Hi, I’m Jeremy, I’m glad you’re here.
No matter what you create, I’m guessing you spend a good amount of time feeling lost, hopeless, and unsure about how to get from where you are to where you want to be.
So do I. And so does everyone doing creative work.
This is the Creative Wilderness.
Every week, I publish a new article in my Creative Wayfinding newsletter about how we as creators and marketers can navigate it with more clarity and confidence.
If you’re building something that matters, but aren’t quite sure how to take the next step forward, I’d be honoured to have you join us.
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The Impossibility of Right Decisions
There’s a maddening cycle that plays out every time I launch a new cohort of my course, Podcast Marketing Academy.
I spend months planning the launch, tweaking the content, and making upgrades & improvements to the product as a whole, almost always requiring difficult decisions about what to prioritize in the limited time leading up to the launch.
Most of the components I’m looking to improve on have multiple potential solutions, any one of which might be the absolute best way to proceed.
And while it’s impossible to test all the options for every potential improvement to find that absolute best path forward, I do my best, using a mix of research, analysis, and intuition to make the right decisions about which projects to focus on and what approach to take.
Then, the launch rolls around.
Like clockwork, the moment it’s too late to change course is the moment I realize the choices I made were not, in fact, the ideal decisions.
In almost every case, there was another, better path forward that only becomes apparent when it’s too late to backtrack.
And yet, despite, seemingly failing to have ever made the best possible decision, the course and business as a whole continue to progress.
“Best” Decisions Are Hard to Come By
This streak of imperfect decision-making isn’t confined to my course, or business or creative work in general.
In fact, when I look back on my life as a whole, I can’t think of a single pivotal decision where I made the absolute best-possible decision.
This, despite countless hours spent researching, analyzing, journaling… and maybe most of all, agonizing over each and every one of those decisions, many of which felt like my entire future depended on me making the “right” choice in the moment.
Again, this isn’t to say those less-than-optimal decisions didn’t move me forward in generally the right direction. They simply weren’t the most efficient route.
At this point, I’m convinced it’s essentially impossible to make the “right” decision. Or at least the best possible decision in any given moment.
Every decision we’ll ever make is made with incomplete information.
The important decisions—the ones we agonize over—in particular. In fact, the lack of information is the entire reason we agonize over them.
It’s hard for me to imagine a scenario where, once a decision has been made and we’re able to measure and assess its effects, we couldn’t look back and piece together a more ideal course of action.
On the one hand, this prospect of being unlikely to ever make a single “best” decision for the rest of our lives is somewhat demoralizing.
On the other, however, it invites a sense of freedom and opportunity.
The Freedom of Imperfect Decision-Making
When we take the absolute best possible decision off the table as a goal, our options expand significantly.
Because while there can only be one best possible decision, there are perhaps infinite pretty good decisions that will move us closer to our goal.
Even decisions that—in the moment—result in what feels like a step backward often give us the perspective and clarity required to make more efficient, focused progress going forward.
What’s more, though it doesn’t often feel this way, the number of decisions that would genuinely result in the type of ruin we could never come back from is vanishingly small.
In practice, then, while it might be impossible to make the absolute best possible decision in any given scenario, it’s almost equally impossible to make a decision that doesn’t ultimately move us closer to our goal.
This is a comforting thought.
And it simplifies our decision-making process significantly.
Rather than agonize for days, weeks, or months over a decision, we should strive simply to do the following:
- Identify the few potential scenarios that would lead to complete ruin. Pin them above your desk and avoid them at all costs.
- Make almost any other decision with the confidence that even if it isn’t the best possible decision, it will move us in the right direction regardless.
Rather than aiming for absolute efficiency and perfection, perhaps our goal should simply be to make pretty good decisions most of the time.
This is a pretty low bar to meet.
And while the best decision we can make in the moment is rarely the ideal decision overall, the ideal decision overall is rarely the best decision in the moment.
If we let them, decisions have a way of wedging themselves beneath our wheels and grinding our progress to a halt.
Better to make any decision that allows us to maintain our momentum rather than halting to wait for the perfect path forward to present itself.
Because it won’t. No matter how long we wait.
At least not until we’ve committed to another decision and it’s too late to reverse course, of course.
Life is a trickster that way.
All we can do then is shrug, wave as we go by, and enjoy the road we’ve chosen, knowing that in all likelihood we’ll end up at the same destination regardless.
C’est la vie.
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 wilderness between us and our unique creative potential?”
It’s something I’m proud to create and I’d be honoured to share it with you.
Subscribe
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Flipping Assumptions
Every now and then, it’s worth writing out all the many assumptions you’re making that influence the way you approach your work.
Chances are, the list of assumptions is far longer than the list of hard facts.
Then, when you have your list, flip them.
