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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12 Ways to Create Mediocre Work
- Don’t ask for feedback
- Refuse to accept or consider criticism
- Wait until your work is “perfect” to ship
- Blame people or circumstances beyond your control when things don’t go to plan
- Build in private
- Procrastinate
- Wait for inspiration to strike
- Create based on what you want instead of what your audience/clients/customers want
- Create something for everyone
- Insist that everything you create must be wholly original
- Read the same books as everyone else in your space
- Do everything yourself
Few of us are aspiring to create mediocre work.
And yet, we often behave as though we are.
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.
Subscribe
More Posts
In on the Joke
If a joke has to be explained, it’s probably not all that funny.
The same principle applies to your marketing.
Effective marketing works because it meets your audience where they’re at.
It doesn’t talk down to them, over them, or around them.
They don’t have to reach for it or do their homework to understand it.
Rather than heard, seen, or comprehended, effective marketing is felt.
Not as “marketing” but as truth.
Effective marketing hits your audience in the chest, where it rings true and resonates.
This type of marketing is elusive.
But it doesn’t have to be.
Get to know your audience better than anyone else.
As well as they know themselves.
Engage.
Understand.
Empathize.
Care.
When you can speak to them the way they speak to themselves, your marketing will take care of itself.
Choosing Nourishment Over Cravings
There’s a lot of noise out there.
A lot of different people telling us a lot of different “best” ways to grow an audience, build a business, achieve the freedom and success we want in our lives.
I know I’m not alone in feeling overwhelmed by it all. Not the only one with an ever-expanding list of books to read, podcasts to listen to, strategies to learn and implement.
And yet, despite the already existing overwhelm, I often can’t resist the compulsion to continue to add more onto the stack. To read that next book, binge that new podcast, buy that next course, all the while convincing myself that the solution to my information overload is more information.
At times, I feel like a kind of cartoon waiter, swerving through a restaurant, desperately trying to maintain my center of gravity beneath a teetering stack of dishes, each with a half-finished meal dripping off the edge and onto my head.
Of course, deep down I know that the solution isn’t more information.
I know that more important than dropping everything to desperately pursue the latest marketing trend promising overnight success cough Clubhouse cough is to find just one strategy with a process I know I can sustain over the long run.
The problem is that taking the long view, focusing on the boring tasks that slowly compound into success over time, is kind of like showing up to a party, making your way to the table heaped with all manner of chips, dips, fried appetizers and desserts, and choosing instead to eat only from the one lonely veggie platter, that’s been shoved to the back corner of the table.
When it comes to food, we know that our cravings, while sure to give us a quick hit of dopamine, are not a viable form of long-term nourishment.
So why do we have such a hard time choosing real nourishment over cravings when it comes to our work?
What Does Nourishment Even Look Like?
When it comes to our food intake, we all have an innate sense of what nourishing food looks like.
We know that downing an entire pizza and bottle of coke every night is not a sustainable long term diet and that more vegetables are never a bad idea if we’re looking to lead a healthy life.
When it comes to creating, marketing and making a living off of our work, however, the lines are blurry.
Every strategy has die-hard advocates who believe that theirs is, if not the only, at least the best path to success.
Every expert has dozens if not hundreds of testimonials from people (many who seem to be a lot like you…) whose lives and businesses were changed by their course, coaching, or philosophy.
Every piece of content feels urgent, that if we choose not to consume it, we might just miss out on that one golden tidbit that would change everything for us overnight.
There’s no governing body issuing guidelines on the optimal content diet for achieving long term health. As such, we’re left to decipher the nourishment from the junk food for ourselves.
This can feel like a daunting prospect, rife with the potential for wrong decisions that could stunt our growth and ruin our careers.
But much like our food cravings can be recalibrated by a sugar or junk food detox, allowing our body’s natural, more balanced desires to shine through, so too can our content cravings.
Cleanse Your Pallete, Then Listen
When I’m feeling most overwhelmed with information and content, I’ll often resort to a strict content diet. No business books, podcasts, blogs, courses, or content of any other kind that is likely to add to the existing overwhelm.
With a clean palette and space for my own thoughts to make their way to the surface, I often find that I already know the people, ideas, and content (or lack thereof) that will provide me the sustenance I need to get me through the next leg of my journey.
Only in retrospect do I see that in my haste to chase each and every short-term, surface-level craving, I’ve been ignoring and suppressing these deeper yearnings for real nourishment.
Given a chance to pause, recalibrate, and get clear on the nourishment that’s actually needed to get me where I want to go, I almost always find that the cravings for short term tactics, strategies, and hacks disappear entirely.
For me, what feels nourishing can take many forms. Last year, I spent a month binging through dozens of episodes of Smart Agency Masterclass, a decidedly tactic-heavy podcast. At the time, I’d never thought to look up an agency-specific business podcast, and I took a lot away from the show before the overwhelm started to creep back in.
A couple of years ago I spent six months where I stopped consuming content almost entirely, embarking on a self-imposed fallow period to let my own creativity regenerate after a severe case of content overwhelm and burnout.
Lately, what’s feeling nourishing is a complete exodus from the world of business and marketing, but a steady stream of content from other broader topics. In particular, I’ve been drinking from the hose content related to philosophy, spirituality, poetry, adventure, storytelling and the natural world.
