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 Perils of Playing Cover Songs
Think back to the last busker you saw playing music who had drawn a significant crowd.
Chances are, two things were immediately apparent:
- They were unmistakably and incredibly talented.
- They were playing covers of songs you (and everyone else) recognized
Along with picking the right location to set up and perform, these are two of the prerequisites for success as a busker. And if you can nail those criteria and learn how to work a crowd, you can do pretty well. For a busker at least.
But while many buskers might genuinely love busking, most have higher artistic ambitions.
And so, every so often, they’ll throw in one of their own songs.
When they do, a funny thing tends to happen.
The spell that has drawn and captivated the crowd is broken, the attention is lost, and people start to disperse.
Because original art isn’t what drew them in in the first place.
What drew them in was the sound of a song they already had a positive association with being performed expertly, perhaps in a novel way.
And while familiarity & regurgitation are fantastic shortcuts to engagement, they don’t lead to anything deeper.
And so, when presented with a new song they haven’t already made up their mind about, the audience would often rather move on than stay, listen critically, and decide whether it’s worth sticking around for.
Engagement Hacks ≠ True Fan Hacks
This peril of playing covers exists whether we’re busking for change on the street or likes online.
It’s possible—likely even— that with sufficient skill, we can build a repertoire of content that is almost guaranteed to get a positive reception, and perhaps even draw a crowd.
But building an audience by regurgitating other artists’ original work doesn’t often translate to interest in our own original work.
And yet, it can be hard to resist.
Playing covers is a surefire shortcut to attention and engagement, two assets we as creators are all desperate for, especially when we’re just starting out.
If we can find a hack that gives them to us faster, why wouldn’t we take it?
The problem is that playing covers doesn’t build any equity in your own art.
Sure we might have mastered the ability to get attention, but we haven’t invested in the harder work of building an actual fanbase.
Someone else might occupy the same street corner next week, playing a similar repertoire and it’s likely no one would notice the difference, let alone go out of their way to track us down or even follow us on tour.
What’s more, while we might be able to consistently attract attention with our repertoire of covers, attracting attention for our own art isn’t so easy.
Covers Don’t Count Toward the Clock
When playing covers, we can meticulously construct a repertoire that most people already know, and already have a positive association with.
With our own art, however, we’re starting from scratch. Perhaps even less than scratch given that we all tend to be skeptical of new content unless it’s entirely unignorable (usually when we’ve been told about it by at least a half-dozen other people).
When it comes to building an audience around original work, there’s simply no shortcutting the slow, grinding process of winning over one fan at a time, like the sea slowly eroding a cliff face until one day, years after we started, the whole thing comes crashing down.
For most of that time, progress will be slow and virtually unobservable. It’s the 10 years of silence every artist and creator must endure to create great work.
Despite the positive feedback it attracts, time spent playing covers doesn’t count towards the clock.
What’s more, we may end up boxing ourselves out of the ability to share our own work.
If we’re able to get attention, we get accustomed to it. And once we get accustomed to the attention and engagement it gets hard to create and perform to an empty room.
And so we’re incentivized to keep giving people what they already know and like because it serves our ego in the short term… even as it sacrifices our potential in the long term, all while making it harder and harder to ever make the pivot to building an audience around our own work.
Build Equity in Your Original Work
We’ve all seen and heard stories of creators who can hack attention and engagement to build a massive social following, but are incapable of selling products or services.
If we aspire to be more than that, we need to avoid the allure of short-term attention-hacking in favour of long-term equity-building around the work that only we can do.
It will be slow.
It will be painful.
We’ll constantly feel the pull to pander to the cheap and easy engagement of falling back on familiar cover songs.
But cover bands don’t sell albums.
They don’t sell out stadiums.
And no one follows them around the continent on tour.
At best, cover bands are a pleasant diversion, distraction, or addition to the ambiance of a place we’re already occupying.
As creators, artists, marketers, and founders, we can be more than that.
And if we want to make a sustainable (not to mention fulfilling) living from our work, we need to be.
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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Tend Who You’re Becoming
We’re all in a continual process of becoming.
Each day, evolving or devolving a little further into the person we’ll be tomorrow.
The change is exquisitely subtle.
Perhaps better measured on the timescale of glaciers.
But as sure as the glaciers eventually reach and crumble into the sea,
Or shrink and melt to nothing, short of their destination,
Each of us too will reach our end.
Our fate, whether to reach our destined sea, or wither away before,
Rests in the hands of today.
Who we choose to be guides who we will become.
Books, people, ideas, and beliefs embed themselves in us.
Becoming part of us.
Creating us.
And our work.
Which then embeds itself in others.
Who we choose to be, today and forever will always be within our power,
To nudge, guide, nurture,
Or scrap and start again.
Tend who you are becoming.
It’s the only choice that really matters.
The Many Forms of Progress
It’s easy to get caught thinking about progress in only one dimension. An axis along which we can move only forward or backward.
This view has us focus on a limited number of tasks, milestones and goals that are generally accepted to signify “progress”.
While those signals of progress might matter to others, however, if we’re seeking to create something that hasn’t come before, to do work that really matters, we need to take a more nuanced view of what progress really looks like, and how our actions contribute to it.
Progress could mean checking items off your to-do list.
Or adding to it.
It could mean putting in a focused day’s work.
Or taking it off to recharge.
Progress might be filling the pages of your notebook.
Or tearing them out and burning them.
It could be speeding up.
Or slowing down.
Onboarding new clients.
Or offboarding old ones.
Building a team.
Or dismantling it.
Progress could mean sitting still, staring at the blank wall in front of you, allowing yourself to slip into boredom.
Or writing 1000 uninspired words of drivel simply in order to fulfil your daily commitment.
When we’re able to recognize and embrace the many forms of progress, we’re more likely to recognize the progress we’re making, even when it doesn’t feel like it.
This perspective is essential.
Creating anything that matters is a long game. One sure to be filled with long seasons of sowing so we can reap in the future.
The most difficult form of progress to embody might be the patience required when we’ve planted our seeds and are left with nothing to do but wait for the conditions to come about for those seeds to begin to sprout.
In this limbo, progress might simply mean recentering ourselves and waiting for those first shoots to poke their way through the soil.
So that we might be prepared, ready to spring into action when the season for action once again arrives.
With a long enough view, we see that it’s all progress in the end.
And we would do well to remember that.
Eating Through Your Ideas
One of the things my friends make fun of me for most is my love of mandarin oranges.
When it comes to mandarins, my appetite knows no bounds. On a good day, I can eat through 10, 15, even 20 of them and wake up ready to do it again the next day. And the next day. And the next day. And you get the idea…
Yes, I know, eating that many mandarins in a day might seem excessive (it almost certainly is), but there’s reason behind my obsession.