Work through your assumptions one by one and ask yourself, “What if the opposite were true?”
How would that change the way you’re currently approaching the problem?
If the flipped assumption is desirable, what would need to be in place in order to make it true?
What are the steps to making that change?
We base more of our decisions than we realize on assumptions that are often only partially true at best.
We follow marketing strategies based on what’s working for others.
We build our product or service based on a similar offer we’ve interacted with before
We create the content we assume is going to attract our target audience based on what similar content creators are offering.
We make all these assumptions and more, without ever stopping to ask ourselves, “What if everyone else is doing this the wrong way?” or “What if there are other ways to reach the same result?”
Our assumptions can lead us to create cookie-cutter work that fits in with (and gets lost in) the crowd, instead of the work that only we can possibly create. Work based on our unique skills, experience and perspective.
Our assumptions lead us to market our work in ways that are unsustainable. Maybe we’re just not excited about the latest marketing trend and are unable to maintain the required consistency. Or maybe the trend feels outright sleazy to our taste.
Our assumptions sell ourselves and our potential short. Leading us to contort ourselves into someone else’s box, convincing us that there’s no need for further innovation and experimentation, at least not by us. Best leave that to the maverick marketing geniuses.
Our assumptions lead us to believe that we can’t have it all. That we can’t create the work that would most light us up, and build an audience around it in a way that feels easy, effortless even.
So every now and then, stop and ask, what are the assumptions you, your industry, and your audience are making, and how can you flip them?
What if you could get payed handsomely to do the work that most excites you?
What if marketing that work was effortless?
What if you could charge 3x for the exact same work you’re doing now?
What if you could work 3-day weeks and still earn the same amount, leaving more time to spend with your family?
What if the only thing that’s been keeping you from aiming higher is the assumption that it isn’t possible?
What if you flipped all the assumptions that have kept you playing small and stepped into your potential?
What’s the Worst That Could Happen?
The voice in your head has one answer.
An outcome of catastrophic failure, leading to absolute ruin, destitution, and maybe even death… perhaps simply of shame.
The thought alone is so viscerally terrifying, you don’t dare to even look at it in its entirety, let alone follow through with whatever it was that begged the question in the first place.
But the voice in your head has a flaw in its plan to keep you rooted to inaction by fear.
It’s overreached.
When written down or said aloud, the outcome it proposes begins to feel ridiculous in its hyperbole.
Almost laughable.
And so it’s worth asking the question again, with a twist, “What’s the worst that is likely to happen?”
Thought through with cool rationality, the worst likely outcome is usually something you could live with.
It may not be comfortable, it may not be easy, it may take a while to come back from.
But it’s clear that it’s something you could come back from.
What’s more, the stakes are no longer so high that you can afford to ignore the other side of the question out of hand.
What’s the best that could happen?
All work worth doing exists in the tension between these two possibilities.
No worthwhile project or creation is free from the possibility of failure.
The freedom of failure may be possible for a factory, mass-manufacturing widgets, but not for a creator, artist, or entrepreneur.
Each of these titles carries the implication of doing something new, of creating out of whole cloth, of bringing something to the world that has never existed before.
Every successful creator learns to dance with the possibility of failure.
Flirting with it, tempting fate, falling prey to its seductions many a time.
Then returning to the floor to pick up the beat and resume.
Don’t let the voice in your head keep you from taking the floor in the first place.
It’s just a dance after all.
Acknowledgments & Accompaniment
It’s not often that you come across a book that is completely engrossing, teaches you something valuable, and–most importantly–leaves you viewing the world differently than when you started it.
For me, Underland, by Robert Macfarlane has been one of those books. It’s a book about Robert’s exploration of past, present and future of the unseen world beneath our feet.
Over the course of the book, we’re taken on a twisting subterranean journey through limestone caverns that served as prehistoric burial chambers, the sprawling catacombs that make up the shadow city beneath Paris, dark matter research laboratories and mines whose tendrils stretch far beneath the North Atlantic Sea, Nuclear storage facilities being designed to last 10,000 years and more.
It’s a fascinating book that, even more than the Underland, is about time, deep time to be exact, and our tiny place in–and yet profound effect on–it as humans.
But while the book is stunningly written and has had a profound effect on my own view of time, this isn’t an article about the contents of the book itself.
Instead, I want to talk about something I was struck by in the Acknowledgements at the very end of the book.
Along with the typical acknowledgments including everyone who helped bring the book to life–his friends, family and supporters big and small, Robert included this line:
*”Among the music and musicians whose work has kept me company above and below ground, I could not have done without AR, Bon Iver, the Duke Spirit, Elbow, Johnny Flynn, Grasscut, Willy Mason, the Pixies, Karine Polwart, Schubert, Cosmo Sheldrake, and Le Tigre.”
