Ira Glass, creator of This American Life has an oft-repeated quote about “The Gap” that exists between the quality of work we want to be creating and the quality of work we’re currently capable of.
“All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there is this gap. For the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not that good.”
Our primary goal as creators then, is to close this gap.
To do so, Glass advises that especially when starting out, the most important thing you can do is to produce a large volume of work. To put yourself on a deadline and ship something every week. And this is what many of us do.
We produce weekly podcasts, blogs, newsletters, or videos… and it works! Our skills improve and the gap shrinks. Sooner or later, however, we reach a point of diminishing returns where no matter how much content we produce, the gap persists.
It’s possible at this point that if we simply keep producing content at our current pace, the gap will eventually shrink. But this is a years-long process of slow improvement. If we want to accelerate our growth as creators and more quickly narrow the gap, then, we need to shake things up.
As it turns out, it’s at this point that we can learn a lot from the world of running. Specifically, marathon running.
Why Run A Marathon?
Before we begin, let’s get one thing straight: Running a marathon is an entirely unreasonable pursuit.
While a daily running practice will certainly help you lose weight and improve your health, it’s hard to argue that the act of running one marathon has many lasting health benefits in itself.
It’s equally hard to argue that people sign up for a marathon for the external validation of winning.
Sure, a marathon is a race, but for most people in most marathons, the race is not to beat the competition and reach the podium, but–in one way or another–against themselves. They could just as easily compete against themselves by running a series of 5Ks, however.
So why go to the unreasonable lengths of running 42.2km, dealing with the pain, discomfort, and months of training for so small a tangible reward?
In fact, the unreasonableness is the whole point.
At its core, running a marathon is about going beyond what’s reasonable in order to find and stretch your limits.
When we’re feeling stuck and our growth has stalled, this exploration and expansion of our personal and creative limits is exactly what we need to reach the next level. Not by running a physical marathon, but by applying the same principles to our creative work.
I refer to these endeavors as Marathon Projects, and they should be a regular part of every creator’s process.
An Overview Of Marathon Projects
Like physical marathons, Marathon Projects are infrequent, somewhat unreasonable projects that may not have a tangible, outward-facing upside. Instead, the primary purpose is to push ourselves beyond our usual boundaries in order to find (and push outward on) our current limits.
Much like a runner will rarely run more than half the distance of a marathon during their training, Marathon Projects are an exaggeration of our typical daily or weekly creative practice.
As a YouTuber, a Marathon Project might be producing a short film.
As a writer, a Marathon Project might consist of writing an in-depth 5,000-word guide on a subject when you typically write 1,000-word blog posts. Eventually, you might feel the call to take on the ultimate Marathon Project for any writer, a book.
On top of his weekly The Fashion Geek Podcast production, Podcast Marketing Academy member Reginald Ferguson is working on a short run video & audio series documenting the process of working with a sneaker artist to get a custom pair of kicks designed.
Regardless of the medium, Marathon Projects test both our vision and endurance, requiring pre-planning as well as follow-through. The difficulty of these projects is amplified by the fact that they often happen in the background, an extra task on top of our regular content creation.
The challenge Marathon Projects present, is not without its rewards, however.
Marathon Projects Raise The Bar For Everything Else We Create
While they can be difficult to see through to completion, the difficulty is the whole point.
Marathon Projects expand our scope of what we’re capable of achieving, both on a big-picture level as well as in our day-to-day creating.
To a new runner who struggles to run a couple of kilometers a couple times a week, a marathon might seem like an impossible task. Having completed just one marathon, however, the formerly challenging 2km running practice becomes easy to the point of absurdity. At this point, the bar demands to be raised for even the basic maintenance running when not training for a race.
Marathon Projects have the same result on our day-to-day creative work.
These projects force us to explore, experiment with, and develop techniques, tools, and skills we wouldn’t otherwise employ. Like Pandora’s Box, once we’ve used them once, they have a way of working their way into our typical workflows, even if in a diminished capacity.
