What does it really feel like to move through the messy middle of a creative career?
In this episode, I talk with Kalika Sharma, founder and creative director of Antidote FX, a woman-led animation and design studio whose work spans clients like Netflix, Carnegie Hall, and Marriott Bonvoy. We step away from polished success stories to talk about the very human side of creative transitions—losing work, shifting identity, and managing life when everything feels uncertain. Kalika shares honest insights on resilience, balancing multiple roles, and finding your footing when the ground keeps shifting beneath you.
Kalika Sharma is the founder and creative director of AntidoteFX, a woman-led animation and design studio, known for turning complex ideas into powerful, visual stories. With 20+ years of experience in motion design, her award-winning portfolio includes partnerships with Carnegie Hall, Marriott Bonvoy, Netflix, iHeartRadio Music Festival, and Memorial Sloan Kettering, blending aesthetic impact with strategic messaging.
She has also spent two decades teaching at institutions like NYU-Tisch and Pratt Institute, guiding students from being first-time animators to confident storytellers. Kalika excels at showing creatives how to integrate real-world problem solving, with traditional and digital technology. She believes that enduring creative work is not only about being seen, but being felt, remembered, and shared in meaningful ways.
Kalika Sharma: I've got to ask you, Zack, what are we going to talk about today?
Zack Arnold: That's a really good question, Kalika. The short answer is, I'm not quite sure. We're going to be winging this one a little bit more than usual. For those of you that have been with us for all five days of the summit, you've been bombarded with all kinds of information, ideas, mindset shifts, and strategies. Today is going to be a little bit different, a little bit more on the personal side, and kind of show some of the work that we do inside the Arnold Academy, where you and I are both kind of experiencing our existential crises together.
You and I are both going through the messy middle of career transitions. We both had, by certain definitions, very successful careers, and now the world has kind of crumbled underneath our feet. We're trying to figure out what our new identity is, what direction we want to go, how can we be valuable, how can we generate income, and just how the hell do we survive the messy middle being in the sandwich generation? We've got kids that are growing up, we've got parents that need elder care, and otherwise. So today's conversation is going to be just a little bit different. Needless to say, Kalika, it is both a pleasure to have you here today, and I want to thank you in advance for the vulnerability and the honesty that you're going to bring to today's conversation.
Kalika Sharma: I can't promise tears, but I'll do the best I can in terms of being as open and honest as possible about anything you have questions about, Zack.
Zack Arnold: Well, if memory serves, you've been a member of my community, I think, at least two or three years now. You are the perfect example of somebody that just comes into a community and says, "How can I be helpful?" I love finding the people that consider themselves the helpers because right now, more than ever, we need to find the helpers. It's one of my favorite Mr. Rogers quotes. You are definitely one of those helpers, but what I also love is you always challenge me. I have some idea, some tactic or strategy, and you're like, "Yeah, I don't know, what about this thing?" So I'm looking forward to maybe you even challenging some of my assumptions today.
So given that I know a lot about you, for those that are coming to this fresh, give us the two-minute download on the origin story of Kalika up until the messy middle.
Kalika Sharma: Okay, well, I started off in the 90s, studying animation at the Rhode Island School of Design, and I studied how to make animation and film and video using analog equipment. I was filming my senior thesis film on a 16-millimeter Oxberry animation stand. I learned a little bit of Adobe programs, just enough to be able to apply to Nickelodeon and get rejected. They had come to my school to recruit, and they looked at my portfolio and they said, "Nope." I wasn't going to give up because I really wanted to work for Nickelodeon, so I got a portfolio review from them, then followed up with a phone call and said, "Hey, I'm really excited about the changes I was able to make to my portfolio based on your feedback." This was when email was not really a thing. I came to New York from Rhode Island and showed them what I did. I got the job at Nickelodeon.
I animated there for two and a half years and, as those two guys on In Living Color would say, hated it. I really thought that I was going to love it. I was like, "I'm going to be a preschool animator. This is going to kick ass." I hated it. It was just the same existential crisis every single week for this same character and his family, and I just could not get into it. I think what it was is that I have a very short attention span, and we were working with the same character for two and a half years, and that's when I knew I needed to go into commercials instead.