Music has played a huge role in my life, I played in bands in and after high school and went to school to be an audio engineer because I wanted to produce records. While I don’t create music at the moment, it still plays a huge role in my life, and–as I realized while reading Robert Macfarlane’s acknowledgments–my work.
This acknowledgment of gratitude got me thinking about not just the musicians, but all the artists, creators, teachers, scientists, and others who have a profound impact on the work each of us does.
Most of these people will never know we exist, let alone the impact they’ve had–big or small–on our work. But I can’t help but feel a deep connectedness at the thought of this cross-discipline, -medium, -professional network of shadow support, inspiration, and encouragement.
Change Or Accompaniment?
I know many of us, myself included, hope that our work will change people, leave them seeing the world differently after consuming it, much like Underland has done for me. But as I think about this less-direct form of support, I realize what an essential role accompaniment plays in our and other’s ability to create work and lives that mean something.
Whatever we’re working towards, we all need teachers, guides, and mentors to show us the way forward. But we also need company along the journey. This accompaniment might be the literal people we work and collaborate with, but more often, they’re the people and their creations that across time and space have the ability to soothe us, steel us, and most of all, keep us moving forward when it feels all but impossible.
I can think of numerous moments in my own life where, without the right album or song or book at the right time, things might have turned out very differently, perhaps leading me to take a different fork in the road. In fact, I often think back to a single moment in junior high home economics class when I was 14 years old where my friend Tyler Lofstrand first introduced me to Metallica and set me off on an entirely new path.
Short detour here, I don’t think I ever realized the irony of being introduced to Metallica in Home Economics class until writing it down here. Anyway, that’s a story for another time.
These accompaniments have the ability to remind us that we’re not alone on our creative quest, that we’re in good company, working together toward a shared vision of the future.
My goal with this newsletter has always been to create something that changes your perspective, leaves you seeing the world a little bit differently. But I’m realizing that I would be equally honoured for it to simply be the background accompaniment to the larger work you’re creating.
As I’m writing this issue, I’ve just passed the 5-year anniversary of my business, Counterweight Creative, and so to close out this article, it feels apropos to share some acknowledgments of the background accompaniment that has kept me company across the world and through the ups and downs, thick and thin of building a creative business. Here goes.
So much love and gratitude to those who have provided the soundtrack to the past 5 years in business, including Hailaker, EDEN, The Republic Of Wolves, Trophy Eyes, Misery Signals, Ben Howard, Gregory Alan Isakov, Donovan Woods, Bon Iver, Can’t Swim, The Story So Far, Gang Of Youths, Novo Amor, Tyson Motsenbocker, Henry Jamison, The Gaslight Anthem, Movements, nothing,nowhere. Overgrow, Sights & Sounds, The Tallest Man On Earth, Tall Ships, Thrice, Valleyheart, Driveways, Dustin Tebbutt, Ed Prosek, Ed Patrick, Hayden Calnin, Hundredth, Jack Larsen, Jeremy Zucker, Layover, American Football, Andrew Belle, Avalanche City, Boston Manor, Cape Francis, Cigarettes After Sex, Everything Everything, and CommonWealth. I could not have got here without your work.
Who’s on your list?
Oh, and yes, I made a playlist. It’s long, but I’m a full-album kind of guy, and you can listen to a lot of albums in 5 years.
Explore how to navigate a creative life that matters
This article originally appeared in my weekly Listen Up Newsletter. Each issue is the product of a week of work, and contains something not available for sale.
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 wilderness of creating work that matters?”
It’s something I’m proud to create and I’d be honoured to share it with you.
Creating = Being
We often think about our work as occupying one distinct space in our lives.
It has its role, time, and place in our day that it doesn’t extend beyond.
If it is extending outside the box we’ve put it in, we might actually fight to cram it back in, feeling as though our work is taking over our lives, that we’re losing any semblance of work/life balance.
This is a healthy mentality when working a job we’d rather not be doing.
But if the same mentality persists when it comes to the creative work we truly care about, we’ve got it backwards.
That’s not to say we should all become workaholics and spend every minute of the day at our computers.
But creativity is more than a thing we do.
It’s how we are.
Who we are.
What we are.
Creating work (and a life) that matters is about making connections.
To and between people, ideas, thoughts, and experiences.
And we’re surrounded by all of these every day, maybe even more so when we’re away from our desks.
Connections waiting to be made, if we can just dial in to the right frequency.
Living our work is not about always being in work mode, answering emails, and checking our analytics at 11 pm from our phones while lying in bed.
It’s about staying receptive, curious, drawing connections between the little moments, noticings, thoughts, and experiences of day-to-day life, and the bigger ideas they might tie into.
