1. Creative work is not a sprint
2. But it’s also not a marathon
3. Because there is no finish line (except, of course, death)
4. Creative progress is best measured in decades
5. The first of which, you’ll spend largely in obscurity and indifference
6. And no matter how many decades you have after that, there will never be enough time
7. You’ll never get through your to-do, to-read, or to-create lists
8. You’ll never have large swaths of time to dedicate to your creative work
9. Your craft will always live in the small pockets you carve out for it
10. But these are more than enough to create work that matters
11. Though it will require a never-ending series of hard, painful choices about what to pursue and what to abandon
12. If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to pursue a tiny fraction of your creative ideas
13. And most of them will flop
14. But the ones that hit make up for it and more
15. Going through the flops (maybe dozens of them) is the only way to get to the hits
16. No matter how many hits you have, you’ll never feel like you’ve “made it”
17. It will never get easier
18. In fact, it will get harder
19. Because the scale and complexity of the problems you take on will scale alongside your own progression
20. No matter how much you grow & progress, you’ll never figure it all out
21. But the mystery is exactly what makes this work special
22. If you’re not happy in your work now, you’re not going to be happy with more money, a larger audience, or greater opportunities
23. Speaking of success, you likely won’t become famous
24. You won’t become a household name
25. You won’t impact millions of people
26. You won’t be remembered
27. Rejection and indifference by the masses are the norm
28. But the narrower you focus, the greater your chances of both resonance & success
29. And a narrow, highly resonant audience is enough to make a thriving career of this
30. Your goal is to find 1,000 (maybe fewer) people for whom your work is their favourite thing
31. And you can achieve that
32. But you’re probably not yet ready
33. Because your work isn’t as good as you think
34. And yet it also has more potential than you imagine
35. To find it, you’re going to have to veer away from other people’s frameworks, strategies, and paths to creative success
36. The only path to your creative potential is the one you carve
37. To find it, you need to get better at listening
38. Because you don’t know your audience as well as you think
39. More importantly, you don’t know yourself
40. Unlocking your best work will require you to dig deeper into your motivations, curiosities, and questions
41. To acknowledge that you don’t have an inherent purpose
42. And that you might never find your “passion”
43. But you don’t need purpose or passion or clarity to do meaningful, successful work
44. Humble curiosity is enough
45. And the courage to follow it, especially when no one else has beat a path in that direction
46. At the forks in the road, much of the time you’ll guess wrong
47. Things won’t work out the way you want or expect them to
48. But often enough, they’ll work out better, in the most surprising and unexpected ways
49. You can’t engineer or plot your course to these outcomes
50. The only way to get there is to keep moving forward
51. The odds of achieving creative success are long
52. Most people aren’t willing or able to stick with it long enough to beat them
53. But knowing what you’re up against is the best way to improve your chances
54. You’re already on the right path
55. If you keep walking, you’ll end up where you’re meant to be.

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