So when the show ended, I started working in educational graphics. I started doing some stuff for Sesame Street, some short animations for Elmo's World. And then I went to grad school, learned some visual effects stuff, and graduated from NYU with a degree in Advanced Digital Applications, and then ended up working in commercials. I did projects for Steve Madden, and it was fun because it was like every six to eight weeks, it was a new project.
And then I was going through all of this, and I met my husband, got married, got pregnant. I got sent to the iHeartRadio Music Festival, the first one in Las Vegas, to supervise all of the iHeartRadio-branded graphics there. That was incredible. I was really able to make a difference because the graphics weren't right. All of the graphics artists who had been hired, God bless them, they were really young, and when they handed in the work, they thought they were finished, so they went out and partied. Meanwhile, we get all the graphics, and they're not quite right. These guys who worked on the iHeartRadio graphics, stoned off their asses, could not make the changes that we needed. I had to regroup, hire new artists, revise all the graphics, redeliver all the graphics. I kind of saved the day. It was such a rush. Oh, and I was also six months pregnant at this time with my twins.
Zack Arnold: I'm surprised the graphics didn't get better because of that, or more interesting at least.
Kalika Sharma: Well, the experience was certainly interesting. The guys I was working with were just like, "Whoa, dude, when you were taking a nap, your stomach was moving." I continued to do lots of commercial stuff after that. I had my kids. I worked on projects for Carnegie Hall. I worked as a software trainer, always using Adobe, doing video editing, motion graphics, and 2D character animation. I did a big project for United Way of New York City, which paved the way for me to get a massive contract with Marriott Bonvoy, where we did about 30 videos fully animated for a web series they were doing. It was just incredible.
Everything was going great until about 2023. Toward the end of finishing up Marriott Bonvoy, things started to slow down. Last year, getting projects was like pulling teeth, and this year is even worse. I'm very fortunate in that from day one, when I met my husband, he and I really aligned in terms of our values. We didn't need a lot of money; it was more important for us to have time together. Even if we were earning a decent amount, we were still going to be really frugal. Fortunately, we were able to save a decent nest egg. We bought a house in 2019, right before the pandemic hit. We closed on Halloween of 2019, and by the following year, our house had appreciated 50%.
I still really love what I do, and that's the problem. I still love teaching, and I teach at NYU. I'm an adjunct. I teach four classes a year. It's a living wage, but it's not enough to cover what I want to achieve, and it's not enough to cover what I want to save for in my future. And I haven't hit 50 yet. I'm turning 48 this year.
Zack Arnold: That cannot possibly be true.
Kalika Sharma: It's so true. It's crazy. It snuck up on me, and I blame the children because the children are now 13, and I can't believe that they're taller than me.
Zack Arnold: I've trusted everything you've ever told me up until now. You're going to have to show me a driver's license because you've clearly taken very good care of yourself.
Kalika Sharma: It's not me. My husband has taken very good care of me. He takes on all the stress.
Zack Arnold: One of the details that I think is really important about your origin story that's going to bring us to the messy middle is that you're not just a teacher or a designer or an animator; you built out your own agency. You built your own company, and you manage a team. So tell us a little bit more about that.
Kalika Sharma: Okay, so I officially started my company in 2003. It was a sole proprietorship, and it was always like "Kalika and friends" or "Kalika and friend" or just me. I would use it as a way of not having to just put my name out there and also to be able to command project rates rather than hourly freelance rates. In 2021, I was approached to do the project for Marriott Bonvoy, and I knew I was going to need help.
In May, one of my friends from NYU approached me and said, "You're getting ready to do this project. I have this student, Joanna. She's amazing. She's Hungarian, born of Chinese immigrant parents. She's here on a student visa. If you need a storyboard artist, I would recommend hiring her soon because she needs someone to sponsor her for her OPT visa." I said, "Yeah, okay, I'll meet her." And she was incredible. I immediately hired her as an art production, editing, animation, and storyboard assistant—an assistant of all the things. Just incredibly detail-oriented, organized.