A life lived creatively fuels our work and vice versa.
Both of them becoming better, more useful, and more fulfilling in the process.
So what’s one way you can live your creative work more fully?
Square, Grey LEGO Blocks
Homogeneous building blocks create homogeneous buildings.
Sure they’re easier to piece together, but is ease of building the point of building?
To more quickly build structures indistinguishable from the others around us?
A master may be able to create magic and art out of square grey Lego blocks, but if we’re honest with ourselves, we know we’re not at that level.
At least not yet.
In the meantime, the shortest route to building something remarkable, something that stands out from the grey blocky landscape around it is to start with different blocks.
No, they wont fit together quite so easily.
No, you won’t have the reference point of how to fit the pieces together based on what’s already been built.
No, it won’t be quite so easy to build something stable, capable of supporting weight and withstanding pressure.
But when you start with different blocks you don’t have to work to differentiate yourself.
You simply build with the blocks you have, and your work will do the rest for you.
Recognizing the Signs
One of the great challenges of doing creative work is knowing whether or not you’re on the right path.
Big ideas take time and iteration to work through the derision and dismissal that often accompany their early stages, before gaining curiosity, interest, and acceptance.
But worthless ideas–quite rightly–might also garner derision and dismissal, making it hard to judge which variety of idea we’re currently working on.
This means it’s essential to develop our ability to decipher the signs that we’re on the right track.
Too often, we take our queues from the most obvious metrics.
We see views, downloads, likes, and follows as the ultimate indicators of quality, when in fact, they’re simply indicators of attention.
A better indicator of whether or not we’re on the right path is impact.
Not impact on a large scale, across communities or the world.
But impact on the one to one scale.
Human to human.
Has your work changed even one person in a meaningful way?
Do you mean a lot to a small number of people?
Have you ever been thanked by your followers for the work you’re doing?
These gestures and achievements might feel small when they’re few and far between, but they’re the clearest signs you’ll receive that you’re onto something.
If you can resonate strongly with a few, chances are you can do the same with many.
Find the few and change them.
Then repeat.
If You Gain Traction Immediately, You’re Probably Doing Something Wrong
Few ideas of real value take off immediately.
Ideas that hold our attention and create change require time to digest & grapple with, multiple listens, rereadings.
These ideas are complex, risky, unproven, and must first run the gauntlet of ignorance, derision, and rejection before finding their way to curiosity, experimentation, and ultimately, adoption.
While there might come a time where it feels as though they’re bursting onto the scene overnight, that moment has been in the works for years, decades, perhaps generations.
When it comes to ideas that matter, the foundation runs deep.
Time and care must be spent in laying it.
Of course, the option also exists to skip the foundation and instead shoot for the quick win of immediacy, shock value, clickbait, listicles.
Sure, you might win your corner of the internet for the day, but by tomorrow, the attention will have faded and you now face the prospect of doing it again.
This time a little bit more shocking.
A little bit less nuanced.
A little bit cheaper.
Competing for attention is always a race to the bottom. One that degrades your work, your audience, and yourself the further down you go, selling them each short of their potential.
Ideas that uplift, that capitalize on, and fulfill potential require vision, rigor, and consistency.
These traits are hard to come by when you’re busy simply seeking attention.
But they’re what’s required when building anything that lasts. That continues to move and change the people who engage with it months, years, or decades after its creation.
It’s a tall order.
To shun attention in the short run to invest in impact in the long run.
But it’s the only way to develop and spread the ideas that truly matter.
It’s never too late to stop spending your energy on the hamster wheel of immediate attention.
And spend it instead laying the foundation of something bigger.
This Will Not Be the End of You
On the days your fingers won’t lift the pencil, your voice catches in your throat and your legs can’t bear your weight to move you forward,
This will not be the end of you.
When the deadlines close in and the well is dry,
This will not be the end of you.
When you find yourself one-upped, outshone, and embarrassed,
This will not be the end of you.
When the project flops, when no one shows up, when you play to an empty arena,
This will not be the end of you.
When you feel the grip in your gut of stress, burnout, and exhaustion,
This will not be the end of you.
Through success, failure or sheer indifference,
This will not be the end of you.
No matter to financial or creative pressure you’re under,
This will not be the end of you.
No matter what the trolls, critics, hell, even your friends and family say,
This will not be the end of you.
No matter how confused, how small, how utterly hopeless you feel right now,
This will not be the end of you.
No matter how downtrodden, defeated and devoid of direction,
This will not be the end of you.
You’ll live to create again.
You have more left to give.
Something of value that somebody, somewhere needs to hear.
This is not the end of you.
It’s simply the start of the next iteration.
Explore how to navigate a creative life that matters
This article originally appeared in my weekly Listen Up Newsletter. Each issue is the product of a week of work, and contains something not available for sale.