I don’t know what type of work will emerge from these influences, but it feels exciting, energizing, and inspiring, not emotions I currently associate with any type of marketing or business content, which instead feel forced and draining.
Don’t Let Others Dictate Your Consumption
Too often, we end up basing our own content consumption–and thus the ideas and ingredients that will define our work–on what everyone else around us is consuming.
We worry that by not keeping up with the latest trends, strategies, apps, hacks, and social platforms we’re willfully allowing ourselves to fall behind the pack.
The real shame is that when we follow the same content as everyone else, we end up producing the same work as everyone else.
Brands and creators that stand out from the pack do so because they have a wildly different set of influences from the pack.
The good news is that if you can quiet the cravings, you’ll find that you already know the real nourishment you need to carry you forward, and create the kind of work only you can create.
Where are you finding creative nourishment right now? Shoot me a Tweet at @iamjeremyenns and let me know!
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.
Ask Bigger Questions
There’s room for bigger questions in every pursuit.
In fact, they often go entirely unasked in the first place.
The problem is they break new ground.
Address the thoughts we all have but are too afraid to speak out loud.
They stick out.
Don’t fit in with what’s been done.
Challenge the existing way of doing things.
Bigger questions don’t rehash the past.
They open up new territory for exploration.
Shining light on the dark parts of the map we’ve avoided thus far.
Bigger questions invite in new modalities.
Challenge the orthodoxy.
Create new schools of thought.
Bigger questions ask the Big Questions.
Like how do peace, justice, inequality, accessibility, dignity, stewardship, and healing apply to the work we do? In our communities and beyond.
And what does it all mean?
We all have a role to play when it comes to answering the biggest questions.
But first they need to be asked.
Will It Still Be Worth It?
If no one ever sees it?
If you never hit publish?
If the people it’s intended to serve never get a chance to engage with it?
Some work only pays off when it reaches the intended end user.
For other work, the process itself is reward enough.
It’s worth asking yourself how you can choose to do more work that will be worth it even if it flops with your audience. Or how you can alter your existing process to be a reward unto itself.
When you’ve already won by the time you press publish, it’s a lot easier to create and ship your work without restraint.
To weather the criticisms, dismissals, and the ambivalence.
To get back to work with a smile and create something new.
We all need wins to keep us going.
But too often we rely on others to hand them to us.
In reality, we already have everything we need.
Do You Have the Bandwidth To Start Podcasting?
When it comes to producing a podcast there are two types of difficulty involved.
The first is doing the upfront work to learn everything you need to know to both launch and grow a podcast.
This might include technical production skills like understanding audio equipment, software, how to record high-quality audio, and then how to edit and post your show online.
Or it could also apply to learning about how to effectively market your podcast and build a system to continually bring in new listeners and over time convert them into clients and customers.
These types of skills can be difficult to learn and harder to master. And, at least when it comes to the audio skills, require an initial upfront investment of time, education, and practice.
But for the most part, once you’ve put in the work to acquire the skills, producing your show becomes a fairly simple process.
But simple doesn’t mean easy.
Ongoing Time Investment
While skill acquisition may be a large and often intimidating hurdle to overcome initially, the real difficulty of producing and growing a podcast is finding the time and energy to keep up with the week-to-week episode production.
I’ve asked hundreds of podcasters how much time they spend producing and promoting their podcasts. While their responses range from as few as one or two hours per episode all the way up to dozens of hours, the average seems to fall in the 8-10 hour range.
If you’re producing your show on a weekly basis, that’s a significant amount of time to fit into your weekly schedule.
In the short term, you might be able to carve out that extra time in your schedule to produce the show. But what about in the long run?
Growing a podcast to the point where it’s driving real, meaningful results for your business is a long term proposition.
It’s likely going to take a minimum of six months to a year before you start seeing some return on it, and two years before it really starts to feel worth more than all the effort you’ve put into that point.
I don’t say this to discourage you, podcasting is the very best way to build trust with your audience, and if done well it can completely change your life and your business. But trust is built on consistency, meaning it’s essential that you’re showing up regularly with new episodes on your chosen production schedule.
If you can’t commit to that 8-10 hours of production time per week, I’d recommend either looking at how you can outsource some of the elements of production, considering an alternative episode-release schedule, or rethinking whether podcasting is a good fit for you right now.
It’s worth mentioning that it’s possible to either cut down on that time by using systems and automation, or condense it into larger, less frequent blocks of time through batch recording and production.
These strategies can certainly help make producing the show more efficient, but producing a show that drives results will always require a significant ongoing investment of time and effort.
Remember though, that by investing time into your show, you’re investing time into your relationship with your audience. This is a worthwhile investment to make, as building an audience that knows, likes, and trusts you is one of the most valuable assets you can develop for your business.
The Opposite of Good Isn’t Always Bad
If we want to differentiate ourselves and the work we do, it’s essential to get clear on both what it is, and what it’s not.
Of course, when thinking about what our work is, we immediately call to mind a series of positive adjectives to describe it.
Efficiency, quality, and responsibility all seem at first glance to be traits worthy of becoming known for.