After having Joanna work with me for a couple of months, finally the ink got dry on the contract. I had to hire a whole bunch of people. At one point on the Marriott Bonvoy project, we had 15 people working with me. That has sort of ebbed and flowed, and it goes between our core team of three, which is me, Joanna, and Emily, who's our art director and producer. She's an absolute dream to work with, a genius at both art direction and producing in equal measure. I love working with these people. This is how I operate now, and they rely on me as the source of their income, and I feel incredibly fortunate that I've been able to keep them as long as I have. But there is no work over here, and while it's not my fault, it is my responsibility, as we've talked about, and I need to figure out what I'm doing next.
Zack Arnold: So I would imagine that that's a pretty heavy burden to carry. I know exactly how it feels because similar to you, similar trajectory over the last few years, I went from being a technician where I had one job, I was an editor. Then I decided that I wanted to build my own educational platform, launched a podcast, launched a career coaching program, and now have the Arnold Academy. Can't do that by yourself. Slowly started to build the team, many of whom were actually former and are still current students. And the burden that's the heaviest is not even so much the burden of, "I'm not sure where the next job is coming in." The burden for me is I cannot bear the thought of having to tell my team, "I can no longer employ you."
Kalika Sharma: No, not at all. When I had to change Emily back to contract, I almost started crying. I was so upset. My accountant had advised that since I couldn't guarantee that she'd be on payroll for all of 2025, I shift her down to contract. Now I feel like I'm hiring her the bare minimum that I can in good conscience, and I've been recommending her to pretty much every friend I have. I want to make sure that she has work because she doesn't have something steady. She doesn't have a nest egg like I do.
Zack Arnold: Unfortunately, this is not the only burden that you and I carry. So let's dig a little bit deeper into the epicenter of what we're calling the "messy middle." What are just a few of the things that are defining the messy middle, the quagmire of the shitstorm that is your life right now?
Kalika Sharma: I have two teenage children, and one of them does not like school. At a certain point, she really wanted to do what I do. She loves to draw; she's very artistic. And I've had to encourage her to broaden her horizons and consider something else, and that, to me, was pretty heartbreaking. She needs my time, right? She doesn't need anything else. She just needs me to be there for her, to go over her homework with her, to make sure that she's not imploding because school is so hard for her.
My son, on the other hand, enjoys school, but then he has some issues with socializing, and he has addictive tendencies, and he has obsessive tendencies. I want to make sure that neither of them is going to develop some sort of a self-harm situation or an eating disorder. I'm also married, and I love my husband, and I love spending time with him. And as I navigate this messy middle, I find that I have less and less time to spend, and that breaks my heart because I was supposed to build something for all of us, and I feel like I'm failing all of them.
And then on top of that, my parents are aging. They don't live super close, but my parents only have my sister and me. We found out fairly recently that one of my parents was experiencing dementia. We got them to a geriatrician. There's a cognitive ability test. Out of, let's say, 33 points, they scored 11. They scanned their brains with an MRI, and their hippocampus was first percentile for their age. The size of the hippocampus is a signifier for Alzheimer's. So I have a parent with Alzheimer's, and my parents don't want to leave their house. They're obsessed with their house. It's a distinct possibility that one or both of them will need our care during their 80s. And yeah, it's just a lot.
Zack Arnold: It's a lot. And without going too deep into my own personal story, as you know, because you've been living through it, over the last two years, I watched both of my parents fall to dementia simultaneously. I went through all the same things that you did, where they were absolutely convinced nothing was wrong. They thought they could take care of each other. We had to basically drop everything in my life to transition them, alongside my siblings, to put them in a memory care facility, all at the same time that the industry is imploding, not knowing what work is coming next. The business that I was building is shrinking. I also have two teenagers at the same time, and it's just an overwhelming amount of grief.
