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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    Usefulness Begins Where Perfection Ends

    I’ve had my favorite jacket for 6 years.

    It’s lightly insulated, perfect for cool summer mornings and evenings, spring and fall, and—when layered between a wool sweater and waterproof shell—even winter.

    Given its versatility, I’ve worn it almost every day of those six years.

    As you might imagine after that much use, the wear is starting to show.

    Or rather, it started to show several years ago and has continued to spread since.

    While there are (amazingly) no outright holes, there are numerous snags and pulls and the fabric has been roughed up considerably on the back and shoulders where my backpack often sits.

    Most notably, the jacket’s once bright blue finish has faded, in several places, almost entirely obscured by stains left from the dust of several dozen countries.

    My partner, Kelly, despises the jacket.

    She’s begun asking if I would stop wearing it if she bought me a new one.

    But to be honest, I’m not sure I would.

    I only bought this one, after all, after losing my previous jacket, the exact same model which I’d worn into a similar state over the previous 5 years—though that one was black and hid the stains better—until I left it in an AirBnb closet in a small town in Spain.

    Sentimentality and nostalgia certainly play a role in my attachment.

    We’ve been through a lot together, my jacket and me, after all.

    But it’s more than that.

    Because for all the joy in the unmarred perfection of a tool—be it a jacket, computer, vehicle, or, well… pretty much anything else—thosepristine countenances can’t compete with the fearless utility of their battle-worn counterparts.

    In some cases, a well-worn tool becomes even better with age.

    Baseball mitts, proper leather hiking boots, and good cast iron pans, for example, must all be worn in and well-seasoned before their useful life truly begins.

    Most often, however, it’s not a new tool’s inherent properties that keep us from using it to the fullest, but our own psychology around the item.

    When the surface is pristine and untouched, we go out of our way to keep it that way.

    We tip-toe around even the tiniest potential sources of dirt or damage, in many cases even avoiding the tool’s intended use in order to preserve its outward appearance. It feels as though the moment it picks up that first scuff stain, its value will be lost immediately.

    And yet, as someone who owns my tools far longer and wears them far harder than perhaps someone should, I’ve more often found the opposite to be true.

    That the true life of a tool begins at precisely the moment it picks up that first scratch. And that its value only increases from there.

    After the first nick, all bets are off.

    The illusion of perpetual perfection has been shattered and we can now get to using the thing as intended.

    With my jacket, that means pushing through brambles and scrambling along rock faces without the worry of scuffing up the finish getting in the way of enjoying the thrill of the moment.

    This idea applies beyond clothing and manufactured tools, however.

    Almost every hike I’ve ever been on has begun with the naive attempt to keep my hands clean for as long as possible.

    Sooner or later, however, there inevitably comes an obstacle that can only be overcome by scrambling over, under, or around it on all fours.

    With hands now irreversibly muddied, the spell is broken and there’s nothing keeping me from using them wherever they might make things even marginally easier, which, it turns out, is nearly constantly.

    In hindsight, the thought of intentionally limiting your effectiveness in a misguided attempt to keep your hands clean is laughable.

    And yet, we often can’t help ourselves.

    Most inhibiting of all might be the lengths we take to keep our egos pristine and intact.

    But try as we might to preserve a perfect exterior, it’s not until we picked up our first cuts, scrapes, scars, and bruises that our creative lives begin in earnest.

    Once our surface has been marred we realize that there’s no longer any use in avoiding and tip-toeing around the places with the potential to leave us worn, weathered, and damaged.

    Indeed, these are the places we must travel if we’re to uncover and create anything of value.

    In the process, we’re likely to take on significant wear.

    Over the years, our exterior will be worn down to the point that we no longer resemble the people we were when we started.

    This isn’t the end of the world.

    In fact, embracing this reality, and the scrapes and stains that accompany it is the start of it.


    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 wilds of creating work that matters?”

    It’s something I’m proud to create and I’d be honoured to share it with you.


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        How To Gain Clarity Through Grappling With the Problem

        A few years ago, I found myself stuck.

        Over the previous year, I had finally committed to niching my podcast production and marketing agency down into the health and wellness space after years of resisting.

        It was a largely opportunistic decision, as 70% of our clients were in the wellness space, and we routinely received a large number of referrals to other wellness practitioners and experts.

        I figured that by leaning into the niche that I had already been unintentionally assigned, I could speed up the results and without too much effort become the go-to podcast agency for wellness experts.

        It was a solid plan, one that I was (and still am) sure would work given a bit of time and consistent effort.

        But there was one problem.

        I wasn’t sure I really wanted the end result I was working toward.

        One of the reasons it had taken so long for me to niche down in the first place was because, at some level, I already knew this.

        I knew I wanted to shoot for something different, something bigger, something more personal than a niche service business.

        I just didn’t know what.

        And so, after spending four years waiting for clarity to arrive, I decided to try a more active approach on seeking out clarity myself and asked my partner Kelly—who was then working as a brand strategist—if she would walk me through the brand strategy process she used with her clients.

        As it turns out, not only did I walk away with more personal and business clarity than I’d ever had, but I was also given a framework for taking an active approach to grappling with my biggest challenges elsewhere.

        Most Problems Can’t Be Waited Out

        So often, when confronted with a big, sticky, problem, we try to wait it out, hoping that the answers will come to us if we just give them enough time.

        Sometimes we get lucky and they do.

        More often, however, we keep waiting… And waiting… And waiting… All the while, putting up with the daily discomfort of not knowing how to proceed.

        Grappling takes a different approach to dealing with uncertainty.

        Grappling is about taking control of the situation, engaging in hand-to-hand combat with the challenge facing us, and wrestling with it until we find our way over, under, around, or through it.

        It’s hard, sweaty, emotionally draining work. And while it’s almost guaranteed to uncover new solutions and accelerate the time it takes to gain clarity, our first instinct is often to avoid it, and hope the problem will work itself out on its own.

        Why Is Grappling So Hard?

        The first reason is that we don’t believe clarity can be earned through our own labour.

        Instead, we tend to think of it as being bestowed upon us, in a moment of divine inspiration, where the clouds part, the angels sing, and the yellow brick road presents itself in all its clear, unmistakeable glory.

        Secondly, grappling forces us to take a long, hard, deep look at our dreams, desires, and goals… and measure them against our current situation and the choices that have led (and kept) us here.

        Deep down, most of us know that we have (or could acquire) the tools to achieve our biggest dreams.

        We also know, however, that should we find a way to get around the boulder currently blocking our path, we’ve ruled out the biggest excuse for not chasing it wholeheartedly.

        No matter how badly we tell ourselves and others that we want to achieve our goal, the truth is that there’s always some level of comfort in the status quo. Getting past the boulder means we have little choice but to move forward into unknown terrain and unknown challenges beyond it.

        And so we avoid grappling with the problem.

        We sit back, waiting for a clear and obvious sign while simultaneously (secretly) hoping it doesn’t come along and upend the precariously balanced world we’ve created for ourselves.

        Grappling takes a bravery we often feel we lack.

        It takes a willingness to squeeze, and wrestle and shimmy our way past the boulder in our path and risk finding that once we reach the other side, there’s no going back.

        Grappling requires us to step into the unknown with no guarantee that we’re equipped to handle whatever lies beyond our present line of sight.

        The good news is that grappling is a skill that can be learned and improved, and in grappling our way around the first boulder, we improve our chances of getting past whatever unseen challenges lie on the other side of it.