The problem is that when we choose to build our positioning on the backs of these concepts, we end up lumping ourselves in with… well, most other people doing similar work to us.
So what are the alternatives?
None of us wants to be known for being inefficient, low-quality, or irresponsible in our work.
Our challenge then is to move beyond thinking in the binary of good traits vs bad traits.
When it comes to our positioning, binaries like this lead to bland, beige, and boring.
To platitudes, motivational posters, and company values like integrity, excellence, and respect.
To work that no one gets excited to engage with.
Instead, we need to embrace the idea that the opposite of “good” might not be “bad”, but a different type of good.
A good that appeals to a different type of person, in a different situation.
It turns out that in some situations, efficiency, top-quality, and responsibility may not be positive traits at all. In fact, they may be the opposite.
The creative, experimental process involved with creating something that’s never existed before could rarely be described as efficient.
The spare tire in the trunk of a car was never intended to be top quality. It was intentionally designed to be a compromise between weight and effectiveness, a stopgap to get you to the next service station but no further.
And while responsible vs irresponsible isn’t much of a choice, responsible vs dangerous certainly is.
Brands like Harley Davidson have chosen to build their brands almost exclusively by rebelling against “responsible”.
It would be hard to argue that the responsible choice has ever been to buy any motorcycle, let alone a Harley. And yet for their customers, that’s exactly what makes them an appealing choice.
The purpose of our positioning is not to help our customers decide between good and bad options. They can do that themselves
Rather, it’s to help them decide which version of good most appeals to them.
Are they looking for an IKEA print or a one-of-a-kind painting? Both cover the same spot on the wall.
A short-term lease on a studio apartment or the home their future kids will grow up in? Both provide a place to sleep.
A Prius and a Harley and a Tesla and a pickup truck will all get them to work and back.
Our opportunity, especially when competing with larger, entrenched incumbents is to position ourselves as a positive choice our ideal audience didn’t know they cared about.
Sure, many of them won’t.
But many of them will care deeply.
These are the people who will become our biggest fans, brand advocates, and repeat customers.
We just need to find a way to present them with the right choice between two types of good.
Sitting in Silence
Contrary to popular belief, it’s just as good a way to learn as another podcast, another book, another blog post, another video.
No, maybe not the “7 ways to…” type of learning, but a deeper, more rooted, more valuable variety.
The kind of learning that, when accumulated, amounts to real wisdom.
While the noise of endless content might provide food for thought, it doesn’t leave much room for thought itself.
Without thought, we end up simple automatons, capable of little more than regurgitating what’s already been better said before.
The world has enough automatons without adding our names to the list.
And besides, what a waste of our potential.
To take what’s come before, and instead of regurgitating, choosing to build, transform, evolve, or perhaps dismantle it.
There’s no piece of content telling you how to do the thing that hasn’t been done before.
But if you sit long and listen closely enough, silence will.
Navigating Your Creative Work’s Incubation Phase
I’ve spent the past seven years traveling full-time, living and working in over 30 countries across four continents.
Over this span, I’ve noticed a curious trend emerge.
After leaving a given place, I’ll largely forget about the small, mundane, day to day experiences that defined it while I was there.
Then, almost like clockwork, precisely eleven months later, they’ll start rushing back.
No matter how similar or dissimilar my new location, I’ll start getting regular flashbacks to the places and experiences that took place almost a year prior.
Maybe the bend of a road I’m driving along will remind me of a road I drove a year earlier, or a certain smell in the air will transport me back to another location.
The experiences that come back are almost never the highlights of the trips. Most often, they’re moments of so little consequence that I couldn’t remember them even if I tried.
At first, I thought this was a phenomenon that was unique to me and the way my brain and memory worked, but I’ve come to learn that others experience the same thing themselves.
In this phenomenon, I think there’s a lesson for all of us striving to build creative lives and businesses.
But before we get to that, we need to talk about psychedelics, plant medicine and Vision Quests.
Integration Takes Time
I had been traveling for a couple of years already and had experienced a couple of cycles of this recurrence of memories when I remembered an episode of The Tim Ferriss Show that I had listened to years before.
The episode featured two doctors who researched and worked with plant medicines extensively for a variety of medical uses.
During the course of the interview, one of them told a story about his experience undertaking a Native American Vision Quest.
Following the experience, which involved many days of fasting and isolation in a remote location, he met with the Shaman who had helped prepare for and facilitate the experience. The Shaman asked him what he planned to do in the coming weeks.
“I’ve cleared my schedule and booked a couple of weeks off work,” the doctor responded. “I want to allow myself some time to process and integrate this experience. Then I’d love to talk with you about what I’ve learned.”
The Shaman laughed.
“Come back in a year and tell me what you’ve learned.”
Back on the podcast, Tim’s guests explained how much like an intense experience like a Vision Quest, experiences with plant medicines often take around a year before the real lessons and insights can be fully processed and integrated.
As I thought back to this interview, I realized that maybe this year-long processing period didn’t just apply to plant medicines and Vision Quests, but to our everyday experiences as well, such as my own experiences traveling.
So what does any of this have to do with creating work that matters?