Producing even one Radiolab-style podcast can’t help but improve your production and editing skills.
Creating even one short film can’t help but improve your storytelling ability.
Writing even one short book can’t help but improve the way you structure your ideas and writing.
As with the runner who completes her first half-marathon, once we complete our first marathon project, we begin thinking about our next one, and how we can raise the bar a little higher.
Once this shift happens, our entire view of our regular creative work shifts.
Marathon Projects Provide Purpose And Motivation
While running a marathon might not in itself provide many lasting health benefits, the training required to run one certainly does.
For many people looking to improve their health, the training–not the race itself–is the reason they decide to run a marathon in the first place. The race is simply the capstone project that puts the training in context and gives them the structure, purpose, motivation, and deadline to follow through.
Marathon Projects do the same for our weekly content creation, providing context, purpose, and focus.
When I was first drawing up the outline for Podcast Marketing Academy, I applied my existing daily writing habit to blog my way through my course outline. The Marathon Project of the course provided a pointed focus for my content creation, which resulted in better blog content while also fleshing out the course material. When the time came to record the course videos a month later, most of the content had already been written and simply needed to be put to slides and recorded.
Tim Ferriss has famously used his podcast in a similar way, using his podcast interviews to build out the content for two books, Tools of Titans and Tribe of Mentors.
Marathon Projects force us to stretch ourselves, to explore new depths of ourselves, our topic, and our craft. By contextualizing our regular content production as part of a Marathon Project, that content is stretched as well, improving in both quality and originality.
While the primary benefits of this stretching are internal, Marathon Projects have the potential of attracting significant external opportunities as well.
Marathon Projects Put Your Full Talent On Display
While producing a weekly podcast, blog post, or video might be an important part of your content marketing plan, it’s safe to say that no single piece of content requires or displays the full depth and potential of your thought and creativity.
One of the purposes of Marathon Projects, then, is to discover and display the full extent of those capabilities.
When published publicly, these projects have a way of attracting attention from new potential audience members, collaborators, clients, customers, and even employers beyond what your typical content does. There are a few reasons for this.
Marathon Projects Are (Often) Evergreen
Marathon Projects typically have a longer shelf-life than typical weekly content and can become fantastic showcases for the work you do. They’re a way to grab people’s attention and provide a compelling on-ramp to the rest of your work.
How many people discovered James Clear by reading his best-selling book Atomic Habits and then stuck around for his weekly 3-2-1 Newsletter?
It took him 6 years to reach his first 440k subscribers (which in itself is an incredible feat) before writing Atomic Habits. Since the book was published in October 2018, he’s nearly tripled (he passed 1M subscribers in Jan 2021) his subscribers in less than half the time.
I’d be willing to bet that the majority of those new subscribers came either directly from reading the book, or from the extensive, years-long publicity campaign around it, including the dozens (if not hundreds) of podcast guest appearances, TV interviews, guest columns, and more.
This impressive publicity campaign around Atomic Habits perfectly illustrates another feature of how Marathon Projects help attract external opportunities: They give us something to really promote.
Marathon Projects Demand Promotion
While we might not go over the top to promote our latest podcast episode or blog post, Marathon Projects encourage us to pull out all the stops to get them in front of as many people as people.
It’s unlikely that any of us would write a guest post or do a podcast guest appearance with the sole purpose of raising awareness about a single blog post or podcast episode of our own. With a project we’ve spent weeks, months, or years working on, however, it’s only natural that we would want to do everything possible to get the work in front of as many people as possible.
By nature of their unreasonableness, Marathon Projects often end up being easier to promote than our weekly content. Think about the difference between a friend telling you they just completed a 10km fun run versus a hundred-mile race through Death Valley. The more unreasonable the project, the more attention it’s likely to attract.
Absurdity demands attention.
While there are certainly a number of possible external rewards that Marathon Projects may present, remember that the driving purpose behind them should be internal. Externally, Marathon Projects are gambles, some of which will lead to new opportunities and many of which won’t. This is one of the reasons why it’s helpful to do them regularly.