Growing up on the prairies in Canada, mandarins were only available for a few short weeks a year, right around Christmas. They would first hit the shelves sometime around the start of December, and then, almost like clockwork, disappear as soon as the New Year rolled around. To this day, I still refer to them as “Christmas Oranges” more often than their proper name due to the seasonal correlation of my childhood.
This limited availability meant that if you loved mandarins as I did, you had only a short window of opportunity to make the absolute most of that limited availability… and stuff your face accordingly.
For all the things I love about mandarins, however–the ease of peeling, the satisfying feel of how they rest in your hand, and of course the perfectly bite-sized segments bursting with juicy flavour–mandarins have one glaring flaw.
The problem is that they can be wildly inconsistent in quality. What’s more, from the outside, it’s almost impossible to know what type of orange you’re going to get. You can examine them from every angle, pick what you think is the perfect orange, and get home (or out to the parking lot if we’re being honest) to discover that it’s too sour, or dry, or even rotting on the inside.
It struck me this week, as I was at the market sorting through the bin of mandarins, trying to find the absolute best of the bunch, that in this way, mandarins are a lot like ideas.
The challenge with ideas is not so much finding them, but sorting through and choosing the best of the bunch to bite into, based on the limited information available to us from the outside.
Developing Your Discernment
We’d all like to think we can spot the good ideas from the bad, and to some extent, we can.
Even if they don’t taste great, most mandarins will offer you sustenance after all. It’s just a matter of what you have to eat through or around in order to get it.
Ideas, I think, are the same. Most of them could work, at least for someone. The question, then, is not whether an idea is a good one, but whether it’s the best one for you to bite into at this moment.
Unlike mandarins, however, where I’ve proven it’s possible to eat through 20 or more in a day, developing an idea to the point where it brings us some kind of return is a long-term commitment. We might, even, only be able to fully devote ourselves to one single idea at a time.
This means that we have to be incredibly selective with the ideas we commit to in the first place.
This means expanding our selection criteria beyond simply “Is this a good idea?” or “Could this idea work?” and probe deeper, asking questions like, “Is this a good idea for me, right now?” and “Is this the type of idea I want to eat through, and if so, how long will it take to reach the other side?”
This requires a level of discernment that takes work to acquire.
Even Fantastic Ideas Can Be Wrong
I was recently looking into expanding our service offerings at Counterweight Creative to include a much more in-depth podcast production and management support package. It’s an offer I know would appeal to a higher level of client than we currently serve, there are other companies successfully selling similar offerings, and I know exactly how I would set it up and pitch it.
From the outside, it sounded like a home run of an idea. In fact I spent many weeks so excited about it that I would frequently wake up in the middle of the night to write down new ideas and flesh it out further.
But then I started to peel back the skin of the idea and take a closer look.
As I pulled back the outer layer, I realized that building out this package wasn’t quite so simple as I imagined it would be. I would need to hire and train new team members, set up extensive new systems, and would require a large ongoing time-investment from me, probably for a year or two until the team was built out and the system had been tested and perfected.
The idea was clearly doable, and very likely to be profitable, even. It seemed from the outside to be not just a good idea, but a fantastic one. And yet, despite this fact, after looking closer, I realized that this wasn’t the type of idea I wanted to be eating through for the next two years.
Ultimately, I want to spend more time writing and creating, and even though this idea was good, it would take me further away from my true destination.
In this case, I was lucky enough to be working through this process with my girlfriend, Kelly, who facilitates brand strategy discussions like this for her clients, and could guide my interrogation of the idea to push me beyond the shiny, exciting outer layer. But often, it’s not until we bite into the idea and start chewing that we realize we’ve made a mistake.
The good news is that we can improve our idea discernment over time.
Improving Your Discernment One Bite At A Time
When you’re new to the art (yes, art) of mandarins, you’re likely going to get home and discover a mixed bag.
Sure, it’s easy enough to avoid those that are obviously green, fuzzy, and rotten, but although you might pick out a bunch of oranges that are visually appealing, the flavour and consistency are likely to be hit or miss once you peel them open and sink your teeth into them. This inconsistency in selection is likely to persist, at least for a time.
When you’ve eaten as many mandarins as I have, however, somewhere along the line, something, somehow shifts.
Subtle clues begin to present themselves more clearly while you’re in the store picking them out. You notice something, almost on a subconscious level about the texture or the look, or firmness or most likely the combination of all three that differentiates a perfectly sweet and juicy mandarin from an average one.
You might not be able to put into words why this orange is likely to be a good one and that one isn’t, but you’ve developed some internal compass that guides you to the right choice more often than not.
Sure, you’ll still be fooled into picking up the occasional sour, bitter, or dry orange. Sometimes you’ll grab a straight-up lemon. But the more mandarins you eat the better your discernment becomes, and the higher the quality of your average orange.
The better your discernment becomes, the better the quality of oranges you eat, which in turn makes the process of eating them ever more enjoyable.
The same is true for ideas.
As with mandarins, we often have to bite into dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of ideas before we begin to develop the ability to differentiate which ideas are worth biting into in the first place and which are best left for someone else, perhaps someone with completely different taste preferences than us.
It can feel like an onerous task at times, the thought of chewing through a pile of hit-or-miss ideas in order to improve our discernment. I think it’s worth remembering, however, that just because we don’t always know whether an idea will be worth pursuing at the start, it doesn’t mean we won’t learn something new or grow, or enjoy the process, even if we abandon the idea after the first mouthful.
As with mandarins, there’s no reason to eat through the whole idea if the first bite ends up being different than expected. Toss it in the compost heap and bite into the next one. It might take some time to pick the right ones at first but the more you eat, the better your discernment will become.
And besides, I can think of worse ways to pass my time than eating through a pile of mandarins in search of the perfect one.
If you dug this, give me a shout on Twitter @iamjeremyenns and let me know. I’d love to connect 🙂
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.
Unscripted Moments
We all know the best moments are the unscripted.
The ones where we (or perhaps someone we aspire to be more like) breaks the spell of predictability and injects a spark of vitality into our ennui.
It’s a thrill to break script.
Even a small moment of deviation reinvigorates us, a reminder of what it means to be truly alive.
So why do we still spend so much time reading from it?
Why do we find it so difficult to break with how we’re supposed to speak, work, create and live, and instead do what the moment truly needs from us?
There’s almost always more than one right line.
More than one way to say what it is we’re striving to say. To create the change we’re seeking to make.
The script wasn’t written for us, after all.
It was written for someone seeking simply to fill a role.
To play a part that has been played by many who’ve come before, and will be played by many still to come.
At its worst, the script defines and dominates our lives. Producing a drone, that, no matter how lively, energetic, or emotional, will never break new ground.
We might captivate audiences, but we’ll never create real change.
At its best, the script gives us a framework. A tool to build tension, and get us into a position to do something unexpected.
Even magical, perhaps.
A zig at just the right moment, when everyone was expecting a zag.