Weathering The Incubation Period
One of the things I’m most fascinated by when it comes to creative work is the lag between when someone first starts creating and publishing their work and the point at which they start to gain traction and build an audience.
I’ve written before about how almost all creative work is built on compounding returns.
You might have also heard the concept referenced in ideas like “the snowball effect” or an “overnight success, years in the making”.
The fact of the matter is that no matter our skill, knowledge, or experience, there’s often an incubation period that we must all work through.
This incubation period typically stretches from the moment we start publishing our work publicly to the point where things start to click.
That clicking might be marked by a noticeable uptick in our metrics–followers, subscribers, downloads, page views–or it might be when we ourselves feel the clarity and focus that precipitates them.
In talking with and observing creators and entrepreneurs across a variety of niches, platforms, and mediums, I’ve noticed that as with travel, Vision Quests, and plant medicines, this incubation period often lasts about a year, give or take.
While we often hope (or even expect) that we’ll be able to start publishing content and immediately build up an audience, this is rarely the case.
We need time to find our voice, work through our ideas, and get feedback from the (likely small) audience we do have before things start to slowly fall into place.
We may be able to shortcut the process by getting more reps in–publishing more frequently, getting more feedback, working through more bad ideas–in a compressed period of time. But I’m convinced that there’s something biological at play which makes it hard to analyze, process, and integrate the lessons and feedback we’ve received in less than a year.
For many of us, this is a frustrating reality.
If we’re putting the time, effort, and perhaps money into creating and publishing content, chances are, we’d like to see the fruits of our labour on a rather shorter time scale.
But if this type of universal incubation period exists and is something we must work through, I like to think that knowing about it allows us to use it to navigate it more effectively.
Making The Most Of Our Incubation
For one, knowing that we’re in our incubation phase allows us to take the pressure off of ourselves.
So often, when we’re doing the work and not seeing results, we jump to the assumption that people just aren’t interested in us or our work.
Knowing that we’re not supposed to gain instant traction, however, allows us to realize that it’s not about us or our work, it’s simply a natural phase of the gauntlet any creative endeavour must work its way through.
Experimentation
Secondly, embodying the idea of incubation allows us more freedom to experiment.
We’ve been conditioned to think that in order to gain traction with an audience, we have to be hyper-focused on a specific topic within a specific niche, speaking to a specific audience avatar.
While this is certainly helpful advice once we’ve reached a certain level of clarity and competency, in my experience, we rarely have the required level of clarity on any of those three criteria when we first start out.
In order to get that clarity, we have to experiment broadly, exploring a variety of topics, voices, and styles until slowly, our unique style, perspective, and voice begin to align.
I’ve been writing and publishing almost every day for the past year, and only in the past month or so (right on schedule) has a through-line begun to emerge regarding what I have to offer as a writer and content creator.
It’s worth noting that while time is an essential ingredient, the more important part of this process is the actual experimentation and exploration.
While creating in a defined voice and style, about a singular topic, to a specific audience for a year will surely improve the quality of your work, it won’t help you find your unique voice.
As most of us have been conditioned to write, speak and create in a standardized, generic voice, this type of exploration is essential if we hope to differentiate ourselves and build an audience around the work we do.
Expectation Recalibration
Lastly, being aware of the incubation period we must work through before we can realistically hope to start gaining traction helps us properly calibrate our expectations.
How many podcasters (or YouTubers or bloggers) give up after publishing ten episodes, having failed to grow any kind of audience?
Creative work takes years of investment to pay off in a meaningful way. Knowing this from the outset allows us to pace ourselves for the long haul, opting for a steady, consistent jog as opposed to a sprint.
Incubation Is An Active Process
While there certainly seems to be a time element associated with this type of creative incubation process, it’s worth re-iterating that you can’t simply wait it out.
The fastest way through is to consistently create. Experiment widely, seek out feedback from those whose opinions you respect, analyze your work and the work of others.
In short, focus on working out the process rather than waiting it out.
It won’t happen overnight, but by staying patient and sticking with the process, the time will come when you hatch from your incubation with clarity, purpose, and a voice that’s entirely your own.
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.
Close the Gap
There’s a gap that often exists between the objective quality of our work, and our subjective valuation of it.
The gap can exist in one of two directions.
On the one hand, we perceive our work to be better than it really is.
On the other, we perceive it to be worse.
These positions aren’t fixed for life. We can and do vacillate between the two, sometimes on a daily basis.
In either case, our job is to close the gap.
When our opinion of our work is that it’s better than it is in reality, we close the gap by improving our skills, knowledge, and taste.
When our work is in fact better than we believe it to be, we close the gap by improving our mindset, confidence, and self-worth.
In both cases, the greatest challenge is not in doing the work to close the gap, but in recognizing it in the first place.
This requires us to take a cool-headed, rational assessment of the work we’ve produced so far, and then decide where we need to go to reach the next level.
Peers, mentors, and accountability partners can be useful mirrors to see ourselves more clearly.
But ultimately, we need to be the ones to own our gap and do the work to close it.
Pull the Thread
The clue to your next step is almost always in front of you already.
The tiniest, shimmering thread of an idea,
Waiting for the light to catch it just right and attract your gaze.
When it does, you realize that you’ve looked past it, around it, over it, and straight through it a hundred times before.