        So if we’re ready to grapple with the problem at hand, where do we begin?

        What Does Grappling Look Like?

        It turns out the tools and techniques for grappling with a problem are familiar.

        Journaling, talking through, or simply focused thinking on the problem will all help.

        The biggest challenges are:

        1. To quit avoiding our challenges and face them head-on, and then…
        2. To embrace these simple tools as having the potential to get us to the other side of even our most vexing problems.

        From there, we can choose to explore any or all of a number of more specific techniques, including future pacing, visualization, and assumption flipping exercises. One of my personal favourites that I took away from my brand strategy process is the 6 Hats Technique.

        It’s worth mentioning that while grappling involves working the problem, actively twisting, contorting, pushing, and pulling on it on an ongoing basis, it also requires a significant amount of empty space and time.

        I find that my own breakthroughs and insights almost always come when I’m unplugged and my brain is disengaged. For me, this is most often when I’m out for a walk, without headphones in, allowing my brain to wander and free associate.

        For you, the activity might differ, maybe soaking in a bath, working out, doodling, or simply sitting and daydreaming.

        Regardless of the activity, in order for the focused, active work of grappling to pay off, we also need to intentionally make space for our subconscious to work its magic, making connections in the background that then bubble up to the surface.

        With that in mind, even active grappling requires a certain amount of patience, waiting for inspiration or clarity to arrive.

        The difference between waiting as part of the process of grappling and simply attempting to avoid or wait the problem out, however, is that heat has been applied, bringing it to a boil, speeding it up, allowing for chemical reactions to take place that otherwise wouldn’t.

        What Are You Grappling With?

        Big or small, I’m guessing there’s some problem you’re currently facing that you’ve pushed to the back of your mind.

        Maybe it feels too big to tackle.

        Maybe you’re scared of what’s on the other side.

        Maybe you’re simply too tired to muster the strength or desire to try.

        Chances are, you have some feeling that whatever lies in wait on other side of this particular boulder is better than where you’re currently stuck.

        If so, my challenge for you is to start grappling with the problem in the smallest way you can.

        Spend five minutes journaling about your current feelings or emotions around the problem.

        What would the perfect end result look like?

        How many bad ideas can you get out of your head and onto paper?

        What are all your assumptions about the problem? What if you flipped them? What would need to be in place for the opposite to be true?

        If you’re really committed, make a habit of it. Dedicate five minutes a day to your grappling and another 30 minutes of unplugged time.

        While it might not happen overnight, you’ll find that if you put in the work and face the problem head on, before long, the answers have a way of presenting themselves.


        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.


          Don’t Find Passion, Build It

          Too often we get stuck, standing at the threshold of starting something new because we’re not sure if we truly have the passion for it.

          We hear again and again to follow our passion. That building a business around the work we do is hard, that our passion is the thing that will keep us going when we’d rather not.

          And so we second guess. We take a step back. We decide that we’re better off waiting for the next idea to come around. Maybe we’ll be sure about our passion for that one.

          As a result, we do nothing. We maintain the status quo, perhaps living a life we’re not truly satisfied with as we sit and wait for our one true passion to reveal itself before we take the leap to pursue something new.

          What if instead of waiting to discover our passion, we decided to create it?

          What if we took one of our ideas and ran with it, stepping over the threshold and committing to putting in the effort to make it work, even if we didn’t yet feel outright passion for it?

          What if we decided to use the work we’ve chosen to do as a frame to build our passion around, like an artificial reef is built around otherwise boring old hunks of concrete.

          It turns out that we can take any business or creative pursuit and choose to approach it in a way that we’re passionate about.

          We can use our frame to apply our personality, our unique worldview, our interests, skills, and beliefs to the work we do.

          The fact is that the passion we stumble upon by chance is often fleeting.

          The passion we choose to build into our work, however, is steady, continual, and evolving with us as we evolve.

          Don’t wait for passion. Build it.


          Confidence Where It Counts

          It’s hard to accomplish much of anything, let alone create work that changes people, without confidence.

          No, not absolute confidence that you’ll 100% that you’ll achieve what you set out to do. You’re probably not aiming high enough if that’s the case.

          Not confidence that your work will get the response you hope for. No one can ever predict that.

          Not arrogance or cockiness or blind confidence in spite of signals telling you to change course or reconsider.

          But confidence in yourself.

          Confidence that whatever happens, you can adapt.

          That you can find the answers you need when you need them.

          That you can persevere.

          That you can remain consistent when the going gets tough.

          Confidence that whatever the world throws at you, you alone remain the master of your mindset, emotions, and response.

          Confidence builds when we set a goal and achieve it.

          When we’ve done something once we know we can do it again.

          Which presents a catch-22.

          How can we have confidence in completing a journey we’ve never taken before?

          It turns out that if we practice building confidence around the small things, we can be confident in tackling the big things.

          When we’re confident that we can adapt, learn, persevere, and remain in control of our outlook and response in the face of adversity, we can be confident that we can tackle even the most daunting of tasks.

          These are the component parts of confidence.

          Confidence where it counts.

          And the opportunities to build it in small ways are all around us should we choose to seek them out.


          What Really Matters To Your Clients?

          This question, answered honestly provides the roadmap for what you should be working on in your business.

          More often than not, when faced with the answer to the question, we realize that what we’re actually working on doesn’t matter all that much to our clients.

          Deep down, we already knew this.

          But working on something that doesn’t have the potential to change things is a convenient place to hide while keeping up the appearance of being busy and maintaining the status quo.

          Tinkering with the things that matter to our clients puts us under their scrutiny, and opens us up to self-doubt.

          “What if I put in the effort and things are no better than before?

          “What if I break the entire system by messing with it?”

          “What if I inadvertently make things worse?”

          “What if I make things so good that there’s a flood of new, high-ticket clients with high-ticket expectations that I can’t live up to?”

          If we want to improve, however, to create work that has the greatest impact on the people we serve, sooner or later we need to get clear on what really matters to them.

          What matters so much that they would pay twice what you’re currently charging?

          What matters so much that they would invest more of their own time and effort to solve the problem?

          What matters so much that they would put up with shortcomings elsewhere so long as these desires were being fulfilled?

          What matters so much that the status quo isn’t enough?

          Chances are, there are only a handful of things that matter this much to your clients.

          Two of them are probably saving them time and earning (or saving) them money.

          These are scary problems to address because of their obvious measurability.

          If we commit to improving the results we achieve and fall short, we have nowhere to hide.

          But if we do get it right?

          If we focus our effort on solving the problems that really matter for our clients, and improving on them consistently, we join a very select group of businesses who genuinely have their customers’ interests as their North Star.

          That’s not to say the other stuff doesn’t matter. It does.

          But chances are you’ve been tinkering there in the background long enough.

          It’s time to take on the big stuff.

          And with it, become truly indispensable.


          Stick With the Idea

          Despite what we might like to believe, most great ideas don’t emerge from singular flashes of insight, inspiration, or brilliance.

          It’s rare for the lightbulb to turn on above our heads, to be struck by a lightning bolt of clarity, or for the clouds to part and the profound truths of the universe to be revealed.

          Most great ideas emerge over time, through a continual process of exploration and excavation.

          At first glance, they might not look like much. Barely worth a second look.

          But If the answers we seek were obvious someone else would have found them already.

          The fact is that we all have dozens, maybe hundreds of thoughts every day that could lead to something deeper.

          Most often, we dismiss them.