A lot of it doesn't even seem like grief because there's this acceptable form of grief when somebody has passed. But we would never allow somebody the space to grieve for losing a job or losing a career path. When somebody talks about losing their parents to dementia, you watch them disappear in front of your eyes. My father, unfortunately, did finally pass last summer, but my mother's still with us, but she's not my mom. The sense of identity that "these are my parents," if there's one place that I can go to have a conversation, tell them what's wrong with the world, that disappears. There's grief in that. But then all of a sudden, all that you know about yourself—your job title, your career path, your accolades, the security—that's gone. Then the relationship with your children changes. It's so many things that are happening at once, and for me, it took two years to process the immense amount of grief. And underneath that grief was a lot of anger, too. So I don't know if you have experienced any or all of that, but I would presume I'm not the only one.
Kalika Sharma: It sure is messy. I think for me, it's a lot of grief. I haven't found the anger yet. I've never experienced anything like this in my career. Whenever work would dry up, my husband would say, "Well, have you told anybody that things are slow right now? Why don't you send out a few emails?" And I'd send out five emails, and I'd get three inquiries and a booking. And it's just exponentially worse now. I'm sending out sometimes like 50 emails, and out of those, four people respond at all. I'm following up with people four and five times before they'll respond. And that gets really exhausting, and it's starting to feel like it's not going to get better.
Zack Arnold: You and I have had many a hot seat where we have talked about outreach and relationship building. And one thing specifically that we've really worked on is shifting the mindset from what you call your "inner salesperson, Kalika." But it is so frustrating to reach out, to get really enthusiastic responses, and for everybody to say the same thing: "We'd love to work with you. There's no work right now."
In our community, you're a little bit of an outlier in that we don't have a ton of designers and motion graphics animators. Yet, I'm really hoping to fix that. But you found that all of the challenges that you're dealing with in a very different industry are the same conversation with everybody over and over. Sometimes I find there's value in nothing more than just knowing all of us are going through it. I keep blaming myself. I feel like there's something wrong with me. My work isn't good enough, my outreach emails aren't good enough. It's really hard to just not start saying it's never going to get any better, and it's got to be my fault. And I know that you've fallen into that trap.
Kalika Sharma: Sure. I mean, how many times have I come to you and just said, "What I'm doing isn't working? What do I do with myself? Do I completely change gears?" You keep saying, "Keep doing what you're doing," but sometimes it really feels futile.
At the moment, I'm building out my YouTube channel. And people have told me, "Hey, why don't you build it out live on LinkedIn and talk about how you're building this thing?" And part of me feels like it could do that, but it feels phony. As you know, I'm a very genuine person. I'm not going to do something just so people will pay attention. That shouldn't be the end goal. The end goal should always be to provide value, to help people. As my son used to say when he was little, "I'm a help one," and that's what I like to think of myself as. And if I am not helping, what am I doing? You know, that's so ingrained in my identity.
Zack Arnold: I would say that's a great thing to have ingrained in your identity because that value is so important, and I think you having that as a value is what will serve you going forwards. What I want to talk about with you now, because it's very central to the core narrative of this entire five-day summit, is I really believe the future of entertainment and content creation is bringing the best of the creative world in this one Venn diagram over here, what many are calling "legacy Hollywood," and then you have the next-gen content creators in the YouTube space. Our future is somewhere in the overlap of these two Venn diagrams.
I really believe the next generation of content creators really want to learn how to tell great stories; they just don't know how. But we, the creatives, we kind of suck at selling ourselves and building audiences. I really think there's value in these two worlds coming together. So I wanted to talk a little bit more about you saying, "Well, I'm working on my YouTube." That's a really big shift from conversations that we've had over the last few months. So I want to talk about the genesis of where you decided to put your attention right now.
Kalika Sharma: Okay, so the YouTube channel is something that I had started really around the pandemic. I was doing these YouTube livestreams, and they were basically me downloading my brain into other people. "Okay, here's how you would make a project like this." It didn't work well for me. YouTube Live was not the format. I would get sick to my stomach every time I had to do it. I never got more than like six people on the call, and I couldn't see their faces. It was really hard for me to connect to an empty camera and a chat room.
I started to think about what I know, how well I know it, and how few people are able to explain what I do as well as I can. That was the thing that I kept hearing from my students: "You're really good at explaining how to do the thing." Additionally, my children have this tutor who's 75 years old. She's been a tutor for 50 years. At one point, she started her own series of videos and cataloged her brain, essentially everything she could teach from pre-K to 12th grade, into a series of 1,200 short videos. I thought that that was such a great idea because she had such a wonderful way of communicating these concepts. And I recognize that other people think that about me in my area as well.