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 wilderness of creating work that matters?”
It’s something I’m proud to create and I’d be honoured to share it with you.
When No One Can Do What You Do
This is a freeing place to operate from.
It removes the specter of competition and allows you to create from a place of confidence and generosity, without constantly looking over your shoulder.
Of course, creating work that can’t be emulated is no small feat.
Almost any product or service worth selling can (and will) be copied and undercut, once the idea has been validated.
The alternative is to build your brand not around a product, but a perspective, and then commit to continually refine and evolve that perspective.
Others may attempt to copy your work, but unlike products, services, and content, perspectives are difficult to replicate.
And besides, while others are attempting to catch up and replicate, you’ll already be on to what will be the next big thing.
I Don’t Feel Like…
I don’t feel like doing the work today.
I’m tired.
I’m stressed.
I’m stretched past my limit.
I don’t feel like creating today.
No motivation.
No inspiration.
No determination.
Simply consternation.
I don’t feel like showing up today.
My head hurts.
My back is sore.
I’ve been sitting too long, I ache to get out and explore.
But I’m a professional.
A creator.
An artist.
And so despite how I feel.
I will.
Because creating is the only way through.
Creative Wayfinding For Ambitious Optimists.
Marketing Is Inherently Inefficient
When it comes to our marketing, we’re often in search of a formula that will consistently and reliably deliver the results we’re looking for.
Input x and receive y.
Whether it’s ad spend, conversion rate or any other metric we choose to track, what we’re striving for with our marketing is often efficiency.
This is a worthy objective, no point in doing or spending more than you need when a few small tweaks here or there could improve your results.
The problem is that effective marketing over the long run–while it might be made up of a number of well-oiled components–is always a highly inefficient process.
For every marketing tool or technique we’re able to optimize fully, we’ve likely had to test and tweak our way through a handful of others that couldn’t pass muster.
There’s no perfect template or formula for effective marketing. No way to connect the dots with perfect efficiency.
Marketing that’s wildly successful for someone else, their personality, style, content, and audience might not work for us. And even when we land on a strategy that works in the moment, it’s surely only a matter of time before its returns begin to decline.
When our only metric is maximum efficiency, we’re incentivized to ignore all the inefficient exploration and experimentation that is required to sustain our marketing over the long haul.
Our job then, as marketers and creators is to constantly seek out new ways to connect and build relationships with our ideal audience members. To test and tweak and experiment our way through often-unproven, even seemly irrational strategies in search of the ones that might unexpectedly work for us.
There’s no reason any of us can’t stumble on on a new strategy.
Marketing, like science, is filled with discoveries made by common folk like us.
What’s more, we already have our starting point.
If we’ve done our homework, we know our audience as well as they know themselves.
We know what they read, listen to, consume, and where they hang out online.
We know where they’re looking to go, the challenges in their path, and the solutions we’re best positioned to deliver.
With the map already filled in, we only need to get creative in making a connection. Capturing their attention just long enough for them to realize that we’re exactly what they’ve been looking for.
With this as our goal, it’s not hard to see that there are dozens, maybe even hundreds of ways to capture that attention.
Which means all we have to do is start experimenting, doubling down on what works and rejecting what doesn’t.
Flipping Assumptions
Every now and then, it’s worth writing out all the many assumptions you’re making that influence the way you approach your work.
Chances are, the list of assumptions is far longer than the list of hard facts.
Then, when you have your list, flip them.
Work through your assumptions one by one and ask yourself, “What if the opposite were true?”
How would that change the way you’re currently approaching the problem?
If the flipped assumption is desirable, what would need to be in place in order to make it true?
What are the steps to making that change?
We base more of our decisions than we realize on assumptions that are often only partially true at best.
We follow marketing strategies based on what’s working for others.
We build our product or service based on a similar offer we’ve interacted with before
We create the content we assume is going to attract our target audience based on what similar content creators are offering.
We make all these assumptions and more, without ever stopping to ask ourselves, “What if everyone else is doing this the wrong way?” or “What if there are other ways to reach the same result?”
Our assumptions can lead us to create cookie-cutter work that fits in with (and gets lost in) the crowd, instead of the work that only we can possibly create. Work based on our unique skills, experience and perspective.
Our assumptions lead us to market our work in ways that are unsustainable. Maybe we’re just not excited about the latest marketing trend and are unable to maintain the required consistency. Or maybe the trend feels outright sleazy to our taste.
Our assumptions sell ourselves and our potential short. Leading us to contort ourselves into someone else’s box, convincing us that there’s no need for further innovation and experimentation, at least not by us. Best leave that to the maverick marketing geniuses.