          If we want to uncover and develop new ideas and create change with the work we do, we need to train our eyes, develop our patience, and focus our curiosity.

          The best way to create work that matters is not to wait for the rare flashes of inspiration from the heavens.

          Instead, it’s to keep our eyes trained on the ground in front of us.

          On the mundane. On the dull. On the relatable.

          Looking for the slightest glimmer of potential.

          And when those dirty, common, dull ideas present themselves, we need to stick with them for just a moment.

          Rather than pass them by, we need to pick them up, turn them over in our hands, dust them off and inspect them from every angle.

          Many will be worthless.

          But many won’t.

          It takes effort, persistence, and rigor to expose a dull idea’s shiny potential.

          But it’s a process that is available and waiting for us if we choose to do the work.


          How To Flip The Script On Time-Scarcity

          At the root of so much of our anxiety as creators is our relationship with time.

          So often, we feel constrained, even oppressed by our perceived lack of time in relation to the scope of goals we want to achieve.

          As a result, we end up heaping pressure on ourselves to work more, faster, harder, optimizing every minute of every day in order to keep up with the competition and maintain the blistering schedule we’ve set for ourselves.

          Apart from not being conducive to leading a happy, fulfilling life, this relationship with time also keeps us from creating the quality and depth of work we’re truly capable of.

          But what if all our ideas around the limited amount of time we have to get ahead and make an impact weren’t just unhelpful, but flat out wrong? Backward even?

          What if instead of viewing time as a restrictive enemy to fight against, we could view it as a benevolent ally to work with?

          Said differently, what would it take to feel that time was actually on our side?

          I know it sounds radical, given our bias towards scarcity thinking. But the reframe is simpler than you might think.

          At it’s core, it comes down to addressing two mindset issues that are both within our control to change: Misaligned expectations and the comparison game.

          Recalibrating Our Expectations Around Time

          We most commonly think about our relationship with time in the urgent context of our day-to-day lives.

          The topic of time calls to mind tasks and projects with pressing due dates, appointments and events to rush to, and meetings slotted into our schedules like Tetris pieces.

          From this short-term perspective, it’s hard to view time as anything but an onerous constraint. At best to be negotiated with and worked within, at worst to be pushed against and fought with.

          As we shift our perspective from the short to long-term view, however, we begin to see time from a different perspective. Not as a narrow constraint, but as an open expanse, full of opportunity and possibility.

          Sure, our calendars are overbooked now, but look even just a month or two into the future, let alone a year or two, and a blank canvas presents itself, ready and waiting for us to pick up the brush and start to paint.

          Our challenge then, is to be mindful of both views of time, the narrow and the expansive, and shape our experience of each of them intentionally.

          This intentional crafting of our schedule requires an awareness of two categories of tasks and projects.

          Conduits & Blockades

          First, we need to recognize the tasks and projects that–while important (maybe even essential) to our long term creative success–routinely get pushed off in favour of more urgent short term tasks.

          I like to think of these projects as Conduits as a reminder to myself that these are the things that will move me closer to my creative potential.

          For time to work in our favour, Conduits require us to actively schedule them into our calendars and protect their space fiercely.

          As you’re likely aware, however, Conduits are difficult to keep clear.

          The reason, is Blockades.

          Blockades are the urgent-feeling types of tasks, projects, and requests of our time that routinely infringe on, eat away at, block out entirely our Conduits.

          Blockades are closely tied to our feeling of time scarcity, and while we might think of them as specific requests of our time (meetings and emails come immediately to mind), what makes a task, project or deadline a Blockade is not the task itself, but our response to it.

          Many potential Blockades are made up of tasks that are necessary to running and progressing our creative businesses.

          What’s not necessary, however, is our tendency to automatically insert them in the path of our Conduits.

          In most cases, that meeting request could be scheduled for next week, or the week after, or a month from now rather than squarely in the middle of the one two hour block of time you have available tomorrow.

          Similarly, most client projects could easily have an extra two weeks added on to the scope without any pushback.

          If we want time to work for us, rather than against us, we need to take a more active role in shaping how our time is used.

          In some ways, taking active control over the time we have available to us is the easy part.

          It’s cause and effect. We take an action and see a result.

          The murkier, more difficult side of making time our ally is avoiding the pull of being influenced by how those around us are using their time and trusting our own processes and intuition.

          How The Comparison Game Influences Your Relationship With Time

          It’s difficult enough to maintain control of our relationship with time in a vacuum.

          It’s almost impossible to keep up the discipline, however, with every one of our competitor’s websites and social media accounts never more than three seconds away.

          While checking in on our competitor’s latest case study, big client achievement or social media post might be the most anxiety-inducing variety, the comparison game extends beyond our direct competitors.

          Chance’s are, we’re surrounded by collaborators, accountability partners, and a network of other creators and business owners doing similar work to ours. Maybe they’ve just run an amazing 5-day challenge, maybe they’re gaining traction on TikTok, or maybe the YouTube channel they started 6 months ago just hit 100k subscribers.

          We don’t have to look far to find someone already achieving the results we’ve dreamed of for ourselves… probably in less time.

          When we see someone else achieving our goals, our time-anxiety is triggered, prompting us to tear up our new, more spacious, long-term focused schedule and fill it up with short-term, shiny object, hustle-focused work in an attempt to replicate the success of someone else.

          The irony is that the people we compare ourselves to (and even compete with) are rarely working towards the same end goals we are. What’s more, they’re working with different skills, experiences, values, and perspectives.

          Is it any wonder then that we rarely get the same results when trying to emulate someone else’s results?

          Eliminating the Negative Influence of Competition & Comparison

          When it comes to removing the potential source of such a trigger, the most obvious option is to limit our time on social media, unfollow negative influences, and make a rule to never, EVER go down the rabbit hole of poring over our competitor’s accounts.

          All of these are likely healthy choices.

          But when it comes to creating a relationship with time where we truly feel that it’s on our side, working for us instead of against us, avoidance is simply a bandaid solution.

          We can do better than that.

          In my experience, when we feel the pressure to keep up with the Joneses, it’s because we’re working towards similar–if not identical–goals.

          But much like our view of time shifts from enemy to ally as we move our perspective from the short to the long term view, our view of goals, milestones, and competition does as well.

          Reframing Your Relationship With Competition

          In the short term, we’re most often working toward crystal clear, hard and fast goals.

          Landing a certain number of new clients, hitting a specific revenue target, enrolling a target number of students for our course, increasing our traffic or follower or subscriber counts are all common milestones we might be working towards.

          These goals, while clear and easily measured are also–for those very same reasons–ripe for comparison to–if not in direct competition with–others.

          Maybe it’s the zero-sum competition of vying over the same client, a general competition for attention, or simply the urge to measure and judge our progress (if not outright worth) against others operating in entirely different niches.

          The problem is that in focusing primarily on these goals and metrics it’s easy to step onto the hedonic treadmill and become hooked. Before long, chasing ever larger numbers becomes our goal in and of itself.

          Without stopping to ask what it’s all for, we can become consumed by the competition and the chase.

          Our perspective shifts, however, as we take a longer view of things.

          Competition Ceases To Exist In The Long Run

          When we zoom out to the long view, specific metrics and milestones recede into the background or disappear entirely.

          With them, so does the idea of competition & comparison.

          It’s impossible to say who we would feel pressure to compete or keep up with 10, 20, or 30 years from now, and have no baseline from which to set any measurable goals.