Wouldn't it be nice to be able to just give people this? People have time right now; they don't have money. Why not help them make their LinkedIn photo look more attractive? Why not help them get ready for that sports graphics job that they're applying for? Just really taking this idea of, "Let me help people." Let's turn this into an opportunity to help people learn a new skill because my work spans a lot of different genres and styles and apps and approaches. But it always comes back to, "What do you need in order to tell your story?"
Zack Arnold: The story that I want to dig even deeper into now is one that you're very familiar with. I have a course that's called "Design Your Dream Career," and one of the key concepts that we talk about is figuring out what your "asymmetric advantage" is. I want to emphasize it to everybody that is watching right now that is saying to themselves, "I'm starting over." Nobody is starting over. We all have a lifetime of skills, expertise, knowledge, passions, hobbies, and interests. It's the intersection of all those various Venn diagrams where I believe all of us have a unique asymmetric advantage.
I think what you're talking about is that you have largely found that for yourself, which is, you're really good at explaining complex ideas, specifically in the animation and motion graphics design space. Your world frightens and confuses me, but you're really good at piecing all that together and teaching it. But you're also a really talented animator and motion graphics artist. You're also a really good communicator. You're also somebody that wants to help others. And you're also very photogenic and have a really good way that you present yourself that feels very natural. You take all those Venn diagrams, the center of that, the asymmetric advantage is potentially downloading all of this knowledge that you have.
This is adjacent to a conversation that I had with Liz Craft and Sarah Fain. They were saying, "We just know we need to get on TikTok." And I pushed back on that. I said, "Nobody needs to get on TikTok." If you feel pulled to do TikTok and TikTok feels authentic to you, and on the other end is an audience that you're going to resonate with, then yeah, absolutely dive into TikTok. But my biggest fear is that I'm going to be chasing all of these shiny objects, and eventually, the algorithm decides who we are. That's why I think it's so hard. I remember so much trepidation about, "Well, I guess I'm supposed to get on YouTube." But once we cracked the code that was about you providing that service to teach these things, and then the other code that we cracked that I want you to talk about because it's so tiny but so important, was you overcoming the barrier of, "Yeah, but I'm just talking to myself."
Kalika Sharma: Okay, so I feel a little awkward about talking about this because it's so fresh. I've only been doing this for a few weeks.
Zack Arnold: That's why we're talking about this now because I wanted it fresh. I wanted it new. I love talking to people in the messy middle because it's real.
Kalika Sharma: So basically, what happened was, I was talking to you about how I hate doing YouTube Live because I'm so used to teaching people. I got my start teaching in 2005 at Pratt Institute. I love that energy that I get from teaching a live class. And it doesn't matter as much whether they're in person or virtual, but if they're virtual, I better see their faces. I want to see them laugh at my dog jokes. I want to see that spark when I show them something cool.
So I was talking to you about how I missed that when I was recording for YouTube, and you said, "Well, you know, when I record all of my courses, I do it live." The compromise is that the video quality isn't as sharp, but that energy makes up for it. And I thought that was a really good solve. So what I've started doing is every Tuesday and Thursday, I record at least one YouTube tutorial that lasts about a half an hour. They're on whatever topic I feel like. And for anyone that has read or heard about Gretchen Rubin's The Four Tendencies, I am a Rebel/Obliger, so I'll do whatever you want me to do, but I'm going to do it my way.
Zack Arnold: And just out of curiosity, how, in fact, did you hear about Gretchen Rubin and her Four Tendencies?
Kalika Sharma: Well, I am glad you asked that question, Zack, because this wonderful mentor by the name of Zack Arnold introduced me to Gretchen Rubin and her Four Tendencies in Focus Yourself, and it was instrumental in understanding who I was and how I operated.