Scheduling Your Marathon Projects
Much like you wouldn’t run a marathon every week, or even every month, Marathon Projects should be pursued infrequently but on at least a semi-consistent schedule.
I recommend either a bi-annual or quarterly basis, depending on the scope of the projects. This schedule gives you enough time to do them well while not overwhelming your week-to-week workload.
It’s worth mentioning that Marathon Projects often act as a ratchet. The process of developing and launching my Podcast Marketing Academy, the Creative Wayfinding Newsletter, and the Build A Better Wellness Biz podcast were all Marathon Projects for me. But once they were up and running, the ongoing creation and management of them became the new baseline.
This is the case for many types of marathon projects, just as it is for physical races.
A runner who completes their first 5K often feels empowered and perhaps even compelled to run a 10K. After running the 10K, they may set their sights on a half-marathon, followed by a full marathon, and perhaps (if they’re a certain type of crazy) an ultra marathon.
In the same way, as we expand the scope of our skills, knowledge, and belief in ourselves, the ratchet cranks ever-upward, and our subsequent Marathon Projects increase in ambition and scale.
How To Pick Your Next Marathon Project
When planning a Marathon Project, there are a few factors to keep in mind.
1. Personal Interest
The first and most important consideration is your personal interest in the project itself.
While the point is for the project to be difficult enough to challenge and stretch yourself, it also needs to be something you’re motivated to keep chipping away at over the weeks or months it will take to complete it.
2. Level Of Difficulty
The difficulty of your Marathon Project has a huge effect on its ultimate effectiveness.
The purpose is to push yourself, but choosing a project that is too hard will likely lead to a project that either drags on for years or gets abandoned entirely. Set the bar too low, however, and you won’t see any meaningful benefits.
Aim for a project that’s juuuust outside your comfort zone. Something that calls on your existing skills but requires you to either take them further than you have before or apply them in a new way.
One of the best ways to determine whether or not you’re aiming for the right range of difficulty is whether or not your project makes you a little bit nervous when you think about completing it within your given timeline.
3. Skill-Specific Growth
Any effective Marathon Project will help improve your endurance, confidence, and self-belief. But they also present an opportunity to hone and develop specific skills.
One of my primary goals this year is leveling up as a writer, which was one of the reasons behind the 30 Days of Podcasting evergreen email series I’ve been working on.
Think about any skills you currently want to develop and choose a project that will require you to put those skills to use.
4. Public Appeal
While the core purpose of a Marathon Project should be to find and stretch your personal and creative limits, it’s worth thinking about the potential public appeal of the project.
Remember, these projects can serve as entry points to your larger body of work. Think about the themes of your existing work as well as what you want to be known for, and choose a project that showcases that.
Start Running
It’s never too early to start planning your first (or next) Marathon Project.
Remember, the point of a marathon isn’t to win. It’s to stretch yourself beyond what you currently see yourself as capable of achieving. To develop the depth and breadth of your skills. To give the rest of your work context and purpose.
As with any marathon, you don’t need to be exceptionally fast or exceptionally skilled. “The Marathon,” as running company New Balance says, is “how an average runner becomes more than average.”
Marathons are about determination, grit, and a willingness to continue beyond the limits of reason. These are traits available to all of us should we choose to call on them.
If you’re feeling stuck, like the gap between the work you’re currently making and the work you know you have the potential to create isn’t closing as fast as you’d like, a marathon is the best way to take the next step.
All you need to do is pick your destination, lace up your sneakers, and start running.
Explore how to navigate a creative life that matters
This article originally appeared in my weekly Creative Wayfinding Newsletter. Each issue is the product of a week of work, and contains something not available for sale.
A fresh perspective, a shot of encouragement when you need it most, and maybe even some genuine wisdom from time to time.
Each week, we explore a different facet of the question “How do we navigate the wilds of creating work that matters?”
It’s something I’m proud to create and I’d be honoured to share it with you.
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