          If you’re like me, zooming out might spark the realization that 20 years from now, your goal is to have worked yourself to a place that is naturally without competition. That you’ll have developed your voice, perspective, and your work to a place where it is entirely singular.

          That’s not to say everyone will want or like your work, most people won’t. But for the people who do, you’ll be the only one they can get it from.

          While developing a singular voice over a time-span of multiple decades is certainly not as easy a goal to work towards as getting 10K Instagram subscribers, it’s a much more valuable one.

          Perhaps most importantly, it establishes your magnetic North, the point from which all of your interim goals, projects, and actions are referenced and working towards.

          Competition & Comparison Are Matters Of Perspective

          Beyond giving you a valuable reference point for your short term actions, clarity around the type of work and life you’re working toward can also radically reframe your relationship with time, as well as the creators around you, even your direct competitors.

          Take the following charts of the trajectories of both us, and the creators around us.

          caption for image

          When we zoom in to the shortest-term view, the space feels impossibly crowded, as though everyone is jostling against each other, competing for the same limited resources and attention.

          Zoom out, however, and we can see that given enough time, each of us is moving towards a space in which we’re the only occupant, the creator of singular work that can’t be found anywhere else.

          Viewed this way, our perception of both time and competition shift.

          It becomes clear that given enough time, (as long as we’re not actively copying someone else) if we stick to our process, it’s entirely inevitable that we’ll end up in a space that we can own for ourselves.

          Once again, the further we look ahead, the more time appears a welcoming expanse to lean into, rather than a constraint to be pushed back against.

          And while you might not be able to simply quit the short term jostling and jump into creating singular work, you can certainly accelerate your progress.

          Sprint To The Open Space

          The first step is to choose to opt-out of short-term competitions defined as important by other people without clarity on exactly how they serve your long-term vision.

          Gaining followers might feel both urgent and important now, but how do those followers fit into your 20-year vision?

          Second, remember that the thing that creates singular work is a unique perspective and voice.

          While this can’t be developed overnight, there are a couple of things you can do on a regular basis over the short-term to get there.

          1. Diversify Your Inputs

          It’s hard to develop a unique voice and perspective when you’re consuming all the same base material as everyone else around you.

          Push yourself to seek out information and inspiration from a diversity of sources. Find business and creative inspiration from non-business or creative sources. Watch foreign movies, read fiction and literature, follow your curiosity instead of top-10 lists and recommendations from others.

          When you have a specific skill or tool you need to learn quickly, binge deeply on that and return to your habit of broad content consumption.

          Then, get creating.

          2. Create, Publish, Repeat

          The chart above applies equally to your voice. At the start, you’re going to sound a lot like everyone else, making you a commodity, one among many competing for the same attention.

          You want to get out of this zone as quickly as possible, and the fastest way to do that is to create. A lot.

          Work the generic content out of your system by publishing consistently.

          Good or bad doesn’t apply right now, most of it will almost certainly be bad, at least compared to what you’ll be creating a year from now, or five or ten or twenty years from now.

          Again, we see how, with a solid process in place, time is in fact on our side, our work improving, and our voice and perspective becoming more unique with the passage of time.

          You Control Your Experience Of Time & Scarcity

          While not easy, we each have the ability to recalibrate our relationship with time – from viewing it as an enemy and constraint to being our greatest ally and opportunity.

          While we don’t need (and can’t possibly) have a crystal-clear picture of where we want to be decades from now, it helps to regularly zoom out and think in longer time frames than we’re accustomed to.

          Starting from a long-term perspective, we’re able to adopt short term strategies that align our goals, actions, and even day to day scheduling with our defined magnetic North.

          And while keeping your compass needle pointed in the right direction is certainly valuable, so is the impact this type of long-term-first thinking has on your day to day experience.

          Less stress, less scarcity, more space, and the comfort of knowing that you’re walking a path in which, as long as you keep putting one foot in front of the either, time is on your side.


          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.


            Doing More Is Keeping You Stuck

            As creators, we face an incredible pressure for more.

            To do more.

            To learn more.

            To create more.

            To increase our input.

            To increase our output.

            Much of this pressure is inflicted on us by the outside world.

            Our culture glorifies the hustler, working themselves to the bone in pursuit of a dream.

            It’s a seductive ideal, at least at first.

            And in chasing it, we choose to accept and adopt the pressure and accouterments that come with it.

            But if we’re truly honest with ourselves, most of the pressure we face is that we heap onto ourselves.

            And so we chase every new tool. Every new trend. Every new strategy.

            With each addition to our toolset, we’re certain that this will be the thing that helps us achieve our great breakthrough.

            At least until the Next Big Thing comes along.

            And so the treadmill continues.

            Never sticking with any one thing long enough to develop mastery.

            But what if the answer to building real momentum wasn’t about adding more?

            What if the secret to real progress was not asking “What can I add?” but “What can I subtract?”

            What if by eliminating all but the essential, we freed up the time, space, and focus to truly master the few things that matter?

            It’s hard to believe that the energy we’re currently scattering across dozens of different ideas, strategies, and tools wouldn’t be more effective when applied to only a chosen few.

            No matter how hard you run, it’s impossible to build momentum when you’re on a treadmill.

            So when you next ask yourself what you can subtract, start with the treadmill itself.


            Getting To the Best Solution

            When looking to solve a problem, we often take the first idea that strikes us and run with it.

            Maybe the burst of inspiration it was delivered in convinces us that it’s the best option available.

            Maybe we’re in such a rush to solve the problem that the convenience is too much to ignore.

            The fact is, however, that the first idea that comes to mind is rarely the best one.

            It might be a duct tape solution to the problem at hand.

            It might solve one problem, but create others in the process.

            Or it might simply be inelegant.

            The first solution that comes to mind is always best viewed as a starting point.

            A jumping-off point for both broader and deeper exploration.

            The best solution takes work to uncover in the first place and then iteration over time to hone and perfect.

            But when we get it right, it performs better than we could have imagined.

            We sell ourselves short when we take the first solution that comes to us, no matter how convenient or inspired it may at first seem.


            Component Parts

            If you look closely, you’ll find that every complex task is made up of a handful of component parts.

            Taken whole, the task ahead of you might seem impossible, and you might spend weeks, months, or years stalling as you try to decide which chunk of the elephant to bite off first.

            As you zoom in, however, you begin to make out the smaller, more approachable pieces that make up the whole.

            The amorphous task of marketing, for example, could be broken down into the following component parts:

            1. Audience Identification
            2. Research
            3. Exposure
            4. Connection
            5. Trust

            When staring down the daunting task of figuring out how to market the work you do, you might initially draw a blank.

            But break it down into a series of sub-tasks and a plan begins to come into view.

            From our initial marketing breakdown, we can zoom in closer, and the plan becomes even clearer.

            1. Audience identification
              1. Decide who you want to work with
              2. Where do your skills and interests overlap with a market need?
            2. Research
              1. Talk to your target audience
              2. Hang out in Facebook groups
              3. Read Quora or Reddit posts
            3. Exposure
              1. Buy attention
                1. Ads
              2. Borrow attention
                1. Podcast guesting
                2. Collaborating with other creators or businesses
                3. Guest blogging
            4. Connection
              1. Speak to your intended audience in a way that addresses their current situation, goals, and challenges.
              2. Embrace the parts of yourself that make you unique.
              3. Develop your personal point of view and perspective.
            5. Trust
              1. Nurture your audience with your own pillar content
                1. Podcast
                2. Blog posts
                3. Newsletter
                4. Youtube
                5. Social media

            Of course, we could still break down each of these sub-tasks and sub-sub-tasks further still in order to understand how to approach each of them effectively.

