I’ve spent the past seven years traveling full-time, living and working in over 30 countries across four continents.

Over this span, I’ve noticed a curious trend emerge.

After leaving a given place, I’ll largely forget about the small, mundane, day to day experiences that defined it while I was there.

Then, almost like clockwork, precisely eleven months later, they’ll start rushing back.

No matter how similar or dissimilar my new location, I’ll start getting regular flashbacks to the places and experiences that took place almost a year prior.

Maybe the bend of a road I’m driving along will remind me of a road I drove a year earlier, or a certain smell in the air will transport me back to another location.

The experiences that come back are almost never the highlights of the trips. Most often, they’re moments of so little consequence that I couldn’t remember them even if I tried.

At first, I thought this was a phenomenon that was unique to me and the way my brain and memory worked, but I’ve come to learn that others experience the same thing themselves.

In this phenomenon, I think there’s a lesson for all of us striving to build creative lives and businesses.

But before we get to that, we need to talk about psychedelics, plant medicine and Vision Quests.

Integration Takes Time

I had been traveling for a couple of years already and had experienced a couple of cycles of this recurrence of memories when I remembered an episode of The Tim Ferriss Show that I had listened to years before.

The episode featured two doctors who researched and worked with plant medicines extensively for a variety of medical uses.

During the course of the interview, one of them told a story about his experience undertaking a Native American Vision Quest.

Following the experience, which involved many days of fasting and isolation in a remote location, he met with the Shaman who had helped prepare for and facilitate the experience. The Shaman asked him what he planned to do in the coming weeks.

“I’ve cleared my schedule and booked a couple of weeks off work,” the doctor responded. “I want to allow myself some time to process and integrate this experience. Then I’d love to talk with you about what I’ve learned.”

The Shaman laughed.

“Come back in a year and tell me what you’ve learned.”

Back on the podcast, Tim’s guests explained how much like an intense experience like a Vision Quest, experiences with plant medicines often take around a year before the real lessons and insights can be fully processed and integrated.

As I thought back to this interview, I realized that maybe this year-long processing period didn’t just apply to plant medicines and Vision Quests, but to our everyday experiences as well, such as my own experiences traveling.

So what does any of this have to do with creating work that matters?

Weathering The Incubation Period

One of the things I’m most fascinated by when it comes to creative work is the lag between when someone first starts creating and publishing their work and the point at which they start to gain traction and build an audience.

I’ve written before about how almost all creative work is built on compounding returns.

You might have also heard the concept referenced in ideas like “the snowball effect” or an “overnight success, years in the making”.

The fact of the matter is that no matter our skill, knowledge, or experience, there’s often an incubation period that we must all work through.

This incubation period typically stretches from the moment we start publishing our work publicly to the point where things start to click.

That clicking might be marked by a noticeable uptick in our metrics–followers, subscribers, downloads, page views–or it might be when we ourselves feel the clarity and focus that precipitates them.

In talking with and observing creators and entrepreneurs across a variety of niches, platforms, and mediums, I’ve noticed that as with travel, Vision Quests, and plant medicines, this incubation period often lasts about a year, give or take.

While we often hope (or even expect) that we’ll be able to start publishing content and immediately build up an audience, this is rarely the case.

We need time to find our voice, work through our ideas, and get feedback from the (likely small) audience we do have before things start to slowly fall into place.

We may be able to shortcut the process by getting more reps in–publishing more frequently, getting more feedback, working through more bad ideas–in a compressed period of time. But I’m convinced that there’s something biological at play which makes it hard to analyze, process, and integrate the lessons and feedback we’ve received in less than a year.

For many of us, this is a frustrating reality.

If we’re putting the time, effort, and perhaps money into creating and publishing content, chances are, we’d like to see the fruits of our labour on a rather shorter time scale.

But if this type of universal incubation period exists and is something we must work through, I like to think that knowing about it allows us to use it to navigate it more effectively.

Making The Most Of Our Incubation

For one, knowing that we’re in our incubation phase allows us to take the pressure off of ourselves.

So often, when we’re doing the work and not seeing results, we jump to the assumption that people just aren’t interested in us or our work.

Knowing that we’re not supposed to gain instant traction, however, allows us to realize that it’s not about us or our work, it’s simply a natural phase of the gauntlet any creative endeavour must work its way through.

Experimentation

Secondly, embodying the idea of incubation allows us more freedom to experiment.

We’ve been conditioned to think that in order to gain traction with an audience, we have to be hyper-focused on a specific topic within a specific niche, speaking to a specific audience avatar.

While this is certainly helpful advice once we’ve reached a certain level of clarity and competency, in my experience, we rarely have the required level of clarity on any of those three criteria when we first start out.

In order to get that clarity, we have to experiment broadly, exploring a variety of topics, voices, and styles until slowly, our unique style, perspective, and voice begin to align.

I’ve been writing and publishing almost every day for the past year, and only in the past month or so (right on schedule) has a through-line begun to emerge regarding what I have to offer as a writer and content creator.

It’s worth noting that while time is an essential ingredient, the more important part of this process is the actual experimentation and exploration.

While creating in a defined voice and style, about a singular topic, to a specific audience for a year will surely improve the quality of your work, it won’t help you find your unique voice.

As most of us have been conditioned to write, speak and create in a standardized, generic voice, this type of exploration is essential if we hope to differentiate ourselves and build an audience around the work we do.

Expectation Recalibration

Lastly, being aware of the incubation period we must work through before we can realistically hope to start gaining traction helps us properly calibrate our expectations.

How many podcasters (or YouTubers or bloggers) give up after publishing ten episodes, having failed to grow any kind of audience?

Creative work takes years of investment to pay off in a meaningful way. Knowing this from the outset allows us to pace ourselves for the long haul, opting for a steady, consistent jog as opposed to a sprint.

Incubation Is An Active Process

While there certainly seems to be a time element associated with this type of creative incubation process, it’s worth re-iterating that you can’t simply wait it out.

The fastest way through is to consistently create. Experiment widely, seek out feedback from those whose opinions you respect, analyze your work and the work of others.

In short, focus on working out the process rather than waiting it out.

It won’t happen overnight, but by staying patient and sticking with the process, the time will come when you hatch from your incubation with clarity, purpose, and a voice that’s entirely your own.

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