Zack Arnold: So this solution of recording the YouTube videos live is a game-changer. I'll have maybe just one or two people. And of all the communities I belong to, I get more people from the Arnold Academy than I do from other places. And I think part of that is that the other communities I belong to, they already know how to do this stuff, whereas being a little bit of an outlier in your community has allowed me to have a new audience to share this knowledge with. After the recording is over, I ask them, "Well, what did you think of this?" and it's really cool because I'm getting immediate feedback, and it's very nourishing.
I would imagine that there's also a pretty heavy dose of imposter syndrome that comes with this. When I was first in the position where I decided to take this seriously, the two thoughts in my mind were, "Who the hell do I think that I am to be doing this?" and "Why would anybody come to me when there are other people that are talking about all the same things?"
Kalika Sharma: Okay, so one of the cool things about being a Rebel/Obliger is that I'm not just going to commit to one person to teach me. So I'm learning from a lot of different people who do similar stuff. And one nugget of information that I got recently that's really stuck with me is, yes, there are probably hundreds of people who teach the same content that I am teaching. How are they teaching? You're the only one who has that unique voice. You're the only one who's going to describe it that way. And it's your brand voice.
I've shared my videos with some colleagues, and sometimes I'll get pushback. They'll say, "Oh, I really would not say that line about Beyoncé right there." And I was like, "But that's how you remember it. Everything you own is in a box to the left, just like Beyoncé." This is how people remember things. I get feedback from my former students on LinkedIn all the time, but I still do what you taught me. I still remember that I have to hit the letter 'T' for opacity in After Effects because it's 'T' for opacity. You know, other instructors, they'll say, "Oh, it's 'T' for transparency." And I'm like, "No, opacity and transparency are opposites. Why would you say that? That is stupid." So I've come up with all these different ways for people to remember things that make sense for my brain, and it makes sense for theirs, too.
Zack Arnold: And like you said, it isn't just the message; it's the messenger. That's where it took me a while to find my own voice, but I realized that whatever I teach, my goal is that I want to make sure that people are entertained and emotionally engaged. I want to pivot. Now, everybody remembers that when we talk about career navigation.
One of the most important sayings that I've heard recently about when we create media actually came from one of my previous summit guests, Jay Clouse. He said that content creation is nothing more than the transfer of emotion. And if we can transfer emotion from the work that we're doing and how we feel about it, that's why we choose the messengers. That's why I think it's so important that if we have to push ourselves to get in front of that camera, and you just feel like you've got to push yourself to do it because everybody says that's what you're supposed to do, it probably won't work if you don't want to stick with it. I felt like I was selling my creative soul. Then I discovered Substack, and I said, "Oh my God, these are my people." This is my voice. This is all of the quiet introverts that never want to go anywhere, but when they speak, they speak in 2,000 words at a time. These are my people. When you put that authentic energy out there, it attracts similar energies in return. It's the whole reason you and I are having this conversation today.
Kalika Sharma: Oh sure, absolutely. I liked the way you talked, and you were funny. And this might be, I don't mean this to be at all insulting, but I had a friend who I introduced your material to, and she said, "You know, he's not handsome, but he's charming."
Zack Arnold: My mother would disagree with you, but I tend to agree.
Kalika Sharma: She said, "And you can tell that he got to where he is through being just incredibly smart and incredibly charming." And I was like, "Yeah, that's it." And when I shared your videos with my assistant, Joanna, she was like, "Oh my gosh, this guy's really funny." And Joanna's 25. I said, "Joanna, if you were 45, you'd find him hilarious."
Zack Arnold: All my jokes would make sense.
Kalika Sharma: Exactly. But she still found you very funny. And that idea of the messenger conveying the emotion, I think, is so important. Yeah. And so one thing that I've started doing—this was something my dad did when he was improving his management skills—was he sent surveys out to his colleagues. I started posting a survey to my former students, some of whom took my class 20 years ago, and the feedback that I'm getting is all about how I was able to transfer that spark that I have for animation and storytelling to them, and how once they caught that bug, they were hooked.