            The big picture view is essential for establishing your vision and plotting your course.

            But if you’re feeling overwhelmed, confused, or intimidated by the scale of the work ahead of you, it’s worth zooming in to the point where the micro-tasks feel manageable.


            Building Human Brands

            There’s a lot of talk about building human brands these days.

            The fact that this is buzzworthy demonstrates how far marketing has strayed from its core purpose.

            To connect.

            No matter the work we do, sooner or later, the goal is to get it into the hands of another human and impact them.

            The path to getting there is through connection.

            If that’s our goal, we waste our time learning about and obsessing over the latest marketing hacks, software tools, and shiny objects du jour.

            If we want to build deeply human brands, that connect with our audiences and evoke deep emotion, maybe we should spend more time studying what it means to be human.

            Art.

            Poetry.

            Mythology.

            Philosophy.

            Neuroscience.

            Psychology

            Meditation.

            Yoga.

            If we want to connect with humans deeply we need to understand humans deeply.

            Luckily for us, we have thousands of years of content on which to base our discovery.

            The core of what drives us hasn’t changed that much in that time.

            It turns out that in order to build a more deeply human brand we need to more deeply explore what it means to be human ourselves.

            Think deeply

            Study deeply.

            Connect deeply.


            Creative Wayfinding For Ambitious Optimists.

            What’s Worth Talking About?

            Any business or creative endeavor that grows does so because people talk about it.

            Which means there needs to be some aspect of your work that is worth talking about.

            The challenge is that things worth talking about are those aspects of your work that exceed existing expectations.

            Delivering high-quality work on schedule and on budget isn’t going to cut it.

            That’s expected.

            In fact, getting people talking about your work itself might be the very hardest way to get them talking of all.

            Anyone engaging with you has already set their expectations based on your existing body of work.

            The bar has been set. And while you’re likely capable of meeting, and even exceeding that bar, at least a bit, that’s not enough.

            Work that is truly worth talking about is extraordinary. Transcendent. Expectation-defying.

            Sure, it’s possible, but few manage to get there once, let along consistently.

            Luckily, there are other ways to get people talking.

            While the work itself might be the most obvious element of what you deliver – it is, after all, what people are paying for, in either money or attention – it’s not the only element.

            Perhaps equally as important as your defined deliverables is the experience people have when they engage with you.

            This experience is made up of your process, your organization, your ability to communicate.

            Maybe most important of all, it’s your ability to make people feel seen, heard, and understood.

            This experience isn’t easy to create.

            It’s not an item to be checked off your to-do list once, but an ongoing process that requires continual time, attention, and effort.

            But while expectations may be high for your work itself, expectations about the experience of engaging with you are often low or non-existent.

            Which makes it much easier to create an experience worth talking about.

            You might tell anyone who will listen about your favourite podcast, even if they’re not interested in the topic itself.

            It’s not the information on the show that gets you talking, however.

            More likely, it’s the experience, and the community the host creates for and with her listeners.

            Similarly, you might gush about a web design agency long before your new website is even finished if the process and experience are worth talking about.

            Zappos is legendary for growing not because of its product – shoes that could be found at any number of outlets – but because of its customer service.

            That service defied expectations of what shopping on an online marketplace could be like and as a result, was worth talking about.

            Your work still needs to deliver. That’s a non-negotiable.

            But it’s also just the foundation.

            Which means you need to decide, if not your work itself, what’s worth talking about?


            How To Gain Clarity Through Grappling With the Problem

            A few years ago, I found myself stuck.

            Over the previous year, I had finally committed to niching my podcast production and marketing agency down into the health and wellness space after years of resisting.

            It was a largely opportunistic decision, as 70% of our clients were in the wellness space, and we routinely received a large number of referrals to other wellness practitioners and experts.

            I figured that by leaning into the niche that I had already been unintentionally assigned, I could speed up the results and without too much effort become the go-to podcast agency for wellness experts.

            It was a solid plan, one that I was (and still am) sure would work given a bit of time and consistent effort.

            But there was one problem.

            I wasn’t sure I really wanted the end result I was working toward.

            One of the reasons it had taken so long for me to niche down in the first place was because, at some level, I already knew this.

            I knew I wanted to shoot for something different, something bigger, something more personal than a niche service business.

            I just didn’t know what.

            And so, after spending four years waiting for clarity to arrive, I decided to try a more active approach on seeking out clarity myself and asked my partner Kelly—who was then working as a brand strategist—if she would walk me through the brand strategy process she used with her clients.

            As it turns out, not only did I walk away with more personal and business clarity than I’d ever had, but I was also given a framework for taking an active approach to grappling with my biggest challenges elsewhere.

            Most Problems Can’t Be Waited Out

            So often, when confronted with a big, sticky, problem, we try to wait it out, hoping that the answers will come to us if we just give them enough time.

            Sometimes we get lucky and they do.

            More often, however, we keep waiting… And waiting… And waiting… All the while, putting up with the daily discomfort of not knowing how to proceed.

            Grappling takes a different approach to dealing with uncertainty.

            Grappling is about taking control of the situation, engaging in hand-to-hand combat with the challenge facing us, and wrestling with it until we find our way over, under, around, or through it.

            It’s hard, sweaty, emotionally draining work. And while it’s almost guaranteed to uncover new solutions and accelerate the time it takes to gain clarity, our first instinct is often to avoid it, and hope the problem will work itself out on its own.

            Why Is Grappling So Hard?

            The first reason is that we don’t believe clarity can be earned through our own labour.

            Instead, we tend to think of it as being bestowed upon us, in a moment of divine inspiration, where the clouds part, the angels sing, and the yellow brick road presents itself in all its clear, unmistakeable glory.

            Secondly, grappling forces us to take a long, hard, deep look at our dreams, desires, and goals… and measure them against our current situation and the choices that have led (and kept) us here.

            Deep down, most of us know that we have (or could acquire) the tools to achieve our biggest dreams.

            We also know, however, that should we find a way to get around the boulder currently blocking our path, we’ve ruled out the biggest excuse for not chasing it wholeheartedly.

            No matter how badly we tell ourselves and others that we want to achieve our goal, the truth is that there’s always some level of comfort in the status quo. Getting past the boulder means we have little choice but to move forward into unknown terrain and unknown challenges beyond it.

            And so we avoid grappling with the problem.

            We sit back, waiting for a clear and obvious sign while simultaneously (secretly) hoping it doesn’t come along and upend the precariously balanced world we’ve created for ourselves.

            Grappling takes a bravery we often feel we lack.

            It takes a willingness to squeeze, and wrestle and shimmy our way past the boulder in our path and risk finding that once we reach the other side, there’s no going back.

            Grappling requires us to step into the unknown with no guarantee that we’re equipped to handle whatever lies beyond our present line of sight.

            The good news is that grappling is a skill that can be learned and improved, and in grappling our way around the first boulder, we improve our chances of getting past whatever unseen challenges lie on the other side of it.

            So if we’re ready to grapple with the problem at hand, where do we begin?

            What Does Grappling Look Like?

            It turns out the tools and techniques for grappling with a problem are familiar.

            Journaling, talking through, or simply focused thinking on the problem will all help.

            The biggest challenges are:

            1. To quit avoiding our challenges and face them head-on, and then…
            2. To embrace these simple tools as having the potential to get us to the other side of even our most vexing problems.

