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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Creative Cruxes: The Key Required to Unlock Any Creative Project
The “crux” of a rock climbing route is the point requiring the single most difficult move—or combination of moves—presented by the climb.
A crux can occur anywhere on a route, from the very first move to the very last and everywhere in between.
Regardless of where it occurs, if you can’t solve the crux, you can’t complete the route, even if you can execute the rest of the route flawlessly.
This simple truth leads many climbers to spend months or even years working only on a specific route’s crux in order to solve it, sometimes camping out on the side of a cliff face, thousands of feet above the ground for days at a time in order to practice.
The idea of cruxes extends to creative projects as well.
Unlike the climbing world, however, where the crux of a given route is often clearly documented in guidebooks and discussed at length among fellow climbers, creative cruxes tend to fly under the radar.
The result is often wasting months on a project we never had a hope of pulling off, all because we couldn’t solve the crux when we arrived at it.
If we want to improve the odds of success for any of our projects, then, it helps if we can identify the crux early, and develop a plan to navigate them.
Many Types of Creative Cruxes
In climbing, some cruxes might only be solved through brute strength.
Others might demand flexibility, balance, or perhaps the ability to leap four feet up and to the left and grab onto a half-inch wide ledge with just your fingertips.
The cruxes at the heart of creative projects vary similarly.
Some projects hinge on access to a specific network of people, such as the hit podcast (and now Netflix series) Song Exploder .
If you’re not familiar with it, the show features interviews with popular musicians in which they break apart their hit songs piece by piece, detailing the inspiration and then the musical construction that went into creating them.
While the premise is interesting in its own right, the massive success of the show hinges on the audiences’ existing awareness of both the artists and the songs.
In other words, famous musicians and famous songs.
Without access to that level of guests, the show would likely fall flat.
In other projects, the crux might be your ability to fulfill the stakes you’ve set for a project with a publicly stated goal.
This is the case for my friend (and CW reader!) Daren Smith, whose 10k Creator project documents his journey to building a 10k audience and $10k/mo creator business.
Without regular momentum toward the goal, the project quickly loses its appeal to any potential audience.
Additional common creative cruxes revolve around budget, access to distribution channels, time, skill, trust, reputation, and an existing level of fame or recognition.
Sometimes these cruxes are easy to spot and plan for well in advance.
Often, however, they’re less obvious and more nuanced.
And it’s these types of cruxes that often result in us spending enormous amounts of time pursuing projects that we never stood a chance at solving in the first place.
Identifying A Project’s Crux
The best way to identify a project’s crux is to start with a simple question.
“What needs to happen for this project to work?”
“Work” in this case is about more than just checking off the tasks required to ship the project.
Instead, it’s about creating something that is worth both our—and others’—time.
This means both creating a meaningful finished product, but also getting the attention and engagement of its intended audience, and—in many cases—getting paid for it.
For each project, the question of what’s required for the project to work will likely turn up a number of outcomes and scenarios that all must be true.
In some cases, a project may have multiple cruxes that must be solved in order to achieve its intended outcome.
In others, the core challenge of executing the project successfully might all funnel back to one key crux, that, when solves, unlocks and opens up the project.
Regardless, identifying a project’s crux points gives us the map of what’s required to achieve success.
It also allows us to properly assess whether or not a project is worth pursuing at all.
In many cases, identifying a crux we can’t solve early in a project’s exploration allows us to avoid wasting significant time, money, and heartbreak on a project that hinged on a crux we never had any hope of solving.
Not All Cruxes Are Created Equal
The crux is usually the single most difficult part of a project.
But depending on our existing skills, personalities, and assets we may have an easier—or harder—time with some cruxes than others.
In climbing, for example, a 6’7” tall climber might be able to simply reach around a given route’s crux negating it entirely.
On another crux, however, that same height might work against them.
The same idea applies to creative cruxes.
The crux of a podcast interviewing YouTubers with 1M+ subscribers about the first video they ever posted online is your ability to access and convince YouTubers with 1M+ subscribers to come on the show.
This is a much easier crux to overcome if you personally are a YouTuber with 1M+ subscribers and are already on a first-name basis with all your potential guests.
The same is true for any crux.
The trick, then, is to pursue projects with cruxes that are particularly challenging to others, but that play to our existing strengths and capabilities.
Observe, Assess, Identify
Every successful project has a crux.
