It’s easy to get wrapped up in the seriousness of our work and forget the lightness we felt when we first started down the path that led us to where we are now.

Sure, it’s important work and we should take it seriously, but it shouldn’t feel serious, or heavy, or somber.

For many of us pursuing creative, entrepreneurial lives, we wrap our self-worth up so inextricably with the work we do that we become cautious about taking risks, worried that any failed experiments in our work reflect equally upon us as people.

And then, of course, there’s the posturing.

The need we all seem to feel to pretend that we know exactly what we’re doing at every moment, that every success was the result of a masterstroke of strategic planning, and any failures — if we share them — were the result of impossible to predict events that ruined our otherwise exquisite planning.

It feels amateurish to come across as light-hearted and playful about our work–no matter how meaningful it is–when there are so many people who are so keen to display how seriously they take their work.

We feel like we must not be real entrepreneurs, real leaders, real artists if we don’t approach the work we do with the same deadpan seriousness as the others we see around us.

And so we adopt the air of one who has been given a weighty responsibility by the universe itself. A duty which, should we fail to fulfil, will surely result in the destruction of everyone and everything we know.

We start by putting on this heavy mask only when others are around. But soon enough it becomes a part of us, and it starts to impact our work.

We soon find ourselves experimenting less, playing it safe, afraid that any crack in the perfect, serious, exterior we’ve cultivated will leave us exposed to the world as the fraud we worry we might be.

This is not the way to create work that matters.

Work that matters is probably work that hasn’t been done before, or hasn’t been done the way you’re doing it.

Work that matters requires you to show up every day with the understanding that what you’re doing today, this week, month or year might not work, but that trying it anyway is essential to finding out what might.

Instead of pretending we know what we’re doing, doubling down on what we already know works, and playing it safe, we need to show up again and again and ask, “What about this?”

Sure, there’s a place for strategy and thoughtful planning, but there’s also a place for play, for experimentation, for whimsy even.

Don’t let your best ideas lie on the cutting room floor because they’re not serious solutions to the problem at hand.

One day, someone’s going to pick up up those pieces and disrupt everything with a way of doing things that’s never been done before.

It might as well be you.

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Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!

https://medium.com/swlh/embrace-eagerness-3c450af03afahttps://medium.com/swlh/embrace-eagerness-3c450af03afa