            From there, we can choose to explore any or all of a number of more specific techniques, including future pacing, visualization, and assumption flipping exercises. One of my personal favourites that I took away from my brand strategy process is the 6 Hats Technique.

            It’s worth mentioning that while grappling involves working the problem, actively twisting, contorting, pushing, and pulling on it on an ongoing basis, it also requires a significant amount of empty space and time.

            I find that my own breakthroughs and insights almost always come when I’m unplugged and my brain is disengaged. For me, this is most often when I’m out for a walk, without headphones in, allowing my brain to wander and free associate.

            For you, the activity might differ, maybe soaking in a bath, working out, doodling, or simply sitting and daydreaming.

            Regardless of the activity, in order for the focused, active work of grappling to pay off, we also need to intentionally make space for our subconscious to work its magic, making connections in the background that then bubble up to the surface.

            With that in mind, even active grappling requires a certain amount of patience, waiting for inspiration or clarity to arrive.

            The difference between waiting as part of the process of grappling and simply attempting to avoid or wait the problem out, however, is that heat has been applied, bringing it to a boil, speeding it up, allowing for chemical reactions to take place that otherwise wouldn’t.

            What Are You Grappling With?

            Big or small, I’m guessing there’s some problem you’re currently facing that you’ve pushed to the back of your mind.

            Maybe it feels too big to tackle.

            Maybe you’re scared of what’s on the other side.

            Maybe you’re simply too tired to muster the strength or desire to try.

            Chances are, you have some feeling that whatever lies in wait on other side of this particular boulder is better than where you’re currently stuck.

            If so, my challenge for you is to start grappling with the problem in the smallest way you can.

            Spend five minutes journaling about your current feelings or emotions around the problem.

            What would the perfect end result look like?

            How many bad ideas can you get out of your head and onto paper?

            What are all your assumptions about the problem? What if you flipped them? What would need to be in place for the opposite to be true?

            If you’re really committed, make a habit of it. Dedicate five minutes a day to your grappling and another 30 minutes of unplugged time.

            While it might not happen overnight, you’ll find that if you put in the work and face the problem head on, before long, the answers have a way of presenting themselves.


            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.


              Don’t Find Passion, Build It

              Too often we get stuck, standing at the threshold of starting something new because we’re not sure if we truly have the passion for it.

              We hear again and again to follow our passion. That building a business around the work we do is hard, that our passion is the thing that will keep us going when we’d rather not.

              And so we second guess. We take a step back. We decide that we’re better off waiting for the next idea to come around. Maybe we’ll be sure about our passion for that one.

              As a result, we do nothing. We maintain the status quo, perhaps living a life we’re not truly satisfied with as we sit and wait for our one true passion to reveal itself before we take the leap to pursue something new.

              What if instead of waiting to discover our passion, we decided to create it?

              What if we took one of our ideas and ran with it, stepping over the threshold and committing to putting in the effort to make it work, even if we didn’t yet feel outright passion for it?

              What if we decided to use the work we’ve chosen to do as a frame to build our passion around, like an artificial reef is built around otherwise boring old hunks of concrete.

              It turns out that we can take any business or creative pursuit and choose to approach it in a way that we’re passionate about.

              We can use our frame to apply our personality, our unique worldview, our interests, skills, and beliefs to the work we do.

              The fact is that the passion we stumble upon by chance is often fleeting.

              The passion we choose to build into our work, however, is steady, continual, and evolving with us as we evolve.

              Don’t wait for passion. Build it.


              Confidence Where It Counts

              It’s hard to accomplish much of anything, let alone create work that changes people, without confidence.

              No, not absolute confidence that you’ll 100% that you’ll achieve what you set out to do. You’re probably not aiming high enough if that’s the case.

              Not confidence that your work will get the response you hope for. No one can ever predict that.

              Not arrogance or cockiness or blind confidence in spite of signals telling you to change course or reconsider.

              But confidence in yourself.

              Confidence that whatever happens, you can adapt.

              That you can find the answers you need when you need them.

              That you can persevere.

              That you can remain consistent when the going gets tough.

              Confidence that whatever the world throws at you, you alone remain the master of your mindset, emotions, and response.

              Confidence builds when we set a goal and achieve it.

              When we’ve done something once we know we can do it again.

              Which presents a catch-22.

              How can we have confidence in completing a journey we’ve never taken before?

              It turns out that if we practice building confidence around the small things, we can be confident in tackling the big things.

              When we’re confident that we can adapt, learn, persevere, and remain in control of our outlook and response in the face of adversity, we can be confident that we can tackle even the most daunting of tasks.

              These are the component parts of confidence.

              Confidence where it counts.

              And the opportunities to build it in small ways are all around us should we choose to seek them out.


              What Really Matters To Your Clients?

              This question, answered honestly provides the roadmap for what you should be working on in your business.

              More often than not, when faced with the answer to the question, we realize that what we’re actually working on doesn’t matter all that much to our clients.

              Deep down, we already knew this.

              But working on something that doesn’t have the potential to change things is a convenient place to hide while keeping up the appearance of being busy and maintaining the status quo.

              Tinkering with the things that matter to our clients puts us under their scrutiny, and opens us up to self-doubt.

              “What if I put in the effort and things are no better than before?

              “What if I break the entire system by messing with it?”

              “What if I inadvertently make things worse?”

              “What if I make things so good that there’s a flood of new, high-ticket clients with high-ticket expectations that I can’t live up to?”

              If we want to improve, however, to create work that has the greatest impact on the people we serve, sooner or later we need to get clear on what really matters to them.

              What matters so much that they would pay twice what you’re currently charging?

              What matters so much that they would invest more of their own time and effort to solve the problem?

              What matters so much that they would put up with shortcomings elsewhere so long as these desires were being fulfilled?

              What matters so much that the status quo isn’t enough?

              Chances are, there are only a handful of things that matter this much to your clients.

              Two of them are probably saving them time and earning (or saving) them money.

              These are scary problems to address because of their obvious measurability.

              If we commit to improving the results we achieve and fall short, we have nowhere to hide.

              But if we do get it right?

              If we focus our effort on solving the problems that really matter for our clients, and improving on them consistently, we join a very select group of businesses who genuinely have their customers’ interests as their North Star.

              That’s not to say the other stuff doesn’t matter. It does.

              But chances are you’ve been tinkering there in the background long enough.

              It’s time to take on the big stuff.

              And with it, become truly indispensable.


              Stick With the Idea

              Despite what we might like to believe, most great ideas don’t emerge from singular flashes of insight, inspiration, or brilliance.

              It’s rare for the lightbulb to turn on above our heads, to be struck by a lightning bolt of clarity, or for the clouds to part and the profound truths of the universe to be revealed.

              Most great ideas emerge over time, through a continual process of exploration and excavation.

              At first glance, they might not look like much. Barely worth a second look.

              But If the answers we seek were obvious someone else would have found them already.

              The fact is that we all have dozens, maybe hundreds of thoughts every day that could lead to something deeper.

              Most often, we dismiss them.

              If we want to uncover and develop new ideas and create change with the work we do, we need to train our eyes, develop our patience, and focus our curiosity.

              The best way to create work that matters is not to wait for the rare flashes of inspiration from the heavens.

              Instead, it’s to keep our eyes trained on the ground in front of us.

              On the mundane. On the dull. On the relatable.

              Looking for the slightest glimmer of potential.

              And when those dirty, common, dull ideas present themselves, we need to stick with them for just a moment.