They’ve seen this play out before, after all.
Breaking script requires courage, confidence, timing, and a keen eye for recognizing an opportunity, when the moment is asking for something more than what is scripted, and then delivering it.
In the end, it’s the unscripted moments that make a performance remarkable.
Find the Equilibrium
Almost everything has a sweet spot.
A point of tension in which opposing forces meet and hold each other in check.
This is where the magic exists.
Input and output create ideas.
Accident and intention produce a novel offering.
Fear and inspiration hone it and brings it to the world.
Experimentation and consistency connect with the ideal audience.
Value and profit sustain a business.
You can find this equilibrium in anything, if you look hard enough.
And indeed, to unlock the potential of your work, you must.
It’s almost always found by first leaning too far in one direction.
By pushing the boundaries, outgrowing your comfort zone,
Then shrinking back, seeking the balance of discomfort and sustainability.
But take care.
Equilibrium is rarely the natural state of things.
Once found, it can be maintained, at least for a while.
Before the time comes, once again to push outward,
Or perhaps, shrink back.
Upsetting the balance and beginning the cycle anew.
The Magic of Mundane Creativity
My absolute favourite smell in the world is the sweet aroma given off every spring by blossoming cherry trees.
Or is it plum trees? Or lilacs?
I’ve spent at least the past decade trying to determine the specific source of the smell and am still no closer to finding the answer.
I’ve crossed highways and hopped fences more times than I can count to bury my nose in the nearest blossoming tree whenever I catch the faintest whiff. And while all I’ve been able to narrow it down(ish) to the three trees mentioned above, none of them is quite right.
My best guess at this point is that it’s actually some mix of all three of these trees, mingling and diffusing to create a magical concoction more enticing than any of them on their own.
For as long as I can remember, this smell has, for me, marked the arrival of spring.
And every year, without fail, it catches me off guard, appearing one day in full force only to disappear just as suddenly a few short weeks later.
I spend those three or so weeks breathing deeper than I do the rest of the year, going for more and longer walks, seeking out that elusive smell, and basking in its ephemeral beauty whenever I stumble across (or hop fences or cross highways to find) it.
A few weeks ago, I got my first whiff of it for this spring.
The Magic Of The Mundane
Part of the appeal–and the mystery–of this smell is its ubiquity, if not temporally, then at least geographically.
It’s one of those smells that is tied inextricably to my memories of childhood on the Canadian prairies, but I’ve since encountered it all over the world.
From my years living in Vancouver to Edinburgh, to Belgrade, to Italy, and more. I hope to one day experience the Sakura bloom in Japan and imagine that perhaps I’ll encounter the same alluring aroma there as well, perhaps at its most fully-realized.
These past weeks, as I’ve been burying my nose in every blossoming tree I can see, this ever-elusive smell I’ve been struck by the immense, eternally-captivating power of the simple, mundane, and familiar, and the opportunities that embracing it presents us as creators.
So often as creators, we convince ourselves that the only things worth creating are immense, profound, and utterly transformative on the people we create them for.
We tell ourselves that for our work to be meaningful it must be broad in scope and deep in depth. That the impact and change are to be measured by marked shifts in our communities and industries if not broader upheaval of the status quo.
It’s true, this is important work to aspire to.
But it’s not the only type of work to aspire to.
And while aiming to create impact at the highest possible level can be inspiring, it can also be debilitating when we begin to sense ourselves incapable of ever living up to the expectations we’ve set of ourselves.
Life-Changing vs Life-Affirming?
Whether or not we contribute to it, the world is already in a state of upheaval.
It’s always continually eating and regurgitating and reinventing itself at a pace that can be exhausting to keep up with, as individual humans as well as communities, networks, societies, and cultures.
We would do well to remember, that in the midst of upheaval, it’s often the small, mundane, and familiar that make the greatest difference and are, in fact, the most necessary.
These things ground us, comfort us, and connect us–to ourselves, to each other, to our collective and personal past and future.
The smell of fresh-cut grass, or fresh-baked bread or coffee brewing as you lie in bed on a Sunday morning.
The soft kiss of sun on skin in early spring, or the caress of a cool breeze at the peak of summer heat.
The sound of rain on the pavement, or thunder rippling across an open plain, or the sea, breaking onto a rocky coastline, or the kettle whistling away on the stove.
A simple, hearty meal with good friends, or sitting around a campfire, whether lost in thought or deep in conversation.
These are rarely life (let alone world)-changing experiences. They’re familiar, mundane, expected. Many of them are within our ability to reach out and engage with at any time.
And yet their power is immense.
Small Contributions Can Be Deeply Meaningful
While we might measure and remember our lives by the life-changing peak experiences and accomplishments, it’s the small, mundane, universal stuff of life in-between that actually makes life worth living, and is the source of many of our greatest joys.
I used to think we should all be aspiring to change the world with the work that we do, if not globally then at least communally.
Now I’m not so sure.
The truth is, we’re not all cut out to change the world, and the pressure to aspire to that level of impact often stunts our ability to create deeply meaningful work on an alternative scale.
Narrower in scope perhaps, but no less important.
While we may not all have the ability to create world-changing work, it’s within all of our reach to create something small in scale that manages to move people in a meaningful way.
When repeated, we can build an entire career on it.
A new take on an old classic, a subtle shift on the familiar. Work that adds to the richness of life. That connects rather than disrupts. That seeks simply to deliver joy, even (maybe especially) if only in the smallest of doses.
We could always use more joy after all.
We can each aspire to be like our favourite band, the one that no one else has ever heard of but will always mean the world to us. Who are inextricably tied to our story and sense of self, even if they never hit it big or gained broader recognition.
We can bake bread, build campfires, and like the cherry (or plum or lilac) blossoms, create work that’s magic lies not in its scope and grandeur, but in its grounded comfort, familiarity, and simplicity.
Not in its ability to change life, but to affirm it and to make it worth living.
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.
What Are You Saying “Yes” To?
It might be an obvious yes.
Or it might be implied – to everyone but you perhaps.
Maybe it’s simply a failure to say no.
Regardless, before long your “yeses” will ensnare you if you let them.
Crowding out the work that matters in favour of other people’s priorities.
“No” takes courage. It takes tact. It takes honesty.
It also takes back your time.
In fact, getting good at saying “no” might be the single most transformative skill when it comes to spending your time on the work that only you can do.
Set “no” as your default, and be wooed from that position with care.
Claim your time as your own or have it claimed from you.
Steering Away/Towards
Even when you know where you’re going, the path to your destination can be long and the route to getting there isn’t always clear.
While it might not be possible to regularly live your absolute perfect day this week, month, or year, you can almost certainly take some small action to get yourself closer.
One of the best ways to do this is by defining the tasks, experiences, people, and pursuits to steer away from, and those to steer towards.
Steer Away
The things you steer away from should be those that take you further from your perfect day.