Which means every day, we’re surrounded by opportunities to study and identify them.
When you come across a product, offer, or piece of content that works, ask yourself why.
The answer you come up with will be slightly different for each project you come across, but over time patterns will emerge.
Some projects hinge on the personality, expertise, or perspective of the creator.
Others on distribution, funding, or access.
With each new crux you identify in other creators’ successful projects, you improve your ability to identify the crux points in your own.
And once you’ve identified the crux, you’ve identified the lock that you must find the key to fit in order to unlock the project.
You won’t have access to the keys required to unlock each and every lock you encounter.
But you don’t need to.
You’ve got all the keys you need.
Your goal is to find the right locks to fit them in.
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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All Receiving Begins with Giving
None of us is so altruistic that we expect nothing in return for the work we create.
Yes, we care deeply about our work and the people we create it for, yes we might feel compelled to create regardless of any return on the other side of it.
But we also would love to receive validation for our effort from others. We might want to make a living off of the work. We might even want to become famous, at least in our field, for our work.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to receive. But too often we find our focus slipping more toward the receiving end of the equation, spending less time on the giving.
In order to receive, we have to start by being incredibly generous with the work we create and our marketing to connect it to the people who will benefit.
It can feel like simply creating the work is a generous act, and sometimes it is. But if we’re not careful, as time goes by with little return on the time, energy, and money we’ve poured into our creations, we can pull back, creating shallower, less generous work as we clench up and tighten our fists, trying to squeeze out some sustenance.
In fact, if we’re not seeing the return, we need to be more generous with the work we create. We need to give more of our knowledge, more of our insight, more of our heart to the people we’re seeking to engage with.
If our work isn’t resonating, a good place to start is to ask how we can be more generous.
Every Sunday I publish an exclusive article on my newsletter that hopefully provides a new perspective, encouragement, and maybe even some occasional wisdom.
It’s something I’m proud to create and I’d be honoured to deliver it to you. If you’d like me to share it with you please subscribe here.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads.
https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/what-does-it-mean-to-serve-your-audience-7a86e2c3bf3ahttps://medium.com/@jeremyenns/what-does-it-mean-to-serve-your-audience-7a86e2c3bf3a
The Simple Secret to Getting Better at Marketing
Marketing is seen by many as something of a dark art.
Creators, in particular, may feel entirely competent when it comes to the ideation and creation stage of a project, but when it comes to getting the finished work in front of the people it was intended to benefit, they draw a blank.
If you’ve ever wished you were a better marketer, someone able to connect others to your work, spread ideas, and make a living off the work you do, there’s a simple practice you can do to massively improve the effectiveness of your marketing.
Pay attention to your own reactions to marketing.
As you go through your days, become aware of what marketing, branding, copywriting, and imagery resonates with you and what turns you off. Regardless of your reaction, ask yourself “why?”
I keep a journal of marketing that works on me and why I resonate with it. Most often, I find that the marketing I resonate most strongly with clearly conveys a shared worldview and value system. That might not be the case for you, but it’s an obvious trend for me.
By training yourself to recognize which types of marketing work on you and which don’t, you’ll begin to build your own marketing style and vocabulary which you can then use to start testing in your own marketing.
We’re all bombarded with marketing messages throughout our days, so you’ll have no difficulty in finding material to analyze and build up your knowledge base from.
Just remember. Your views do not reflect everyone’s views. Just because you react one way to certain marketing messages doesn’t mean your audience will react the same way. You’ll still have to apply plenty of experimentation to your messaging and presentation to find the best way to connect with your audience.
But you need a starting point. And the best place to look to analyze the emotional resonance of marketing is inward.
Every Sunday I publish an exclusive article on my newsletter that hopefully provides a new perspective, encouragement, and maybe even some occasional wisdom.
It’s something I’m proud to create and I’d be honoured to deliver it to you. If you’d like me to share it with you please subscribe here.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads.
You Don’t Need All the Answers
You’re probably not exactly where you’d like to be in life right now.
Your business isn’t as profitable as you’d like it to be.
You don’t have enough time to do everything you want to be doing
You don’t see your friends and family as often as you’d like to.
You have a few more pounds around your waist than you’d like to have.
You can picture the life you’d love to have but you don’t have the answers on how to create it.
Sometimes it’s not about having the answers, though.