              Rather than pass them by, we need to pick them up, turn them over in our hands, dust them off and inspect them from every angle.

              Many will be worthless.

              But many won’t.

              It takes effort, persistence, and rigor to expose a dull idea’s shiny potential.

              But it’s a process that is available and waiting for us if we choose to do the work.


              How To Flip The Script On Time-Scarcity

              At the root of so much of our anxiety as creators is our relationship with time.

              So often, we feel constrained, even oppressed by our perceived lack of time in relation to the scope of goals we want to achieve.

              As a result, we end up heaping pressure on ourselves to work more, faster, harder, optimizing every minute of every day in order to keep up with the competition and maintain the blistering schedule we’ve set for ourselves.

              Apart from not being conducive to leading a happy, fulfilling life, this relationship with time also keeps us from creating the quality and depth of work we’re truly capable of.

              But what if all our ideas around the limited amount of time we have to get ahead and make an impact weren’t just unhelpful, but flat out wrong? Backward even?

              What if instead of viewing time as a restrictive enemy to fight against, we could view it as a benevolent ally to work with?

              Said differently, what would it take to feel that time was actually on our side?

              I know it sounds radical, given our bias towards scarcity thinking. But the reframe is simpler than you might think.

              At it’s core, it comes down to addressing two mindset issues that are both within our control to change: Misaligned expectations and the comparison game.

              Recalibrating Our Expectations Around Time

              We most commonly think about our relationship with time in the urgent context of our day-to-day lives.

              The topic of time calls to mind tasks and projects with pressing due dates, appointments and events to rush to, and meetings slotted into our schedules like Tetris pieces.

              From this short-term perspective, it’s hard to view time as anything but an onerous constraint. At best to be negotiated with and worked within, at worst to be pushed against and fought with.

              As we shift our perspective from the short to long-term view, however, we begin to see time from a different perspective. Not as a narrow constraint, but as an open expanse, full of opportunity and possibility.

              Sure, our calendars are overbooked now, but look even just a month or two into the future, let alone a year or two, and a blank canvas presents itself, ready and waiting for us to pick up the brush and start to paint.

              Our challenge then, is to be mindful of both views of time, the narrow and the expansive, and shape our experience of each of them intentionally.

              This intentional crafting of our schedule requires an awareness of two categories of tasks and projects.

              Conduits & Blockades

              First, we need to recognize the tasks and projects that–while important (maybe even essential) to our long term creative success–routinely get pushed off in favour of more urgent short term tasks.

              I like to think of these projects as Conduits as a reminder to myself that these are the things that will move me closer to my creative potential.

              For time to work in our favour, Conduits require us to actively schedule them into our calendars and protect their space fiercely.

              As you’re likely aware, however, Conduits are difficult to keep clear.

              The reason, is Blockades.

              Blockades are the urgent-feeling types of tasks, projects, and requests of our time that routinely infringe on, eat away at, block out entirely our Conduits.

              Blockades are closely tied to our feeling of time scarcity, and while we might think of them as specific requests of our time (meetings and emails come immediately to mind), what makes a task, project or deadline a Blockade is not the task itself, but our response to it.

              Many potential Blockades are made up of tasks that are necessary to running and progressing our creative businesses.

              What’s not necessary, however, is our tendency to automatically insert them in the path of our Conduits.

              In most cases, that meeting request could be scheduled for next week, or the week after, or a month from now rather than squarely in the middle of the one two hour block of time you have available tomorrow.

              Similarly, most client projects could easily have an extra two weeks added on to the scope without any pushback.

              If we want time to work for us, rather than against us, we need to take a more active role in shaping how our time is used.

              In some ways, taking active control over the time we have available to us is the easy part.

              It’s cause and effect. We take an action and see a result.

              The murkier, more difficult side of making time our ally is avoiding the pull of being influenced by how those around us are using their time and trusting our own processes and intuition.

              How The Comparison Game Influences Your Relationship With Time

              It’s difficult enough to maintain control of our relationship with time in a vacuum.

              It’s almost impossible to keep up the discipline, however, with every one of our competitor’s websites and social media accounts never more than three seconds away.

              While checking in on our competitor’s latest case study, big client achievement or social media post might be the most anxiety-inducing variety, the comparison game extends beyond our direct competitors.

              Chance’s are, we’re surrounded by collaborators, accountability partners, and a network of other creators and business owners doing similar work to ours. Maybe they’ve just run an amazing 5-day challenge, maybe they’re gaining traction on TikTok, or maybe the YouTube channel they started 6 months ago just hit 100k subscribers.

              We don’t have to look far to find someone already achieving the results we’ve dreamed of for ourselves… probably in less time.

              When we see someone else achieving our goals, our time-anxiety is triggered, prompting us to tear up our new, more spacious, long-term focused schedule and fill it up with short-term, shiny object, hustle-focused work in an attempt to replicate the success of someone else.

              The irony is that the people we compare ourselves to (and even compete with) are rarely working towards the same end goals we are. What’s more, they’re working with different skills, experiences, values, and perspectives.

              Is it any wonder then that we rarely get the same results when trying to emulate someone else’s results?

              Eliminating the Negative Influence of Competition & Comparison

              When it comes to removing the potential source of such a trigger, the most obvious option is to limit our time on social media, unfollow negative influences, and make a rule to never, EVER go down the rabbit hole of poring over our competitor’s accounts.

              All of these are likely healthy choices.

              But when it comes to creating a relationship with time where we truly feel that it’s on our side, working for us instead of against us, avoidance is simply a bandaid solution.

              We can do better than that.

              In my experience, when we feel the pressure to keep up with the Joneses, it’s because we’re working towards similar–if not identical–goals.

              But much like our view of time shifts from enemy to ally as we move our perspective from the short to the long term view, our view of goals, milestones, and competition does as well.

              Reframing Your Relationship With Competition

              In the short term, we’re most often working toward crystal clear, hard and fast goals.

              Landing a certain number of new clients, hitting a specific revenue target, enrolling a target number of students for our course, increasing our traffic or follower or subscriber counts are all common milestones we might be working towards.

              These goals, while clear and easily measured are also–for those very same reasons–ripe for comparison to–if not in direct competition with–others.

              Maybe it’s the zero-sum competition of vying over the same client, a general competition for attention, or simply the urge to measure and judge our progress (if not outright worth) against others operating in entirely different niches.

              The problem is that in focusing primarily on these goals and metrics it’s easy to step onto the hedonic treadmill and become hooked. Before long, chasing ever larger numbers becomes our goal in and of itself.

              Without stopping to ask what it’s all for, we can become consumed by the competition and the chase.

              Our perspective shifts, however, as we take a longer view of things.

              Competition Ceases To Exist In The Long Run

              When we zoom out to the long view, specific metrics and milestones recede into the background or disappear entirely.

              With them, so does the idea of competition & comparison.

              It’s impossible to say who we would feel pressure to compete or keep up with 10, 20, or 30 years from now, and have no baseline from which to set any measurable goals.

              If you’re like me, zooming out might spark the realization that 20 years from now, your goal is to have worked yourself to a place that is naturally without competition. That you’ll have developed your voice, perspective, and your work to a place where it is entirely singular.

              That’s not to say everyone will want or like your work, most people won’t. But for the people who do, you’ll be the only one they can get it from.

              While developing a singular voice over a time-span of multiple decades is certainly not as easy a goal to work towards as getting 10K Instagram subscribers, it’s a much more valuable one.