But you’ve never really seen it.
At least not for what it is.
Once glimpsed, however, it becomes impossible to ignore.
Somehow, it both compels and cows you.
Who’s to say where it will lead, after all.
It could be the ticket to your next big breakthrough.
Or…
It could unravel everything you’ve built with the slightest tug.
Making you realize that what you mistook for solid ground beneath you
Was little more than cloud, bound tightly by hope and ignorance and belief.
Unspool as they might, the world you’ve constructed for yourself,
Followed far enough, these threads always lead back to something solid.
Rock bottom, bedrock, mountaintop?
It matters not.
A foundation to build from,
Or an anchor to pull towards.
Anything worth building requires a solid reference.
The threads leading the way are already in front of you
If you’re brave enough to pull.
Creative Wayfinding For Ambitious Optimists.
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.
In on the Joke
If a joke has to be explained, it’s probably not all that funny.
The same principle applies to your marketing.
Effective marketing works because it meets your audience where they’re at.
It doesn’t talk down to them, over them, or around them.
They don’t have to reach for it or do their homework to understand it.
Rather than heard, seen, or comprehended, effective marketing is felt.
Not as “marketing” but as truth.
Effective marketing hits your audience in the chest, where it rings true and resonates.
This type of marketing is elusive.
But it doesn’t have to be.
Get to know your audience better than anyone else.
As well as they know themselves.
Engage.
Understand.
Empathize.
Care.
When you can speak to them the way they speak to themselves, your marketing will take care of itself.
Choosing Nourishment Over Cravings
There’s a lot of noise out there.
A lot of different people telling us a lot of different “best” ways to grow an audience, build a business, achieve the freedom and success we want in our lives.
I know I’m not alone in feeling overwhelmed by it all. Not the only one with an ever-expanding list of books to read, podcasts to listen to, strategies to learn and implement.
And yet, despite the already existing overwhelm, I often can’t resist the compulsion to continue to add more onto the stack. To read that next book, binge that new podcast, buy that next course, all the while convincing myself that the solution to my information overload is more information.
At times, I feel like a kind of cartoon waiter, swerving through a restaurant, desperately trying to maintain my center of gravity beneath a teetering stack of dishes, each with a half-finished meal dripping off the edge and onto my head.
Of course, deep down I know that the solution isn’t more information.
I know that more important than dropping everything to desperately pursue the latest marketing trend promising overnight success cough Clubhouse cough is to find just one strategy with a process I know I can sustain over the long run.
The problem is that taking the long view, focusing on the boring tasks that slowly compound into success over time, is kind of like showing up to a party, making your way to the table heaped with all manner of chips, dips, fried appetizers and desserts, and choosing instead to eat only from the one lonely veggie platter, that’s been shoved to the back corner of the table.
When it comes to food, we know that our cravings, while sure to give us a quick hit of dopamine, are not a viable form of long-term nourishment.
So why do we have such a hard time choosing real nourishment over cravings when it comes to our work?
What Does Nourishment Even Look Like?
When it comes to our food intake, we all have an innate sense of what nourishing food looks like.
We know that downing an entire pizza and bottle of coke every night is not a sustainable long term diet and that more vegetables are never a bad idea if we’re looking to lead a healthy life.
When it comes to creating, marketing and making a living off of our work, however, the lines are blurry.
Every strategy has die-hard advocates who believe that theirs is, if not the only, at least the best path to success.
Every expert has dozens if not hundreds of testimonials from people (many who seem to be a lot like you…) whose lives and businesses were changed by their course, coaching, or philosophy.
Every piece of content feels urgent, that if we choose not to consume it, we might just miss out on that one golden tidbit that would change everything for us overnight.
There’s no governing body issuing guidelines on the optimal content diet for achieving long term health. As such, we’re left to decipher the nourishment from the junk food for ourselves.
This can feel like a daunting prospect, rife with the potential for wrong decisions that could stunt our growth and ruin our careers.
But much like our food cravings can be recalibrated by a sugar or junk food detox, allowing our body’s natural, more balanced desires to shine through, so too can our content cravings.
Cleanse Your Pallete, Then Listen
When I’m feeling most overwhelmed with information and content, I’ll often resort to a strict content diet. No business books, podcasts, blogs, courses, or content of any other kind that is likely to add to the existing overwhelm.
With a clean palette and space for my own thoughts to make their way to the surface, I often find that I already know the people, ideas, and content (or lack thereof) that will provide me the sustenance I need to get me through the next leg of my journey.
Only in retrospect do I see that in my haste to chase each and every short-term, surface-level craving, I’ve been ignoring and suppressing these deeper yearnings for real nourishment.
Given a chance to pause, recalibrate, and get clear on the nourishment that’s actually needed to get me where I want to go, I almost always find that the cravings for short term tactics, strategies, and hacks disappear entirely.
For me, what feels nourishing can take many forms. Last year, I spent a month binging through dozens of episodes of Smart Agency Masterclass, a decidedly tactic-heavy podcast. At the time, I’d never thought to look up an agency-specific business podcast, and I took a lot away from the show before the overwhelm started to creep back in.
