For the first 10 years of my creative endeavours, I lived in nearly a constant state of frustration that things weren’t progressing as fast as I wanted them to.

On any given day, the focal point of that frustration may have been related to income, audience growth, skill development, or more likely, all of the above… plus a dozen other areas where progress felt painfully slow.

Of course, we all want things to happen faster than they often seem to be happening in the moment.

Indeed, no matter how quickly things are actually moving, we seem to feel that they could always still be going faster.

This is especially frustrating when things don’t seem to be moving at all.

It’s no wonder why we feel this way.

The reason so many of us embark on our creative journey in the first place is to escape some dissatisfaction with our current circumstances.

Perhaps we feel stifled, uninspired, or worried that we’re wasting our potential doing work that doesn’t use our skills or unique perspectives. Perhaps we feel as though we don’t fit into our current community, circumstance, or culture. Or perhaps we’re simply curious about what lies beyond the boundaries of the standard-issue life we’ve been sold as “normal” and desirable.

Whatever our reasoning, many of us are looking to use our creative work as a vehicle to get somewhere we perceive to be better.

It’s only natural, then that we should want to be in that better place as soon as possible.

The truth, however, is that progress related to creative work is not linear.

Instead, creative progress is a lag effect. In other words, it requires us to put in a significant amount of upfront work before seeing even the smallest of results.

Said differently still: Creative progress takes time.

In the middle of one of my bouts of frustration about my own speed of progress, I decided to start journaling about all the things that take time when it comes to developing a sustainable creative platform.

The resulting list provided a stark reminder that of course creative progress takes a long time. Presented with an itemized list of all the components of creative work that take time to develop, it becomes obvious why progress feels so slow, especially at the start.

There’s just a lot to work through!

Hopefully, the following list provides you the same type of reassurance and frame of reference it’s provided me to help you reset your expectations around the timeline of your work.

Things That Take Time

• Finding clarity
• Building up the confidence to make a leap
• Nursing yourself and your ego back to health when your leaps fail (they will) and getting yourself back out there (this can take a lifetime if you let it. So don’t.)
• Releasing the handbrake that’s keeping your voice in check (no, you don’t need to find your voice, you need to release it)
• Recognizing and then overcoming all the many limiting beliefs about yourself that are keeping you stuck
• Developing your skills to the point where they’re actually capable of getting the job done
• Completing the necessary reading, learning, and apprenticeship to be seen as a serious contributor to your space
• Getting to intimately know your ideal audience members
• Building your network of support, accountability, partners, collaborators
• Developing an interesting and unique point of view
• Getting clear on what the hell you’re actually creating (there’s probably a deeper thread that runs through your work than what’s visible on the surface)
• Once you do, learning how to talk about what you do in a way that’s compelling to others
• Understanding where your work and perspective uniquely fits in your niche, industry, and the world
• Starting and quitting dozens of different blogs, podcasts, newsletters, Youtube channels, social accounts, projects, and more that weren’t quite the right fit for either you or your audience
• Developing offers that suck and don’t sell
• Going back to the drawing board to develop better offers that do
• Creating a whole lot of shitty content
• Creating a whole lot of mediocre content
• Creating even a small amount of good or even great content (and finding that this content takes way more time to create… but the positive results are obvious)
• Developing a sustainable distribution system for your content to get it seen by more people
• Learning how to market yourself and your work
• Finding and learning the tools that will help you make and market your work
• Running regular experiments and analyzing the results
• Running more experiments and analyzing those results
• Continuing to run & analyze more experiments… (you basically do this til the end of time)
• Pivoting when it all goes to shit
• Pivoting when you realize you don’t want what you used to want and having to go back to the top of this list
• Pivoting when you realize you’ve been playing small and that you have more to offer but it will require you to expose yourself in a way that is terrifying, uncertain, and vulnerable
• Getting the timing right (this might mean sitting on your idea for years)
• Learning to navigate and leverage your personal and creative patterns, habits, strengths, and weaknesses
• Learning the limits of your capabilities
• Learning the limits of your knowledge
• Learning who you really are
• Learning to trust yourself.

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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.

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?”

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