If you’ve spent any time on Twitter over the past couple of weeks, you’ve probably seen a near endless stream of cryptic posts like the one below, and thought to yourself, “What the hell is going on?”

What the hell is going on is a word game (wonderfully) called Wordle.

As if the name isn’t charming enough on its own, Wordle’s origin story is even better.

The game was developed by software developer Josh Wardle, who wanted to create a game that his crossword-loving partner would enjoy during lockdown.

While the game was initially released publicly released in November, over the past week, Wordle has proliferated across the internet, primarily through Twitter, to the point where hundreds of thousands of people are now playing it daily.

Including me.

I’m only a few days into my Wordle streak at this point (9/9 so far 🤞) but even with limited exposure, it’s clear that there’s a lot this simple word game can teach us as creators.

Before we dive into the lessons Wordle has to offer, however, let’s quickly cover how the game works.

How Wordle Works

The premise of Wordle is simple: correctly guess the mystery five-letter word in six guesses or less.

You can think of it as a sort of cross between Hangman and Wheel of Fortune.

A few other notes on the setup:

1. Every guess must be a real word
2. Letters can be used more than once
3. Once you’ve submitted a guess, the grey letters are those that do not appear in the answer
4. Yellow letters appear in the answer but are currently in the wrong position
5. Green letters appear in the final word and are in the correct position
6. There is only one puzzle per day, meaning everyone playing Wordle is working on the exact same puzzle every day.

And that’s it!

So what can we learn from this simple yet surprisingly addictive game about doing better creative work?

First, Identify the Crux of the Problem You’re Solving

Like most puzzles, you can attempt to tackle Wordle through uninformed guesswork–guessing any random five-letter words that come to mind–or you can approach it with some strategy.

To take the strategic approach, it helps to know the crux of the problem Wordle presents.

At its core, Wordle is a game about maximizing the amount of new information you uncover with each of your limited number of guesses.

There are two types of information you’re looking for which will help you solve the puzzle:

1. Correct letters
2. Correct letter placements

And as mentioned in the outline, the feedback the puzzle gives us comes in three varieties:

1. Correct letter, correct position
2. Correct letter, wrong position
3. Wrong letter

It turns out that this is the same crux we’re presented with in our effort to succeed as creators. A useful creative process, then, is built around addressing this information gap.

Said differently, our goal as creators, especially early-stage creators is to maximize the amount of useful information we’re able to collect with each of our “guesses”.

In our case, those guesses are made up of any new work we put out into the world.

Tweets, podcast episodes, newsletter issues, workshops, products, and anything else we create and present to the world are not just opportunities for new people to find (or pay) us. First and foremost, they are critical opportunities for feedback.

This applies equally to everything from a 25 character Tweet to a $5,000 product offer.

Feedback first, everything else second.

This is a critical mindset to adopt as a creator as it subtly, but importantly shifts our stance in relation to how we approach creating content. Maybe most helpfully, it provides a distinct sense of purpose to what can otherwise feel like a mindless task we just have to do as creators.

Once published, the feedback we’re looking for is remarkably similar to the feedback offered by Wordle:

1. Correct letter, correct position – Something that resonated deeply with a large portion of your audience
2. Correct letter, wrong position – Something that resonated with a few people but didn’t quite “click” like you thought it might. More tweaking and experimenting are required to find the right fit.
3. Wrong letter – *Crickets -* Best to switch course and try something new.

Of course, when it comes to our work, the feedback isn’t nearly as clear as the daily Wordle, where there is exactly one, objectively correct answer.

But while the feedback we receive in the real world takes some additional discernment on our part, the process for gathering information and using it to inform our future guesses remains the same.

Two Ways to Collect Information

With an understanding of the challenge presented by the puzzle, we now have a choice to make when it comes to how to solve it.

1. Try and cycle through as many new letters as quickly as possible, first worrying about finding all of the correct letters, and then trying to unscramble them.
2. Lean into any positive feedback you receive in your first guess and build your subsequent guesses around it.

At the start of a new puzzle (be that Wordle or a new creative project) it makes sense to follow method number one, quickly testing as many variables as possible.

In creative work, this means experimenting with various mediums, formats, structures, tones, styles, and more in order to see what works both for you and your intended audience.

Once you begin to get even a small bit of positive feedback, however, rather than continuing to throw paint at the wall, it makes sense to start doubling down and building around what seems to be working.

At this stage, that might only mean the Wordle equivalent of having identified one correct letter in the wrong position.

It doesn’t feel like much, but it gives you an anchor to start building your word around.

As you iterate, you soon find not only the correct placement of that anchor letter but also the letters that surround it, slowly but surely clarifying the word in front of you.