A couple of years ago I spent six months where I stopped consuming content almost entirely, embarking on a self-imposed fallow period to let my own creativity regenerate after a severe case of content overwhelm and burnout.
Lately, what’s feeling nourishing is a complete exodus from the world of business and marketing, but a steady stream of content from other broader topics. In particular, I’ve been drinking from the hose content related to philosophy, spirituality, poetry, adventure, storytelling and the natural world.
I don’t know what type of work will emerge from these influences, but it feels exciting, energizing, and inspiring, not emotions I currently associate with any type of marketing or business content, which instead feel forced and draining.
Don’t Let Others Dictate Your Consumption
Too often, we end up basing our own content consumption–and thus the ideas and ingredients that will define our work–on what everyone else around us is consuming.
We worry that by not keeping up with the latest trends, strategies, apps, hacks, and social platforms we’re willfully allowing ourselves to fall behind the pack.
The real shame is that when we follow the same content as everyone else, we end up producing the same work as everyone else.
Brands and creators that stand out from the pack do so because they have a wildly different set of influences from the pack.
The good news is that if you can quiet the cravings, you’ll find that you already know the real nourishment you need to carry you forward, and create the kind of work only you can create.
Where are you finding creative nourishment right now? Shoot me a Tweet at @iamjeremyenns and let me know!
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.
Ask Bigger Questions
There’s room for bigger questions in every pursuit.
In fact, they often go entirely unasked in the first place.
The problem is they break new ground.
Address the thoughts we all have but are too afraid to speak out loud.
They stick out.
Don’t fit in with what’s been done.
Challenge the existing way of doing things.
Bigger questions don’t rehash the past.
They open up new territory for exploration.
Shining light on the dark parts of the map we’ve avoided thus far.
Bigger questions invite in new modalities.
Challenge the orthodoxy.
Create new schools of thought.
Bigger questions ask the Big Questions.
Like how do peace, justice, inequality, accessibility, dignity, stewardship, and healing apply to the work we do? In our communities and beyond.
And what does it all mean?
We all have a role to play when it comes to answering the biggest questions.
But first they need to be asked.
Will It Still Be Worth It?
If no one ever sees it?
If you never hit publish?
If the people it’s intended to serve never get a chance to engage with it?
Some work only pays off when it reaches the intended end user.
For other work, the process itself is reward enough.
It’s worth asking yourself how you can choose to do more work that will be worth it even if it flops with your audience. Or how you can alter your existing process to be a reward unto itself.
When you’ve already won by the time you press publish, it’s a lot easier to create and ship your work without restraint.
To weather the criticisms, dismissals, and the ambivalence.
To get back to work with a smile and create something new.
We all need wins to keep us going.
But too often we rely on others to hand them to us.
In reality, we already have everything we need.
Do You Have the Bandwidth To Start Podcasting?
When it comes to producing a podcast there are two types of difficulty involved.
The first is doing the upfront work to learn everything you need to know to both launch and grow a podcast.
This might include technical production skills like understanding audio equipment, software, how to record high-quality audio, and then how to edit and post your show online.
Or it could also apply to learning about how to effectively market your podcast and build a system to continually bring in new listeners and over time convert them into clients and customers.
These types of skills can be difficult to learn and harder to master. And, at least when it comes to the audio skills, require an initial upfront investment of time, education, and practice.
But for the most part, once you’ve put in the work to acquire the skills, producing your show becomes a fairly simple process.
But simple doesn’t mean easy.
Ongoing Time Investment
While skill acquisition may be a large and often intimidating hurdle to overcome initially, the real difficulty of producing and growing a podcast is finding the time and energy to keep up with the week-to-week episode production.
I’ve asked hundreds of podcasters how much time they spend producing and promoting their podcasts. While their responses range from as few as one or two hours per episode all the way up to dozens of hours, the average seems to fall in the 8-10 hour range.
If you’re producing your show on a weekly basis, that’s a significant amount of time to fit into your weekly schedule.
In the short term, you might be able to carve out that extra time in your schedule to produce the show. But what about in the long run?
Growing a podcast to the point where it’s driving real, meaningful results for your business is a long term proposition.
It’s likely going to take a minimum of six months to a year before you start seeing some return on it, and two years before it really starts to feel worth more than all the effort you’ve put into that point.
I don’t say this to discourage you, podcasting is the very best way to build trust with your audience, and if done well it can completely change your life and your business. But trust is built on consistency, meaning it’s essential that you’re showing up regularly with new episodes on your chosen production schedule.
If you can’t commit to that 8-10 hours of production time per week, I’d recommend either looking at how you can outsource some of the elements of production, considering an alternative episode-release schedule, or rethinking whether podcasting is a good fit for you right now.
It’s worth mentioning that it’s possible to either cut down on that time by using systems and automation, or condense it into larger, less frequent blocks of time through batch recording and production.
These strategies can certainly help make producing the show more efficient, but producing a show that drives results will always require a significant ongoing investment of time and effort.
Remember though, that by investing time into your show, you’re investing time into your relationship with your audience. This is a worthwhile investment to make, as building an audience that knows, likes, and trusts you is one of the most valuable assets you can develop for your business.
The Opposite of Good Isn’t Always Bad
If we want to differentiate ourselves and the work we do, it’s essential to get clear on both what it is, and what it’s not.
