Entrepreneurs, creators, and marketers often have the wrong idea of what their goal should be when it comes to producing their work.

They think it’s about creating new work that consistently wows people, and then doing it again and again and again, never missing a beat, becoming an endless hit machine.

Of course, this is fantastic if you’re able to achieve it, but I have yet to hear of someone who has.

The risk of this mentality is first that you never release anything that you aren’t 100% sure will amaze everyone who engages with it, and second that you become discouraged at your perceived lack of talent and conclude that you don’t have anything to offer to the field.

In my own experience, creating an offer that resonates with people always takes a leap into the unknown. The offers that I’ve been most sure would take off like wildfire have consistently fallen flat, while the successes have been offers that I barely gave a second glance.

What we need to understand as people looking to produce remarkable work that changes the people who engage with it is that there is no creating remarkable work without creating a great deal more less-than-remarkable work first.

Remarkable work is the byproduct of a consistent process of work , not one-off projects brought on when inspiration strikes.

If we want to create work that matters, we need to adopt the mindset of miners, seeking to uncover something valuable.

Grab Your Pickaxe

Miners understand that finding a vein of valuable ore requires commitment and effort, trial and error, patience and persistence.

They might have done some testing which informed the area in which they chose to start digging, but no matter how certain they are of finding something valuable there, they know that they’re still going to have to dig through a monumental pile of worthless dirt, rock, and other debris to reach their target.

As they dig, they might find greater and greater concentrations of valuable ore in their buckets, but even at highest concentrations, the ore is mixed in with a lot of junk that will take refining to uncover fully.

This is the process of tapping into your best work, into work that has the potential to change people, into work that is remarkable.

Accept that finding it will require you to put on your hard hat and go to work, to pick up your axe and your shovel every morning and dig a little deeper, bucket by bucket, following the flecks of value you find along the way, and always remembering that even your best, most valuable work will take some refining.

Are you ready to get digging?

Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!

https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/getting-job-done-changing-people-9e4b99f96de4https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/getting-job-done-changing-people-9e4b99f96de4