Understanding and mastering this process of discovery is an invaluable skill for any creator, as it must be repeated fresh with each new project.

While you might have a general template for creating and launching a new project, as with Wordle, each new puzzle is different. You can begin with the same first foundational guess each time, but you’ll then need to use the the feedback you get from that first guess to inform your second guess, the feedback from which will inform your third, and so on.

For this reason, it’s best to start with a basic strategy–an understanding of which letters have the highest probability of showing up in five-letter words perhaps–but otherwise starting fast, getting your first guess out into the world and seeing what comes back.

Understand What the Puzzle Rewards

Finally, in addition to understanding the crux of a puzzle, and how to most efficiently collect information, it helps to understand the type of knowledge and skill that the puzzle rewards, or even requires.

In Wordle’s case, we’re rewarded primarily for two types of knowledge.

1. Our Total Pool of Known Five-Letter Words

This is due to the restriction on using only real words in our guesses.

You might want to test out 3 or 4 specific letters but if you don’t know a word that uses all of them, you may be forced to settle for a less helpful guess. This was the case in my “ENURN” guess above, where I was forced to use the letter “N” twice, the second of which uncovered no new information.

The more five-letter words we know, the better use we’re able to make of each of our guesses.

When it comes to our creative work, this is the equivalent of being well-versed in a broad set of skills, mental models, and knowledge that are all necessary (to varying degrees) in order to create, market, and sell our work.

These skills include idea generation, knowledge of our audience, social media strategy, copywriting, graphic and web design, podcast and/or video production, and more.

While it’s impossible for us to master all of these skills, the higher our base skill level at each of these, the better our results will be with each project we take on.

2. Knowledge of How Letters Work Together

Spend enough time playing any kind of word game and you begin to notice trends and patterns, letters that have a higher probability of appearing next to each other.

These combinations range from common word-end pairings like “…er”, “…es”, “…se”, or “…ce” to longer groupings like “ough”.

Understanding these common groupings allows us make more educated, efficient guesses, thus maximizing the information we’re able to collect with our guesses.

Patterns and groupings like these don’t just exist in the construction of words, however, but in our creative work as well.

Our creative work might be focused on a different niche or industry than other creators, or we may be employing a different primary creative medium. But we don’t need to look far to find examples of the same business models, habits, practices and strategies put to use in order to achieve success.

For me, one of the most striking examples is a daily writing habit.

I adopted the habit after hearing a disproportionate number of my creative idols endorse it again and again and ultimately, it was the thing that kickstarted my own creative progress.

That’s not to say it will work for everyone, but there certainly seems to be a pattern between people who write daily for an extended period of time and those who achieve creative success.

As in Wordle, an awareness of these patterns allows us to make the most efficient use of our guesses, whether they’re creating an individual piece of content or choosing our next project to work on.

In short, pattern recognition gives us a clear sense of what’s most likely to work.

Acquiring this Knowledge Takes Time

It’s worth noting that building up our library of 5-letter words and common letter groupings is not something we can simply take a weekend course on and be done with.

The same is true for our creative skills.

This sort of knowledge acquisition and pattern recognition is best learned through practice, experimentation, and feedback over time.

This means our early guesswork will be largely uninformed. Over time, however, it will improve as we incorporate more and more feedback into our creative operating system.

The challenge is sticking through the early phase when our guesses don’t yield many hits.

That said, we can do what we can to speed up the process.

While It might not be worth studying hard to build out your library of 5-letter words for Wordle, when it comes to our creative careers, we can hasten our results by investing in skill development, analyzing the work of others in order to spot the patterns, and publishing a lot of work.

More work means more feedback after all.

Applying the Wordle Approach to Creative Work

Too often, we as creators make creating successful creative work out to be a more complex task than it really is.

That’s not to say it’s easy of course, but that it’s simply a puzzle to be solved.

And if there’s one thing to know about solving puzzles it’s that they’re almost impossible to be solved through guesswork.

Instead, puzzles are best solved by sticking to a process.

And in Wordle, we’re gifted a simple five-step process that crosses over directly to creating better, more successful work.

1. Make an educated guess as a starting point, knowing that we’re unlikely to get more than one small piece of the answer right on the first try.
2. Treat everything we do as first and foremost a form of feedback.
3. Maximize the amount of new information we open ourselves up to acquiring with each guess.
4. Lean into anchor letters and build around them.
5. Repeat the process until the puzzle is solved.

Sure, creative work might be more akin to solving a 20 (or 100) letter word than a 5 letter one. But we’re also unconstrained by the six guess limit, and the puzzle doesn’t resent at the end of the each day.

Give it time, and stick to the process, and eventually, each of us will solve the puzzle we’ve been presented with.

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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.

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