People and tasks that drain your energy, waste your time, or that you simply don’t enjoy. For me, meetings top the list, followed by other people’s deadlines, excessive admin work, and interruptions.
It might not be possible to eliminate the things on this list immediately–maybe never–but by first being aware of what they are, you can then choose to steer as far away as you current situation will allow.
Steer Towards
As you might guess, the people, tasks and circumstances you choose to steer towards are the things you want more of in your life.
They’re the component parts of your perfect day, week or month.
Just as with the things you steer away from, it’s entirely likely that you’ll never 100% arrive at the things you steer towards, but the act of steering towards them helps move you closer to the life you truly want to live and the work you want to be doing.
For me, this list is defined by space.
Time and space to spend observing, thinking, experimenting and creating.
While a big part of my goal is to build up my personal brand as an independent creator, steering into space also plays a big role in my agency.
Within Counterweight, while I have responsibilities to my team and my clients that put some constraints on my time and space, I want to steer myself as far as possible into the tasks and projects that are big-picture, strategic and creative.
In practice, this means hiring and training effectively for the tasks I don’t want to be doing, setting and reinforcing client expectations, being intentional with my schedule, and being mindful of what I say yes to.
Navigating Your Influences
Aside from tasks and commitments, the concept of steering away or towards is incredibly valuable in choosing the influences you allow to guide how you do things.
This might mean steering away from learning from anyone who does a particular type of marketing, or uses specific language in their copy writing.
For me, this often means steering away from anything that looks like a Facebook Ad → Cl*ckfunnels Landing Page → One Time Offer sales funnel.
Instead, lean into your guiding stars, the people and brands who are building businesses, living life, and creating impact in a way that you admire.
For me, this means long-term thinking, slow marketing, building trust through empathy, and striving to create impact beyond the actual product on offer.
Who you choose to steer away from or toward will certainly differ from mine, but much like with your day to day tasks and responsibilities, defining who you want to be more or less like can help you get there faster.
Stay Vigilant
It might feel like the road you’re on is flat and straight, and that without applying pressure to the steering wheel in either direction you’ll continue forward toward your destination at a neutral trajectory. This is not the case, however.
The world is constantly putting pressure on us that more often pulls us closer to the things we don’t want in our lives than the things we do.
If we want to ensure that we’re continually moving toward the lives we want, we need to keep steering toward them every chance we get.
This is a continual process, but one that gets easier over time as choice becomes habit.
While it may seem at the moment that your perfect day is all but unreachable, you’ll be surprised how a few thoughtful, intentional course corrections, the right pressure applied at the right time, can open doors and speed the process to living the life you really want to live.
What Pinky Toes Teach Us About Strong Foundations
When you think about your body as a whole, your pinky toes might not immediately feature as major players.
Of course, they spend most of their time covered up under shoes and socks, not to mention they’re wayyyyyy down about as far away from our eyes as can be while still being part of our body. But it’s more than the distance and the generally obscured nature of their existence that keeps them from our minds.
Unlike our hands and fingers which are so obviously useful, pinky toes feel like they’re just kinda there. We can’t peel bananas or hang from branches with them like chimp cousins (lucky bastards). In fact, they’re so seemingly useless that we might go weeks, maybe even months without ever thinking of them specifically at all. Maybe this moment is the first time you’ve ever given them any proper thought. If so, don’t worry, it’ll be worth it.
The obvious exceptions to our otherwise general disregard for pinky toes, is when we’re breaking in new shoes that are just a little too tight, or when we have the misfortune of ramming one of them into the foot of the couch while euphorically running at full speed to meet the pizza delivery guy who’s just showed up outside the door.
Which is exactly what happened to me on Thursday.
The good news is that the pizza was still delicious, maybe even more so than it would have otherwise been.
The bad news was that by Friday morning, the toe was heavily swollen and had been engulfed in blueish-blackish bruising which had wrapped its way around the entire toe…
As you might imagine, I’ve spent the past few days making up for lost time, and thinking a lot about pinky toes, both my injured specimen, but also the group of them as a whole. Yes, that means yours as well.
In thinking about these toes, it strikes me that there’s a corollary between these often-ignored, under-appreciated digits and certain aspects of the foundation of our creative work, which we might also ignore until they’re inflamed.
Adaptation Isn’t Always Positive
When healthy and functioning properly, pinky toes are easily taken for granted. As soon as one of them is injured, however, it becomes immediately apparent just how important they are, not only to the foot to which they’re attached but the rest of our body as a whole.
Despite having plenty of backup in our four other toes, when we’re unable to put pressure on that one, tiny toe, our entire mechanism of movement is disrupted.
If we can walk at all, it’s with a slow, shaky, tender hobble, rather than our typical strong, confident stride. When we’re forced to adjust our gait, stress is induced on other parts of our body such as our knees, ankles, and backs which must now adapt and work in ways for which they weren’t designed. This might cause subsequent pain in those areas, which, left unchecked may cause us to contort ourselves further still in an attempt to adapt to this new discomfort.
While we can still get around with a broken or malfunctioning toe, we have little hope of moving quickly. We can’t pick up the pace and jog, let alone sprint. We find it difficult to react on the fly, to dodge, or to pivot. And it’s all but impossible to make the plant, push, and landing that’s required when making a big leap.
The disruption extends further, however, beyond simply our ability to move.
Stealing Resources From Elsewhere
Without a useable pinky toe, it becomes difficult to balance, and we might be forced to call on external support. The most intuitive choice for this balance support might be to use our hands to steady ourselves. This approach works, but makes our hands unavailable for the more tasks that only they can perform–peeling bananas and swinging from branches for example.
Still, the disruption caused by a teeny, tiny broken pinky toe extends further, beyond the mechanical effects on our anatomy, and to our mind. Seeking to protect the toe from further harm, we find ourselves distracted, our gaze pulled down to our feet, looking out for the smallest of hazards, instead of upward on the horizon, charting our course and on the lookout for new opportunities.
A Little Leverage In The Right Place
Measured roughly by weight, the few grams of each pinky toe contributes only about 0.001% of our total body mass. And yet, as we can see, their impact on the other 99.999% is significant.
Of course, the impact of this tiny appendage is exaggerated by its position as a part of the foundation upon which the rest of our body relies. But this is exactly the point. While we often think of foundations as big and heavy and solid, they often contain small, seemingly insignificant elements that, when misaligned or broken can cause cascading repercussions that ripple out across the structure as a whole.
The experience with my toe has me wondering what other elements of my foundation I might be disregarding, seeing as nonessential or even entirely useless when in fact they’re causing problems to manifest themselves elsewhere.
Symptoms & Causes
In our bodies, our nervous system does a fantastic job of helping us locate the source of the pain. In our work, lives, and businesses, the source is harder to determine.