              Perhaps most importantly, it establishes your magnetic North, the point from which all of your interim goals, projects, and actions are referenced and working towards.

              Competition & Comparison Are Matters Of Perspective

              Beyond giving you a valuable reference point for your short term actions, clarity around the type of work and life you’re working toward can also radically reframe your relationship with time, as well as the creators around you, even your direct competitors.

              Take the following charts of the trajectories of both us, and the creators around us.

              caption for image

              When we zoom in to the shortest-term view, the space feels impossibly crowded, as though everyone is jostling against each other, competing for the same limited resources and attention.

              Zoom out, however, and we can see that given enough time, each of us is moving towards a space in which we’re the only occupant, the creator of singular work that can’t be found anywhere else.

              Viewed this way, our perception of both time and competition shift.

              It becomes clear that given enough time, (as long as we’re not actively copying someone else) if we stick to our process, it’s entirely inevitable that we’ll end up in a space that we can own for ourselves.

              Once again, the further we look ahead, the more time appears a welcoming expanse to lean into, rather than a constraint to be pushed back against.

              And while you might not be able to simply quit the short term jostling and jump into creating singular work, you can certainly accelerate your progress.

              Sprint To The Open Space

              The first step is to choose to opt-out of short-term competitions defined as important by other people without clarity on exactly how they serve your long-term vision.

              Gaining followers might feel both urgent and important now, but how do those followers fit into your 20-year vision?

              Second, remember that the thing that creates singular work is a unique perspective and voice.

              While this can’t be developed overnight, there are a couple of things you can do on a regular basis over the short-term to get there.

              1. Diversify Your Inputs

              It’s hard to develop a unique voice and perspective when you’re consuming all the same base material as everyone else around you.

              Push yourself to seek out information and inspiration from a diversity of sources. Find business and creative inspiration from non-business or creative sources. Watch foreign movies, read fiction and literature, follow your curiosity instead of top-10 lists and recommendations from others.

              When you have a specific skill or tool you need to learn quickly, binge deeply on that and return to your habit of broad content consumption.

              Then, get creating.

              2. Create, Publish, Repeat

              The chart above applies equally to your voice. At the start, you’re going to sound a lot like everyone else, making you a commodity, one among many competing for the same attention.

              You want to get out of this zone as quickly as possible, and the fastest way to do that is to create. A lot.

              Work the generic content out of your system by publishing consistently.

              Good or bad doesn’t apply right now, most of it will almost certainly be bad, at least compared to what you’ll be creating a year from now, or five or ten or twenty years from now.

              Again, we see how, with a solid process in place, time is in fact on our side, our work improving, and our voice and perspective becoming more unique with the passage of time.

              You Control Your Experience Of Time & Scarcity

              While not easy, we each have the ability to recalibrate our relationship with time – from viewing it as an enemy and constraint to being our greatest ally and opportunity.

              While we don’t need (and can’t possibly) have a crystal-clear picture of where we want to be decades from now, it helps to regularly zoom out and think in longer time frames than we’re accustomed to.

              Starting from a long-term perspective, we’re able to adopt short term strategies that align our goals, actions, and even day to day scheduling with our defined magnetic North.

              And while keeping your compass needle pointed in the right direction is certainly valuable, so is the impact this type of long-term-first thinking has on your day to day experience.

              Less stress, less scarcity, more space, and the comfort of knowing that you’re walking a path in which, as long as you keep putting one foot in front of the either, time is on your side.


              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.


                Doing More Is Keeping You Stuck

                As creators, we face an incredible pressure for more.

                To do more.

                To learn more.

                To create more.

                To increase our input.

                To increase our output.

                Much of this pressure is inflicted on us by the outside world.

                Our culture glorifies the hustler, working themselves to the bone in pursuit of a dream.

                It’s a seductive ideal, at least at first.

                And in chasing it, we choose to accept and adopt the pressure and accouterments that come with it.

                But if we’re truly honest with ourselves, most of the pressure we face is that we heap onto ourselves.

                And so we chase every new tool. Every new trend. Every new strategy.

                With each addition to our toolset, we’re certain that this will be the thing that helps us achieve our great breakthrough.

                At least until the Next Big Thing comes along.

                And so the treadmill continues.

                Never sticking with any one thing long enough to develop mastery.

                But what if the answer to building real momentum wasn’t about adding more?

                What if the secret to real progress was not asking “What can I add?” but “What can I subtract?”

                What if by eliminating all but the essential, we freed up the time, space, and focus to truly master the few things that matter?

                It’s hard to believe that the energy we’re currently scattering across dozens of different ideas, strategies, and tools wouldn’t be more effective when applied to only a chosen few.

                No matter how hard you run, it’s impossible to build momentum when you’re on a treadmill.

                So when you next ask yourself what you can subtract, start with the treadmill itself.


                Getting To the Best Solution

                When looking to solve a problem, we often take the first idea that strikes us and run with it.

                Maybe the burst of inspiration it was delivered in convinces us that it’s the best option available.

                Maybe we’re in such a rush to solve the problem that the convenience is too much to ignore.

                The fact is, however, that the first idea that comes to mind is rarely the best one.

                It might be a duct tape solution to the problem at hand.

                It might solve one problem, but create others in the process.

                Or it might simply be inelegant.

                The first solution that comes to mind is always best viewed as a starting point.

                A jumping-off point for both broader and deeper exploration.

                The best solution takes work to uncover in the first place and then iteration over time to hone and perfect.

                But when we get it right, it performs better than we could have imagined.

                We sell ourselves short when we take the first solution that comes to us, no matter how convenient or inspired it may at first seem.


                Component Parts

                If you look closely, you’ll find that every complex task is made up of a handful of component parts.

                Taken whole, the task ahead of you might seem impossible, and you might spend weeks, months, or years stalling as you try to decide which chunk of the elephant to bite off first.

                As you zoom in, however, you begin to make out the smaller, more approachable pieces that make up the whole.

                The amorphous task of marketing, for example, could be broken down into the following component parts:

                1. Audience Identification
                2. Research
                3. Exposure
                4. Connection
                5. Trust

                When staring down the daunting task of figuring out how to market the work you do, you might initially draw a blank.

                But break it down into a series of sub-tasks and a plan begins to come into view.

                From our initial marketing breakdown, we can zoom in closer, and the plan becomes even clearer.

                1. Audience identification
                  1. Decide who you want to work with
                  2. Where do your skills and interests overlap with a market need?
                2. Research
                  1. Talk to your target audience
                  2. Hang out in Facebook groups
                  3. Read Quora or Reddit posts
                3. Exposure
                  1. Buy attention
                    1. Ads
                  2. Borrow attention
                    1. Podcast guesting
                    2. Collaborating with other creators or businesses
                    3. Guest blogging
                4. Connection
                  1. Speak to your intended audience in a way that addresses their current situation, goals, and challenges.
                  2. Embrace the parts of yourself that make you unique.
                  3. Develop your personal point of view and perspective.
                5. Trust
                  1. Nurture your audience with your own pillar content
                    1. Podcast
                    2. Blog posts
                    3. Newsletter
                    4. Youtube
                    5. Social media

                Of course, we could still break down each of these sub-tasks and sub-sub-tasks further still in order to understand how to approach each of them effectively.

                The big picture view is essential for establishing your vision and plotting your course.

                But if you’re feeling overwhelmed, confused, or intimidated by the scale of the work ahead of you, it’s worth zooming in to the point where the micro-tasks feel manageable.


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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.