Our assumptions lead us to believe that we can’t have it all. That we can’t create the work that would most light us up, and build an audience around it in a way that feels easy, effortless even.
So every now and then, stop and ask, what are the assumptions you, your industry, and your audience are making, and how can you flip them?
What if you could get payed handsomely to do the work that most excites you?
What if marketing that work was effortless?
What if you could charge 3x for the exact same work you’re doing now?
What if you could work 3-day weeks and still earn the same amount, leaving more time to spend with your family?
What if the only thing that’s been keeping you from aiming higher is the assumption that it isn’t possible?
What if you flipped all the assumptions that have kept you playing small and stepped into your potential?
What’s the Worst That Could Happen?
The voice in your head has one answer.
An outcome of catastrophic failure, leading to absolute ruin, destitution, and maybe even death… perhaps simply of shame.
The thought alone is so viscerally terrifying, you don’t dare to even look at it in its entirety, let alone follow through with whatever it was that begged the question in the first place.
But the voice in your head has a flaw in its plan to keep you rooted to inaction by fear.
It’s overreached.
When written down or said aloud, the outcome it proposes begins to feel ridiculous in its hyperbole.
Almost laughable.
And so it’s worth asking the question again, with a twist, “What’s the worst that is likely to happen?”
Thought through with cool rationality, the worst likely outcome is usually something you could live with.
It may not be comfortable, it may not be easy, it may take a while to come back from.
But it’s clear that it’s something you could come back from.
What’s more, the stakes are no longer so high that you can afford to ignore the other side of the question out of hand.
What’s the best that could happen?
All work worth doing exists in the tension between these two possibilities.
No worthwhile project or creation is free from the possibility of failure.
The freedom of failure may be possible for a factory, mass-manufacturing widgets, but not for a creator, artist, or entrepreneur.
Each of these titles carries the implication of doing something new, of creating out of whole cloth, of bringing something to the world that has never existed before.
Every successful creator learns to dance with the possibility of failure.
Flirting with it, tempting fate, falling prey to its seductions many a time.
Then returning to the floor to pick up the beat and resume.
Don’t let the voice in your head keep you from taking the floor in the first place.
It’s just a dance after all.
Acknowledgments & Accompaniment
It’s not often that you come across a book that is completely engrossing, teaches you something valuable, and–most importantly–leaves you viewing the world differently than when you started it.
For me, Underland, by Robert Macfarlane has been one of those books. It’s a book about Robert’s exploration of past, present and future of the unseen world beneath our feet.
Over the course of the book, we’re taken on a twisting subterranean journey through limestone caverns that served as prehistoric burial chambers, the sprawling catacombs that make up the shadow city beneath Paris, dark matter research laboratories and mines whose tendrils stretch far beneath the North Atlantic Sea, Nuclear storage facilities being designed to last 10,000 years and more.
It’s a fascinating book that, even more than the Underland, is about time, deep time to be exact, and our tiny place in–and yet profound effect on–it as humans.
But while the book is stunningly written and has had a profound effect on my own view of time, this isn’t an article about the contents of the book itself.
Instead, I want to talk about something I was struck by in the Acknowledgements at the very end of the book.
Along with the typical acknowledgments including everyone who helped bring the book to life–his friends, family and supporters big and small, Robert included this line:
*”Among the music and musicians whose work has kept me company above and below ground, I could not have done without AR, Bon Iver, the Duke Spirit, Elbow, Johnny Flynn, Grasscut, Willy Mason, the Pixies, Karine Polwart, Schubert, Cosmo Sheldrake, and Le Tigre.”
Music has played a huge role in my life, I played in bands in and after high school and went to school to be an audio engineer because I wanted to produce records. While I don’t create music at the moment, it still plays a huge role in my life, and–as I realized while reading Robert Macfarlane’s acknowledgments–my work.
This acknowledgment of gratitude got me thinking about not just the musicians, but all the artists, creators, teachers, scientists, and others who have a profound impact on the work each of us does.
Most of these people will never know we exist, let alone the impact they’ve had–big or small–on our work. But I can’t help but feel a deep connectedness at the thought of this cross-discipline, -medium, -professional network of shadow support, inspiration, and encouragement.
Change Or Accompaniment?
I know many of us, myself included, hope that our work will change people, leave them seeing the world differently after consuming it, much like Underland has done for me. But as I think about this less-direct form of support, I realize what an essential role accompaniment plays in our and other’s ability to create work and lives that mean something.
Whatever we’re working towards, we all need teachers, guides, and mentors to show us the way forward. But we also need company along the journey. This accompaniment might be the literal people we work and collaborate with, but more often, they’re the people and their creations that across time and space have the ability to soothe us, steel us, and most of all, keep us moving forward when it feels all but impossible.