Instead of an ache, shooting, or a dull throb, we may experience pain as an inability to maintain a full client pipeline, to gain traction with an audience, or to maintain consistent quality of work. And while these may be frustrating, and even painful experiences, without a central nervous system directing us to the source of the pain, we’re in danger of misattributing it.
We end up chalking the ache in our lower back up to stress and overuse, missing the fact that the backache is caused by the way we’ve altered our gait in order to favour our injured toe, which also happens to be the source of the shooting pains we’re experiencing in our knee.
No matter how many Icy-Hot back patches we apply, or how much Tiger Balm we slather on, the ache in our back persists until the root of the issue is addressed.
In my case, I’m fairly confident that the toe is not broken, and will heal on its own within a week or two. Our bodies have a fantastic way of doing that.
Our work and the rest of our lives, however, do not.
Breaks and misalignments in those systems rarely work themselves out. In fact, they’re more likely to compound with use and time.
Identifying The Source Of The Breakdown
I can’t give any prescriptive advice on how to find and diagnose the breakdowns and misalignments in your own foundation. Each of our foundations is unique after all.
But the starting point, I think, is to re-examine the aches and pains you’re currently experiencing in your life and work and ask yourself, “What if this isn’t an isolated problem? What if this is a symptom of a breakdown elsewhere? What are the parts of my foundation, even the teeniest, tiniest ones that I’m neglecting?”
Because as surely as that 0.001% can disrupt the entire system to which it is connected if misaligned or broken, so too can it streamline, ease, and optimize the system when put back in place.
Give me a shout on Twitter @iamjeremyenns and let me know if you’ve had a similar experience of a tiny part of a system causing massive problems elsewhere. I’d love to connect.
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.
Say Something Small
Don’t feel like you need to say something that changes the world.
Few ever utter such words.
And yet we feel like if we can’t say something profound we’re better off saying nothing at all.
But this is not our only option.
We can aim to simply say something small.
Something intimate.
Something that means a lot to only a few.
Maybe only to one.
There’s power in small sayings spoken to a select few.
Start there.
Get good at speaking small.
It’s not about reaching everyone at once.
It’s about planting a seed that gets spread, person to person, ear to ear.
Further and faster, more intimately and personally than you could do yourself.
All big ideas start as small talk between friends.
Creative Wayfinding For Ambitious Optimists.
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.
Tend Who You’re Becoming
We’re all in a continual process of becoming.
Each day, evolving or devolving a little further into the person we’ll be tomorrow.
The change is exquisitely subtle.
Perhaps better measured on the timescale of glaciers.
But as sure as the glaciers eventually reach and crumble into the sea,
Or shrink and melt to nothing, short of their destination,
Each of us too will reach our end.
Our fate, whether to reach our destined sea, or wither away before,
Rests in the hands of today.
Who we choose to be guides who we will become.
Books, people, ideas, and beliefs embed themselves in us.
Becoming part of us.
Creating us.
And our work.
Which then embeds itself in others.
Who we choose to be, today and forever will always be within our power,
To nudge, guide, nurture,
Or scrap and start again.
Tend who you are becoming.
It’s the only choice that really matters.
The Many Forms of Progress
It’s easy to get caught thinking about progress in only one dimension. An axis along which we can move only forward or backward.
This view has us focus on a limited number of tasks, milestones and goals that are generally accepted to signify “progress”.
While those signals of progress might matter to others, however, if we’re seeking to create something that hasn’t come before, to do work that really matters, we need to take a more nuanced view of what progress really looks like, and how our actions contribute to it.
Progress could mean checking items off your to-do list.
Or adding to it.
It could mean putting in a focused day’s work.
Or taking it off to recharge.
Progress might be filling the pages of your notebook.
Or tearing them out and burning them.
It could be speeding up.
Or slowing down.
Onboarding new clients.
Or offboarding old ones.
Building a team.
Or dismantling it.
Progress could mean sitting still, staring at the blank wall in front of you, allowing yourself to slip into boredom.
Or writing 1000 uninspired words of drivel simply in order to fulfil your daily commitment.
When we’re able to recognize and embrace the many forms of progress, we’re more likely to recognize the progress we’re making, even when it doesn’t feel like it.
This perspective is essential.
Creating anything that matters is a long game. One sure to be filled with long seasons of sowing so we can reap in the future.
The most difficult form of progress to embody might be the patience required when we’ve planted our seeds and are left with nothing to do but wait for the conditions to come about for those seeds to begin to sprout.
In this limbo, progress might simply mean recentering ourselves and waiting for those first shoots to poke their way through the soil.
So that we might be prepared, ready to spring into action when the season for action once again arrives.
With a long enough view, we see that it’s all progress in the end.
And we would do well to remember that.
Eating Through Your Ideas
One of the things my friends make fun of me for most is my love of mandarin oranges.
When it comes to mandarins, my appetite knows no bounds. On a good day, I can eat through 10, 15, even 20 of them and wake up ready to do it again the next day. And the next day. And the next day. And you get the idea…
Yes, I know, eating that many mandarins in a day might seem excessive (it almost certainly is), but there’s reason behind my obsession.
Growing up on the prairies in Canada, mandarins were only available for a few short weeks a year, right around Christmas. They would first hit the shelves sometime around the start of December, and then, almost like clockwork, disappear as soon as the New Year rolled around. To this day, I still refer to them as “Christmas Oranges” more often than their proper name due to the seasonal correlation of my childhood.
This limited availability meant that if you loved mandarins as I did, you had only a short window of opportunity to make the absolute most of that limited availability… and stuff your face accordingly.
For all the things I love about mandarins, however–the ease of peeling, the satisfying feel of how they rest in your hand, and of course the perfectly bite-sized segments bursting with juicy flavour–mandarins have one glaring flaw.
The problem is that they can be wildly inconsistent in quality. What’s more, from the outside, it’s almost impossible to know what type of orange you’re going to get. You can examine them from every angle, pick what you think is the perfect orange, and get home (or out to the parking lot if we’re being honest) to discover that it’s too sour, or dry, or even rotting on the inside.
It struck me this week, as I was at the market sorting through the bin of mandarins, trying to find the absolute best of the bunch, that in this way, mandarins are a lot like ideas.
The challenge with ideas is not so much finding them, but sorting through and choosing the best of the bunch to bite into, based on the limited information available to us from the outside.
Developing Your Discernment
We’d all like to think we can spot the good ideas from the bad, and to some extent, we can.
Even if they don’t taste great, most mandarins will offer you sustenance after all. It’s just a matter of what you have to eat through or around in order to get it.
Ideas, I think, are the same. Most of them could work, at least for someone. The question, then, is not whether an idea is a good one, but whether it’s the best one for you to bite into at this moment.
Unlike mandarins, however, where I’ve proven it’s possible to eat through 20 or more in a day, developing an idea to the point where it brings us some kind of return is a long-term commitment. We might, even, only be able to fully devote ourselves to one single idea at a time.