Of course, when thinking about what our work is, we immediately call to mind a series of positive adjectives to describe it.
Efficiency, quality, and responsibility all seem at first glance to be traits worthy of becoming known for.
The problem is that when we choose to build our positioning on the backs of these concepts, we end up lumping ourselves in with… well, most other people doing similar work to us.
So what are the alternatives?
None of us wants to be known for being inefficient, low-quality, or irresponsible in our work.
Our challenge then is to move beyond thinking in the binary of good traits vs bad traits.
When it comes to our positioning, binaries like this lead to bland, beige, and boring.
To platitudes, motivational posters, and company values like integrity, excellence, and respect.
To work that no one gets excited to engage with.
Instead, we need to embrace the idea that the opposite of “good” might not be “bad”, but a different type of good.
A good that appeals to a different type of person, in a different situation.
It turns out that in some situations, efficiency, top-quality, and responsibility may not be positive traits at all. In fact, they may be the opposite.
The creative, experimental process involved with creating something that’s never existed before could rarely be described as efficient.
The spare tire in the trunk of a car was never intended to be top quality. It was intentionally designed to be a compromise between weight and effectiveness, a stopgap to get you to the next service station but no further.
And while responsible vs irresponsible isn’t much of a choice, responsible vs dangerous certainly is.
Brands like Harley Davidson have chosen to build their brands almost exclusively by rebelling against “responsible”.
It would be hard to argue that the responsible choice has ever been to buy any motorcycle, let alone a Harley. And yet for their customers, that’s exactly what makes them an appealing choice.
The purpose of our positioning is not to help our customers decide between good and bad options. They can do that themselves
Rather, it’s to help them decide which version of good most appeals to them.
Are they looking for an IKEA print or a one-of-a-kind painting? Both cover the same spot on the wall.
A short-term lease on a studio apartment or the home their future kids will grow up in? Both provide a place to sleep.
A Prius and a Harley and a Tesla and a pickup truck will all get them to work and back.
Our opportunity, especially when competing with larger, entrenched incumbents is to position ourselves as a positive choice our ideal audience didn’t know they cared about.
Sure, many of them won’t.
But many of them will care deeply.
These are the people who will become our biggest fans, brand advocates, and repeat customers.
We just need to find a way to present them with the right choice between two types of good.
Sitting in Silence
Contrary to popular belief, it’s just as good a way to learn as another podcast, another book, another blog post, another video.
No, maybe not the “7 ways to…” type of learning, but a deeper, more rooted, more valuable variety.
The kind of learning that, when accumulated, amounts to real wisdom.
While the noise of endless content might provide food for thought, it doesn’t leave much room for thought itself.
Without thought, we end up simple automatons, capable of little more than regurgitating what’s already been better said before.
The world has enough automatons without adding our names to the list.
And besides, what a waste of our potential.
To take what’s come before, and instead of regurgitating, choosing to build, transform, evolve, or perhaps dismantle it.
There’s no piece of content telling you how to do the thing that hasn’t been done before.
But if you sit long and listen closely enough, silence will.
Navigating Your Creative Work’s Incubation Phase
I’ve spent the past seven years traveling full-time, living and working in over 30 countries across four continents.
Over this span, I’ve noticed a curious trend emerge.
After leaving a given place, I’ll largely forget about the small, mundane, day to day experiences that defined it while I was there.
Then, almost like clockwork, precisely eleven months later, they’ll start rushing back.
No matter how similar or dissimilar my new location, I’ll start getting regular flashbacks to the places and experiences that took place almost a year prior.
Maybe the bend of a road I’m driving along will remind me of a road I drove a year earlier, or a certain smell in the air will transport me back to another location.
The experiences that come back are almost never the highlights of the trips. Most often, they’re moments of so little consequence that I couldn’t remember them even if I tried.
At first, I thought this was a phenomenon that was unique to me and the way my brain and memory worked, but I’ve come to learn that others experience the same thing themselves.
In this phenomenon, I think there’s a lesson for all of us striving to build creative lives and businesses.
But before we get to that, we need to talk about psychedelics, plant medicine and Vision Quests.
Integration Takes Time
I had been traveling for a couple of years already and had experienced a couple of cycles of this recurrence of memories when I remembered an episode of The Tim Ferriss Show that I had listened to years before.
The episode featured two doctors who researched and worked with plant medicines extensively for a variety of medical uses.
During the course of the interview, one of them told a story about his experience undertaking a Native American Vision Quest.
Following the experience, which involved many days of fasting and isolation in a remote location, he met with the Shaman who had helped prepare for and facilitate the experience. The Shaman asked him what he planned to do in the coming weeks.
“I’ve cleared my schedule and booked a couple of weeks off work,” the doctor responded. “I want to allow myself some time to process and integrate this experience. Then I’d love to talk with you about what I’ve learned.”
The Shaman laughed.
“Come back in a year and tell me what you’ve learned.”
Back on the podcast, Tim’s guests explained how much like an intense experience like a Vision Quest, experiences with plant medicines often take around a year before the real lessons and insights can be fully processed and integrated.