I can think of numerous moments in my own life where, without the right album or song or book at the right time, things might have turned out very differently, perhaps leading me to take a different fork in the road. In fact, I often think back to a single moment in junior high home economics class when I was 14 years old where my friend Tyler Lofstrand first introduced me to Metallica and set me off on an entirely new path.
Short detour here, I don’t think I ever realized the irony of being introduced to Metallica in Home Economics class until writing it down here. Anyway, that’s a story for another time.
These accompaniments have the ability to remind us that we’re not alone on our creative quest, that we’re in good company, working together toward a shared vision of the future.
My goal with this newsletter has always been to create something that changes your perspective, leaves you seeing the world a little bit differently. But I’m realizing that I would be equally honoured for it to simply be the background accompaniment to the larger work you’re creating.
As I’m writing this issue, I’ve just passed the 5-year anniversary of my business, Counterweight Creative, and so to close out this article, it feels apropos to share some acknowledgments of the background accompaniment that has kept me company across the world and through the ups and downs, thick and thin of building a creative business. Here goes.
So much love and gratitude to those who have provided the soundtrack to the past 5 years in business, including Hailaker, EDEN, The Republic Of Wolves, Trophy Eyes, Misery Signals, Ben Howard, Gregory Alan Isakov, Donovan Woods, Bon Iver, Can’t Swim, The Story So Far, Gang Of Youths, Novo Amor, Tyson Motsenbocker, Henry Jamison, The Gaslight Anthem, Movements, nothing,nowhere. Overgrow, Sights & Sounds, The Tallest Man On Earth, Tall Ships, Thrice, Valleyheart, Driveways, Dustin Tebbutt, Ed Prosek, Ed Patrick, Hayden Calnin, Hundredth, Jack Larsen, Jeremy Zucker, Layover, American Football, Andrew Belle, Avalanche City, Boston Manor, Cape Francis, Cigarettes After Sex, Everything Everything, and CommonWealth. I could not have got here without your work.
Who’s on your list?
Oh, and yes, I made a playlist. It’s long, but I’m a full-album kind of guy, and you can listen to a lot of albums in 5 years.
Explore how to navigate a creative life that matters
This article originally appeared in my weekly Listen Up Newsletter. Each issue is the product of a week of work, and contains something not available for sale.
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 wilderness of creating work that matters?”
It’s something I’m proud to create and I’d be honoured to share it with you.
Creating = Being
We often think about our work as occupying one distinct space in our lives.
It has its role, time, and place in our day that it doesn’t extend beyond.
If it is extending outside the box we’ve put it in, we might actually fight to cram it back in, feeling as though our work is taking over our lives, that we’re losing any semblance of work/life balance.
This is a healthy mentality when working a job we’d rather not be doing.
But if the same mentality persists when it comes to the creative work we truly care about, we’ve got it backwards.
That’s not to say we should all become workaholics and spend every minute of the day at our computers.
But creativity is more than a thing we do.
It’s how we are.
Who we are.
What we are.
Creating work (and a life) that matters is about making connections.
To and between people, ideas, thoughts, and experiences.
And we’re surrounded by all of these every day, maybe even more so when we’re away from our desks.
Connections waiting to be made, if we can just dial in to the right frequency.
Living our work is not about always being in work mode, answering emails, and checking our analytics at 11 pm from our phones while lying in bed.
It’s about staying receptive, curious, drawing connections between the little moments, noticings, thoughts, and experiences of day-to-day life, and the bigger ideas they might tie into.
A life lived creatively fuels our work and vice versa.
Both of them becoming better, more useful, and more fulfilling in the process.
So what’s one way you can live your creative work more fully?
Square, Grey LEGO Blocks
Homogeneous building blocks create homogeneous buildings.
Sure they’re easier to piece together, but is ease of building the point of building?
To more quickly build structures indistinguishable from the others around us?
A master may be able to create magic and art out of square grey Lego blocks, but if we’re honest with ourselves, we know we’re not at that level.
At least not yet.
In the meantime, the shortest route to building something remarkable, something that stands out from the grey blocky landscape around it is to start with different blocks.
No, they wont fit together quite so easily.
No, you won’t have the reference point of how to fit the pieces together based on what’s already been built.
No, it won’t be quite so easy to build something stable, capable of supporting weight and withstanding pressure.
But when you start with different blocks you don’t have to work to differentiate yourself.
You simply build with the blocks you have, and your work will do the rest for you.
Recognizing the Signs
One of the great challenges of doing creative work is knowing whether or not you’re on the right path.
Big ideas take time and iteration to work through the derision and dismissal that often accompany their early stages, before gaining curiosity, interest, and acceptance.
But worthless ideas–quite rightly–might also garner derision and dismissal, making it hard to judge which variety of idea we’re currently working on.