This means that we have to be incredibly selective with the ideas we commit to in the first place.
This means expanding our selection criteria beyond simply “Is this a good idea?” or “Could this idea work?” and probe deeper, asking questions like, “Is this a good idea for me, right now?” and “Is this the type of idea I want to eat through, and if so, how long will it take to reach the other side?”
This requires a level of discernment that takes work to acquire.
Even Fantastic Ideas Can Be Wrong
I was recently looking into expanding our service offerings at Counterweight Creative to include a much more in-depth podcast production and management support package. It’s an offer I know would appeal to a higher level of client than we currently serve, there are other companies successfully selling similar offerings, and I know exactly how I would set it up and pitch it.
From the outside, it sounded like a home run of an idea. In fact I spent many weeks so excited about it that I would frequently wake up in the middle of the night to write down new ideas and flesh it out further.
But then I started to peel back the skin of the idea and take a closer look.
As I pulled back the outer layer, I realized that building out this package wasn’t quite so simple as I imagined it would be. I would need to hire and train new team members, set up extensive new systems, and would require a large ongoing time-investment from me, probably for a year or two until the team was built out and the system had been tested and perfected.
The idea was clearly doable, and very likely to be profitable, even. It seemed from the outside to be not just a good idea, but a fantastic one. And yet, despite this fact, after looking closer, I realized that this wasn’t the type of idea I wanted to be eating through for the next two years.
Ultimately, I want to spend more time writing and creating, and even though this idea was good, it would take me further away from my true destination.
In this case, I was lucky enough to be working through this process with my girlfriend, Kelly, who facilitates brand strategy discussions like this for her clients, and could guide my interrogation of the idea to push me beyond the shiny, exciting outer layer. But often, it’s not until we bite into the idea and start chewing that we realize we’ve made a mistake.
The good news is that we can improve our idea discernment over time.
Improving Your Discernment One Bite At A Time
When you’re new to the art (yes, art) of mandarins, you’re likely going to get home and discover a mixed bag.
Sure, it’s easy enough to avoid those that are obviously green, fuzzy, and rotten, but although you might pick out a bunch of oranges that are visually appealing, the flavour and consistency are likely to be hit or miss once you peel them open and sink your teeth into them. This inconsistency in selection is likely to persist, at least for a time.
When you’ve eaten as many mandarins as I have, however, somewhere along the line, something, somehow shifts.
Subtle clues begin to present themselves more clearly while you’re in the store picking them out. You notice something, almost on a subconscious level about the texture or the look, or firmness or most likely the combination of all three that differentiates a perfectly sweet and juicy mandarin from an average one.
You might not be able to put into words why this orange is likely to be a good one and that one isn’t, but you’ve developed some internal compass that guides you to the right choice more often than not.
Sure, you’ll still be fooled into picking up the occasional sour, bitter, or dry orange. Sometimes you’ll grab a straight-up lemon. But the more mandarins you eat the better your discernment becomes, and the higher the quality of your average orange.
The better your discernment becomes, the better the quality of oranges you eat, which in turn makes the process of eating them ever more enjoyable.
The same is true for ideas.
As with mandarins, we often have to bite into dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of ideas before we begin to develop the ability to differentiate which ideas are worth biting into in the first place and which are best left for someone else, perhaps someone with completely different taste preferences than us.
It can feel like an onerous task at times, the thought of chewing through a pile of hit-or-miss ideas in order to improve our discernment. I think it’s worth remembering, however, that just because we don’t always know whether an idea will be worth pursuing at the start, it doesn’t mean we won’t learn something new or grow, or enjoy the process, even if we abandon the idea after the first mouthful.
As with mandarins, there’s no reason to eat through the whole idea if the first bite ends up being different than expected. Toss it in the compost heap and bite into the next one. It might take some time to pick the right ones at first but the more you eat, the better your discernment will become.
And besides, I can think of worse ways to pass my time than eating through a pile of mandarins in search of the perfect one.
If you dug this, give me a shout on Twitter @iamjeremyenns and let me know. I’d love to connect 🙂
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.
Unscripted Moments
We all know the best moments are the unscripted.
The ones where we (or perhaps someone we aspire to be more like) breaks the spell of predictability and injects a spark of vitality into our ennui.
It’s a thrill to break script.
Even a small moment of deviation reinvigorates us, a reminder of what it means to be truly alive.
So why do we still spend so much time reading from it?
Why do we find it so difficult to break with how we’re supposed to speak, work, create and live, and instead do what the moment truly needs from us?
There’s almost always more than one right line.
More than one way to say what it is we’re striving to say. To create the change we’re seeking to make.
The script wasn’t written for us, after all.
It was written for someone seeking simply to fill a role.
To play a part that has been played by many who’ve come before, and will be played by many still to come.
At its worst, the script defines and dominates our lives. Producing a drone, that, no matter how lively, energetic, or emotional, will never break new ground.
We might captivate audiences, but we’ll never create real change.
At its best, the script gives us a framework. A tool to build tension, and get us into a position to do something unexpected.
Even magical, perhaps.
A zig at just the right moment, when everyone was expecting a zag.
They’ve seen this play out before, after all.
Breaking script requires courage, confidence, timing, and a keen eye for recognizing an opportunity, when the moment is asking for something more than what is scripted, and then delivering it.
In the end, it’s the unscripted moments that make a performance remarkable.
Find the Equilibrium
Almost everything has a sweet spot.
A point of tension in which opposing forces meet and hold each other in check.
This is where the magic exists.
Input and output create ideas.
Accident and intention produce a novel offering.
Fear and inspiration hone it and brings it to the world.
Experimentation and consistency connect with the ideal audience.
Value and profit sustain a business.
You can find this equilibrium in anything, if you look hard enough.
And indeed, to unlock the potential of your work, you must.
It’s almost always found by first leaning too far in one direction.
By pushing the boundaries, outgrowing your comfort zone,
Then shrinking back, seeking the balance of discomfort and sustainability.
But take care.
Equilibrium is rarely the natural state of things.
Once found, it can be maintained, at least for a while.
Before the time comes, once again to push outward,
Or perhaps, shrink back.
Upsetting the balance and beginning the cycle anew.
The Magic of Mundane Creativity
My absolute favourite smell in the world is the sweet aroma given off every spring by blossoming cherry trees.
Or is it plum trees? Or lilacs?
I’ve spent at least the past decade trying to determine the specific source of the smell and am still no closer to finding the answer.
I’ve crossed highways and hopped fences more times than I can count to bury my nose in the nearest blossoming tree whenever I catch the faintest whiff. And while all I’ve been able to narrow it down(ish) to the three trees mentioned above, none of them is quite right.
My best guess at this point is that it’s actually some mix of all three of these trees, mingling and diffusing to create a magical concoction more enticing than any of them on their own.