Zack Arnold: And I think that spark that we found is very new. We're just barely planting the seed. I really think that the conversation we've had over the last few months to find this avenue, and right now, you too, you're in the divergent stage of creativity. "I'm going to try this. I'm just going to make whatever video I want." Eventually, you'll start to converge on, "You know what, maybe this is the focus. Maybe this is more specifically who I want to teach After Effects to." But the most important thing is, I believe we've connected you to that emotional spark. "Oh, this is why I'm getting in front of my camera today on YouTube." Because until we have that, God, this is a slog.
So here's where I want to leave us. This is an exercise that I don't always do at the end of my conversations, but I think it's going to be relatable. I want to do a little time-traveling exercise. And the time-traveling is actually going to be future Kalika traveling back to today. So let's say future Kalika is, give or take, no more than five years out. Given all the things that have happened in the next five years in your life, what's future Kalika telling you about right now?
Kalika Sharma: Hmm, I think she's going to tell me, "You're doing the right thing. Keep giving, don't hold back. Let your freak flag fly, and have fun while you do it." And that fun is going to transmit, and that fun is going to impact people and inspire people to learn the way that you've learned.
I had a student tell me that he wanted to learn traditional and 3D animation in two weeks. And I said, "That's not possible." What is possible is that you can get better at traditional animation. And that message that, "Alright, you've got to learn the basics. You've got to really hone your storytelling skills, your writing skills, your ability to craft dialogue, your ability to create meaningful story that connects with not just your friends, but other people outside of your sphere." I think those are timeless lessons that anybody can learn from. It goes beyond software. It goes beyond any specific techniques that I can teach them.
Zack Arnold: Just remember all of this when things get really, really hard. This is an exercise that I take myself through. We literally write a letter to ourselves, or we paint the picture for where we want to be in a year. I constantly have to go back to it. So I've already written to myself that by the end of this year, I will have been through the rebranding process, I will have successfully launched a summit. It was an absolute shitshow for six months, but then things started to settle down. I got through the worst of dealing with my parents' health, and everything worked out okay. And it's the dumbest thing. Every time I read it, I feel just a little bit better. It's such a simple exercise. Remember the next time it gets really hard and it seems really dark and really uncertain, what five-year Kalika just said to you.
Kalika Sharma: Important words from a very wise lady. A very wise lady who's pushing her mid-50s, and maybe retirement doesn't feel so far away for her anymore.
Zack Arnold: I bet she doesn't look like she's pushing her mid-50s, though. She's got that going for her. Having said that, I really appreciate you sharing your time, you being open, vulnerable, and honest about all of your struggles. For everybody that's listening and watching right now that is stuck square in the messy middle, is there anything you want to leave us with that we haven't already talked about?
Kalika Sharma: So this is a bit of wisdom that I got from an animation producer. I asked her this very cliché question. I said, "If your young daughter decided to become a producer in animation and she was struggling to figure out her footing, what would you tell her?" And she said, "I would tell her, 'Don't worry, you'll figure it out.'"
Zack Arnold: I can't imagine a better place to leave us. Don't worry, we will figure it out. Kalika, for anybody that is interested in learning more about you, connecting with you, dare I say, even hiring you for your brilliant motion graphics, animation, and branding skills, where can anybody that's here today find you?
Kalika Sharma: If you want to learn more about me, you can go to my website. It's antdotefx.com, a-n-t-i-d-o-t-e-f-x.com. There is a project inquiry form there, but there's also a contact listed on the website, and you'll get to learn all about me. We have our training component, we have our community component. The best part of that website is the case studies, and we have a whole bunch of them down at the bottom. So I hope you'll scroll all the way to the bottom and take a look at those.
Zack Arnold: Well, you get my wholehearted endorsement, and I'll do my absolute best to make sure that we connect you with all the right people. So once again, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us in this summit.
Kalika Sharma: Thanks, Zack. Appreciate it.
Edited by: Curtis Fritsch
Produced by: Debby Germino
Published by: Vim Pangantihon
Music by: Thomas Cepeda
My conversation with Melissa Costello is centered around the feelings of doubt, confusion, and uncertainty that come with major transitions (imposter syndrome, anyone?). We discuss the tools, habits, strategies, and most importantly the mindsets we can use on ourselves to make sure we're staying aligned to our values and true to our deeper why's.