As I thought back to this interview, I realized that maybe this year-long processing period didn’t just apply to plant medicines and Vision Quests, but to our everyday experiences as well, such as my own experiences traveling.
So what does any of this have to do with creating work that matters?
Weathering The Incubation Period
One of the things I’m most fascinated by when it comes to creative work is the lag between when someone first starts creating and publishing their work and the point at which they start to gain traction and build an audience.
I’ve written before about how almost all creative work is built on compounding returns.
You might have also heard the concept referenced in ideas like “the snowball effect” or an “overnight success, years in the making”.
The fact of the matter is that no matter our skill, knowledge, or experience, there’s often an incubation period that we must all work through.
This incubation period typically stretches from the moment we start publishing our work publicly to the point where things start to click.
That clicking might be marked by a noticeable uptick in our metrics–followers, subscribers, downloads, page views–or it might be when we ourselves feel the clarity and focus that precipitates them.
In talking with and observing creators and entrepreneurs across a variety of niches, platforms, and mediums, I’ve noticed that as with travel, Vision Quests, and plant medicines, this incubation period often lasts about a year, give or take.
While we often hope (or even expect) that we’ll be able to start publishing content and immediately build up an audience, this is rarely the case.
We need time to find our voice, work through our ideas, and get feedback from the (likely small) audience we do have before things start to slowly fall into place.
We may be able to shortcut the process by getting more reps in–publishing more frequently, getting more feedback, working through more bad ideas–in a compressed period of time. But I’m convinced that there’s something biological at play which makes it hard to analyze, process, and integrate the lessons and feedback we’ve received in less than a year.
For many of us, this is a frustrating reality.
If we’re putting the time, effort, and perhaps money into creating and publishing content, chances are, we’d like to see the fruits of our labour on a rather shorter time scale.
But if this type of universal incubation period exists and is something we must work through, I like to think that knowing about it allows us to use it to navigate it more effectively.
Making The Most Of Our Incubation
For one, knowing that we’re in our incubation phase allows us to take the pressure off of ourselves.
So often, when we’re doing the work and not seeing results, we jump to the assumption that people just aren’t interested in us or our work.
Knowing that we’re not supposed to gain instant traction, however, allows us to realize that it’s not about us or our work, it’s simply a natural phase of the gauntlet any creative endeavour must work its way through.
Experimentation
Secondly, embodying the idea of incubation allows us more freedom to experiment.
We’ve been conditioned to think that in order to gain traction with an audience, we have to be hyper-focused on a specific topic within a specific niche, speaking to a specific audience avatar.
While this is certainly helpful advice once we’ve reached a certain level of clarity and competency, in my experience, we rarely have the required level of clarity on any of those three criteria when we first start out.
In order to get that clarity, we have to experiment broadly, exploring a variety of topics, voices, and styles until slowly, our unique style, perspective, and voice begin to align.
I’ve been writing and publishing almost every day for the past year, and only in the past month or so (right on schedule) has a through-line begun to emerge regarding what I have to offer as a writer and content creator.
It’s worth noting that while time is an essential ingredient, the more important part of this process is the actual experimentation and exploration.
While creating in a defined voice and style, about a singular topic, to a specific audience for a year will surely improve the quality of your work, it won’t help you find your unique voice.
As most of us have been conditioned to write, speak and create in a standardized, generic voice, this type of exploration is essential if we hope to differentiate ourselves and build an audience around the work we do.
Expectation Recalibration
Lastly, being aware of the incubation period we must work through before we can realistically hope to start gaining traction helps us properly calibrate our expectations.
How many podcasters (or YouTubers or bloggers) give up after publishing ten episodes, having failed to grow any kind of audience?
Creative work takes years of investment to pay off in a meaningful way. Knowing this from the outset allows us to pace ourselves for the long haul, opting for a steady, consistent jog as opposed to a sprint.
Incubation Is An Active Process
While there certainly seems to be a time element associated with this type of creative incubation process, it’s worth re-iterating that you can’t simply wait it out.
The fastest way through is to consistently create. Experiment widely, seek out feedback from those whose opinions you respect, analyze your work and the work of others.
In short, focus on working out the process rather than waiting it out.
It won’t happen overnight, but by staying patient and sticking with the process, the time will come when you hatch from your incubation with clarity, purpose, and a voice that’s entirely your own.
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.
Close the Gap
There’s a gap that often exists between the objective quality of our work, and our subjective valuation of it.
The gap can exist in one of two directions.
On the one hand, we perceive our work to be better than it really is.
On the other, we perceive it to be worse.
These positions aren’t fixed for life. We can and do vacillate between the two, sometimes on a daily basis.
In either case, our job is to close the gap.
When our opinion of our work is that it’s better than it is in reality, we close the gap by improving our skills, knowledge, and taste.
When our work is in fact better than we believe it to be, we close the gap by improving our mindset, confidence, and self-worth.
In both cases, the greatest challenge is not in doing the work to close the gap, but in recognizing it in the first place.
This requires us to take a cool-headed, rational assessment of the work we’ve produced so far, and then decide where we need to go to reach the next level.
Peers, mentors, and accountability partners can be useful mirrors to see ourselves more clearly.
But ultimately, we need to be the ones to own our gap and do the work to close it.
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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.