This means it’s essential to develop our ability to decipher the signs that we’re on the right track.
Too often, we take our queues from the most obvious metrics.
We see views, downloads, likes, and follows as the ultimate indicators of quality, when in fact, they’re simply indicators of attention.
A better indicator of whether or not we’re on the right path is impact.
Not impact on a large scale, across communities or the world.
But impact on the one to one scale.
Human to human.
Has your work changed even one person in a meaningful way?
Do you mean a lot to a small number of people?
Have you ever been thanked by your followers for the work you’re doing?
These gestures and achievements might feel small when they’re few and far between, but they’re the clearest signs you’ll receive that you’re onto something.
If you can resonate strongly with a few, chances are you can do the same with many.
Find the few and change them.
Then repeat.
If You Gain Traction Immediately, You’re Probably Doing Something Wrong
Few ideas of real value take off immediately.
Ideas that hold our attention and create change require time to digest & grapple with, multiple listens, rereadings.
These ideas are complex, risky, unproven, and must first run the gauntlet of ignorance, derision, and rejection before finding their way to curiosity, experimentation, and ultimately, adoption.
While there might come a time where it feels as though they’re bursting onto the scene overnight, that moment has been in the works for years, decades, perhaps generations.
When it comes to ideas that matter, the foundation runs deep.
Time and care must be spent in laying it.
Of course, the option also exists to skip the foundation and instead shoot for the quick win of immediacy, shock value, clickbait, listicles.
Sure, you might win your corner of the internet for the day, but by tomorrow, the attention will have faded and you now face the prospect of doing it again.
This time a little bit more shocking.
A little bit less nuanced.
A little bit cheaper.
Competing for attention is always a race to the bottom. One that degrades your work, your audience, and yourself the further down you go, selling them each short of their potential.
Ideas that uplift, that capitalize on, and fulfill potential require vision, rigor, and consistency.
These traits are hard to come by when you’re busy simply seeking attention.
But they’re what’s required when building anything that lasts. That continues to move and change the people who engage with it months, years, or decades after its creation.
It’s a tall order.
To shun attention in the short run to invest in impact in the long run.
But it’s the only way to develop and spread the ideas that truly matter.
It’s never too late to stop spending your energy on the hamster wheel of immediate attention.
And spend it instead laying the foundation of something bigger.
This Will Not Be the End of You
On the days your fingers won’t lift the pencil, your voice catches in your throat and your legs can’t bear your weight to move you forward,
This will not be the end of you.
When the deadlines close in and the well is dry,
This will not be the end of you.
When you find yourself one-upped, outshone, and embarrassed,
This will not be the end of you.
When the project flops, when no one shows up, when you play to an empty arena,
This will not be the end of you.
When you feel the grip in your gut of stress, burnout, and exhaustion,
This will not be the end of you.
Through success, failure or sheer indifference,
This will not be the end of you.
No matter to financial or creative pressure you’re under,
This will not be the end of you.
No matter what the trolls, critics, hell, even your friends and family say,
This will not be the end of you.
No matter how confused, how small, how utterly hopeless you feel right now,
This will not be the end of you.
No matter how downtrodden, defeated and devoid of direction,
This will not be the end of you.
You’ll live to create again.
You have more left to give.
Something of value that somebody, somewhere needs to hear.
This is not the end of you.
It’s simply the start of the next iteration.
Explore how to navigate a creative life that matters
This article originally appeared in my weekly Listen Up Newsletter. Each issue is the product of a week of work, and contains something not available for sale.
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 wilderness of creating work that matters?”
It’s something I’m proud to create and I’d be honoured to share it with you.
When No One Can Do What You Do
This is a freeing place to operate from.
It removes the specter of competition and allows you to create from a place of confidence and generosity, without constantly looking over your shoulder.
Of course, creating work that can’t be emulated is no small feat.
Almost any product or service worth selling can (and will) be copied and undercut, once the idea has been validated.
The alternative is to build your brand not around a product, but a perspective, and then commit to continually refine and evolve that perspective.
Others may attempt to copy your work, but unlike products, services, and content, perspectives are difficult to replicate.
And besides, while others are attempting to catch up and replicate, you’ll already be on to what will be the next big thing.
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Hi, I'm Jeremy, I'm glad you're here.
No matter what you create, I'm guessing you spend a good amount of time feeling lost, hopeless, and unsure about how to get from where you are to where you want to be.
So do I. And so does everyone doing creative work.
This is the Creative Wilderness.
Every week, I publish a new article in my Creative Wayfinding newsletter about how we as creators and marketers can navigate it with more clarity and confidence.
If you're building something that matters, but aren't quite sure how to take the next step forward, I'd be honoured to have you join us.