For as long as I can remember, this smell has, for me, marked the arrival of spring.
And every year, without fail, it catches me off guard, appearing one day in full force only to disappear just as suddenly a few short weeks later.
I spend those three or so weeks breathing deeper than I do the rest of the year, going for more and longer walks, seeking out that elusive smell, and basking in its ephemeral beauty whenever I stumble across (or hop fences or cross highways to find) it.
A few weeks ago, I got my first whiff of it for this spring.
The Magic Of The Mundane
Part of the appeal–and the mystery–of this smell is its ubiquity, if not temporally, then at least geographically.
It’s one of those smells that is tied inextricably to my memories of childhood on the Canadian prairies, but I’ve since encountered it all over the world.
From my years living in Vancouver to Edinburgh, to Belgrade, to Italy, and more. I hope to one day experience the Sakura bloom in Japan and imagine that perhaps I’ll encounter the same alluring aroma there as well, perhaps at its most fully-realized.
These past weeks, as I’ve been burying my nose in every blossoming tree I can see, this ever-elusive smell I’ve been struck by the immense, eternally-captivating power of the simple, mundane, and familiar, and the opportunities that embracing it presents us as creators.
So often as creators, we convince ourselves that the only things worth creating are immense, profound, and utterly transformative on the people we create them for.
We tell ourselves that for our work to be meaningful it must be broad in scope and deep in depth. That the impact and change are to be measured by marked shifts in our communities and industries if not broader upheaval of the status quo.
It’s true, this is important work to aspire to.
But it’s not the only type of work to aspire to.
And while aiming to create impact at the highest possible level can be inspiring, it can also be debilitating when we begin to sense ourselves incapable of ever living up to the expectations we’ve set of ourselves.
Life-Changing vs Life-Affirming?
Whether or not we contribute to it, the world is already in a state of upheaval.
It’s always continually eating and regurgitating and reinventing itself at a pace that can be exhausting to keep up with, as individual humans as well as communities, networks, societies, and cultures.
We would do well to remember, that in the midst of upheaval, it’s often the small, mundane, and familiar that make the greatest difference and are, in fact, the most necessary.
These things ground us, comfort us, and connect us–to ourselves, to each other, to our collective and personal past and future.
The smell of fresh-cut grass, or fresh-baked bread or coffee brewing as you lie in bed on a Sunday morning.
The soft kiss of sun on skin in early spring, or the caress of a cool breeze at the peak of summer heat.
The sound of rain on the pavement, or thunder rippling across an open plain, or the sea, breaking onto a rocky coastline, or the kettle whistling away on the stove.
A simple, hearty meal with good friends, or sitting around a campfire, whether lost in thought or deep in conversation.
These are rarely life (let alone world)-changing experiences. They’re familiar, mundane, expected. Many of them are within our ability to reach out and engage with at any time.
And yet their power is immense.
Small Contributions Can Be Deeply Meaningful
While we might measure and remember our lives by the life-changing peak experiences and accomplishments, it’s the small, mundane, universal stuff of life in-between that actually makes life worth living, and is the source of many of our greatest joys.
I used to think we should all be aspiring to change the world with the work that we do, if not globally then at least communally.
Now I’m not so sure.
The truth is, we’re not all cut out to change the world, and the pressure to aspire to that level of impact often stunts our ability to create deeply meaningful work on an alternative scale.
Narrower in scope perhaps, but no less important.
While we may not all have the ability to create world-changing work, it’s within all of our reach to create something small in scale that manages to move people in a meaningful way.
When repeated, we can build an entire career on it.
A new take on an old classic, a subtle shift on the familiar. Work that adds to the richness of life. That connects rather than disrupts. That seeks simply to deliver joy, even (maybe especially) if only in the smallest of doses.
We could always use more joy after all.
We can each aspire to be like our favourite band, the one that no one else has ever heard of but will always mean the world to us. Who are inextricably tied to our story and sense of self, even if they never hit it big or gained broader recognition.
We can bake bread, build campfires, and like the cherry (or plum or lilac) blossoms, create work that’s magic lies not in its scope and grandeur, but in its grounded comfort, familiarity, and simplicity.
Not in its ability to change life, but to affirm it and to make it worth living.
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.
What Are You Saying “Yes” To?
It might be an obvious yes.
Or it might be implied – to everyone but you perhaps.
Maybe it’s simply a failure to say no.
Regardless, before long your “yeses” will ensnare you if you let them.
Crowding out the work that matters in favour of other people’s priorities.
“No” takes courage. It takes tact. It takes honesty.
It also takes back your time.
In fact, getting good at saying “no” might be the single most transformative skill when it comes to spending your time on the work that only you can do.
Set “no” as your default, and be wooed from that position with care.
Claim your time as your own or have it claimed from you.
Steering Away/Towards
Even when you know where you’re going, the path to your destination can be long and the route to getting there isn’t always clear.
While it might not be possible to regularly live your absolute perfect day this week, month, or year, you can almost certainly take some small action to get yourself closer.
One of the best ways to do this is by defining the tasks, experiences, people, and pursuits to steer away from, and those to steer towards.
Steer Away
The things you steer away from should be those that take you further from your perfect day.
People and tasks that drain your energy, waste your time, or that you simply don’t enjoy. For me, meetings top the list, followed by other people’s deadlines, excessive admin work, and interruptions.
It might not be possible to eliminate the things on this list immediately–maybe never–but by first being aware of what they are, you can then choose to steer as far away as you current situation will allow.
Steer Towards
As you might guess, the people, tasks and circumstances you choose to steer towards are the things you want more of in your life.
They’re the component parts of your perfect day, week or month.
Just as with the things you steer away from, it’s entirely likely that you’ll never 100% arrive at the things you steer towards, but the act of steering towards them helps move you closer to the life you truly want to live and the work you want to be doing.
For me, this list is defined by space.
Time and space to spend observing, thinking, experimenting and creating.
While a big part of my goal is to build up my personal brand as an independent creator, steering into space also plays a big role in my agency.
Within Counterweight, while I have responsibilities to my team and my clients that put some constraints on my time and space, I want to steer myself as far as possible into the tasks and projects that are big-picture, strategic and creative.
In practice, this means hiring and training effectively for the tasks I don’t want to be doing, setting and reinforcing client expectations, being intentional with my schedule, and being mindful of what I say yes to.
Navigating Your Influences
Aside from tasks and commitments, the concept of steering away or towards is incredibly valuable in choosing the influences you allow to guide how you do things.
This might mean steering away from learning from anyone who does a particular type of marketing, or uses specific language in their copy writing.
For me, this often means steering away from anything that looks like a Facebook Ad → Cl*ckfunnels Landing Page → One Time Offer sales funnel.
Instead, lean into your guiding stars, the people and brands who are building businesses, living life, and creating impact in a way that you admire.
For me, this means long-term thinking, slow marketing, building trust through empathy, and striving to create impact beyond the actual product on offer.
Who you choose to steer away from or toward will certainly differ from mine, but much like with your day to day tasks and responsibilities, defining who you want to be more or less like can help you get there faster.
Stay Vigilant
It might feel like the road you’re on is flat and straight, and that without applying pressure to the steering wheel in either direction you’ll continue forward toward your destination at a neutral trajectory. This is not the case, however.
The world is constantly putting pressure on us that more often pulls us closer to the things we don’t want in our lives than the things we do.
If we want to ensure that we’re continually moving toward the lives we want, we need to keep steering toward them every chance we get.
This is a continual process, but one that gets easier over time as choice becomes habit.
While it may seem at the moment that your perfect day is all but unreachable, you’ll be surprised how a few thoughtful, intentional course corrections, the right pressure applied at the right time, can open doors and speed the process to living the life you really want to live.
What Pinky Toes Teach Us About Strong Foundations
When you think about your body as a whole, your pinky toes might not immediately feature as major players.
Of course, they spend most of their time covered up under shoes and socks, not to mention they’re wayyyyyy down about as far away from our eyes as can be while still being part of our body. But it’s more than the distance and the generally obscured nature of their existence that keeps them from our minds.
Unlike our hands and fingers which are so obviously useful, pinky toes feel like they’re just kinda there. We can’t peel bananas or hang from branches with them like chimp cousins (lucky bastards). In fact, they’re so seemingly useless that we might go weeks, maybe even months without ever thinking of them specifically at all. Maybe this moment is the first time you’ve ever given them any proper thought. If so, don’t worry, it’ll be worth it.
The obvious exceptions to our otherwise general disregard for pinky toes, is when we’re breaking in new shoes that are just a little too tight, or when we have the misfortune of ramming one of them into the foot of the couch while euphorically running at full speed to meet the pizza delivery guy who’s just showed up outside the door.
Which is exactly what happened to me on Thursday.
The good news is that the pizza was still delicious, maybe even more so than it would have otherwise been.
The bad news was that by Friday morning, the toe was heavily swollen and had been engulfed in blueish-blackish bruising which had wrapped its way around the entire toe…
As you might imagine, I’ve spent the past few days making up for lost time, and thinking a lot about pinky toes, both my injured specimen, but also the group of them as a whole. Yes, that means yours as well.
In thinking about these toes, it strikes me that there’s a corollary between these often-ignored, under-appreciated digits and certain aspects of the foundation of our creative work, which we might also ignore until they’re inflamed.
Adaptation Isn’t Always Positive
When healthy and functioning properly, pinky toes are easily taken for granted. As soon as one of them is injured, however, it becomes immediately apparent just how important they are, not only to the foot to which they’re attached but the rest of our body as a whole.
Despite having plenty of backup in our four other toes, when we’re unable to put pressure on that one, tiny toe, our entire mechanism of movement is disrupted.
If we can walk at all, it’s with a slow, shaky, tender hobble, rather than our typical strong, confident stride. When we’re forced to adjust our gait, stress is induced on other parts of our body such as our knees, ankles, and backs which must now adapt and work in ways for which they weren’t designed. This might cause subsequent pain in those areas, which, left unchecked may cause us to contort ourselves further still in an attempt to adapt to this new discomfort.
While we can still get around with a broken or malfunctioning toe, we have little hope of moving quickly. We can’t pick up the pace and jog, let alone sprint. We find it difficult to react on the fly, to dodge, or to pivot. And it’s all but impossible to make the plant, push, and landing that’s required when making a big leap.
The disruption extends further, however, beyond simply our ability to move.
Stealing Resources From Elsewhere
Without a useable pinky toe, it becomes difficult to balance, and we might be forced to call on external support. The most intuitive choice for this balance support might be to use our hands to steady ourselves. This approach works, but makes our hands unavailable for the more tasks that only they can perform–peeling bananas and swinging from branches for example.
Still, the disruption caused by a teeny, tiny broken pinky toe extends further, beyond the mechanical effects on our anatomy, and to our mind. Seeking to protect the toe from further harm, we find ourselves distracted, our gaze pulled down to our feet, looking out for the smallest of hazards, instead of upward on the horizon, charting our course and on the lookout for new opportunities.
A Little Leverage In The Right Place
Measured roughly by weight, the few grams of each pinky toe contributes only about 0.001% of our total body mass. And yet, as we can see, their impact on the other 99.999% is significant.
Of course, the impact of this tiny appendage is exaggerated by its position as a part of the foundation upon which the rest of our body relies. But this is exactly the point. While we often think of foundations as big and heavy and solid, they often contain small, seemingly insignificant elements that, when misaligned or broken can cause cascading repercussions that ripple out across the structure as a whole.
The experience with my toe has me wondering what other elements of my foundation I might be disregarding, seeing as nonessential or even entirely useless when in fact they’re causing problems to manifest themselves elsewhere.
Symptoms & Causes
In our bodies, our nervous system does a fantastic job of helping us locate the source of the pain. In our work, lives, and businesses, the source is harder to determine.
Instead of an ache, shooting, or a dull throb, we may experience pain as an inability to maintain a full client pipeline, to gain traction with an audience, or to maintain consistent quality of work. And while these may be frustrating, and even painful experiences, without a central nervous system directing us to the source of the pain, we’re in danger of misattributing it.
We end up chalking the ache in our lower back up to stress and overuse, missing the fact that the backache is caused by the way we’ve altered our gait in order to favour our injured toe, which also happens to be the source of the shooting pains we’re experiencing in our knee.
No matter how many Icy-Hot back patches we apply, or how much Tiger Balm we slather on, the ache in our back persists until the root of the issue is addressed.
In my case, I’m fairly confident that the toe is not broken, and will heal on its own within a week or two. Our bodies have a fantastic way of doing that.
Our work and the rest of our lives, however, do not.
Breaks and misalignments in those systems rarely work themselves out. In fact, they’re more likely to compound with use and time.
Identifying The Source Of The Breakdown
I can’t give any prescriptive advice on how to find and diagnose the breakdowns and misalignments in your own foundation. Each of our foundations is unique after all.
But the starting point, I think, is to re-examine the aches and pains you’re currently experiencing in your life and work and ask yourself, “What if this isn’t an isolated problem? What if this is a symptom of a breakdown elsewhere? What are the parts of my foundation, even the teeniest, tiniest ones that I’m neglecting?”
Because as surely as that 0.001% can disrupt the entire system to which it is connected if misaligned or broken, so too can it streamline, ease, and optimize the system when put back in place.
Give me a shout on Twitter @iamjeremyenns and let me know if you’ve had a similar experience of a tiny part of a system causing massive problems elsewhere. I’d love to connect.
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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.
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Each week, we explore a different facet of the question “How do we navigate the wilderness of creating work that matters?”
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