It can be enough to accept that while you don’t have the answers today, you’re on a path that will lead you to the answers as long as you keep moving forward.
It might not be tomorrow, next month, or even next year. But by building small habits, practices, and systems you can develop the confidence that every day you’re moving one step closer to finding the answers, and the life, you’re seeking.
Learn. Meet new people. Ask more questions. Admit you don’t know. Commit time to deep work. Take the long view. Find the things that help and do more of them more regularly.
Accept that you don’t need all the answers today in order to take one small step closer to where you want to be.
Take comfort in the fact that you’re moving in the right direction and enjoy the journey.
Every Sunday I publish an exclusive article on my newsletter that hopefully provides a new perspective, encouragement, and maybe even some occasional wisdom.
It’s something I’m proud to create and I’d be honoured to deliver it to you. If you’d like me to share it with you please subscribe here.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads.
https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/this-will-do-for-now-67604a1a42b1https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/this-will-do-for-now-67604a1a42b1
The Answers Are Right in Front of You
I’m sorry to burst your bubble, but someone’s already done that creative thing you were looking to do.
Maybe it was starting a podcast teaching people how to live healthier lives, maybe it was starting a blog helping people become better photographers, maybe it was a YouTube channel documenting your trip around the world.
Whatever your big, unique idea was, it’s been done.
Actually, more likely, it’s been done to death.
For almost any idea imaginable, there are multiple other creators teaching the same thing, sharing similar content and building audiences around the topic you want to build yours around.
This is a good thing, however.
If someone’s already done it you know it’s possible for you to do it as well. Better yet, if you’re willing to do the research, they’ve probably left you a decent roadmap that will give you a good idea of how to get started or get to the next level.
Everything new is a remixing and reimagining of everything that’s come before. New marketing techniques and strategies are built on top of old ones.
You now have multiple decades of examples of people building audiences online to gain insight and take away lessons from. The mediums and technology might have changed, but the core principals of connecting with the people you seek to engage with have not.
The answers might not be laid out for you on a silver platter. You might have to look to other mediums, audiences or topics, but make no mistake…
The answers you seek are right in front of you if you choose to look for them.
Every Sunday I publish an exclusive article on my newsletter that hopefully provides a new perspective, encouragement, and maybe even some occasional wisdom.
It’s something I’m proud to create and I’d be honoured to deliver it to you. If you’d like me to share it with you please subscribe here.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads.
https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/marketing-hacks-wont-work-be860c8e7463https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/marketing-hacks-wont-work-be860c8e7463
Revisit Bad Ideas
For years, I’ve kept a notebook that I carry with me at all times to record ideas.
At times this book has been a real, paper, physical notebook, and more recently it’s shifted to an app on my phone.
Over the years I’ve written down probably thousands of ideas, from fully mapped out business or product ideas to thoughts, phrases, or even single words that I found interesting at the time.
A lot of the ideas I write down are good, or at least interesting. Almost every blog post I write has its beginnings on this list, as do many of our products and offerings at Counterweight Creative.
But a lot of the ideas — when I revisit them sometimes only a day or a week later — are just bad. Sometimes even entirely nonsensical.
I don’t delete the bad ideas, however.
Occasionally, I’ll go back through my idea list to review and organize everything I’ve written down, and this practice always surprises me. What I’ve found is that often the ideas I thought of as “bad” at one point or another are often not, in fact, bad ideas after all.
Rather, with the perspective of time and different circumstances (sometimes I’ll go back a year or more), I find that while some ideas certainly were bad and are still bad, many of them were simply not a good fit for who I was or where I was at when I first wrote them down.
When revisiting my old notes, many of the ideas I had initially dismissed and passed over have become the projects that I’ve become most excited about going forward.
Bad is subjective. It’s subject to timing, circumstances, present skill set, knowledge, and a host of other variables. If you trust your thought process, it’s worth regularly revisiting those gifts from your subconscious that may have not made sense at the time.
What was a bad idea for you in the past might inspire you in the present, and be just the thing to take you where you’re looking to go in the future.
Every Sunday I publish an exclusive article on my newsletter that hopefully provides a new perspective, encouragement, and maybe even some occasional wisdom.
It’s something I’m proud to create and I’d be honoured to deliver it to you. If you’d like me to share it with you please subscribe here.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads.
https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/ideas-need-leaders-25950eaa90bhttps://medium.com/@jeremyenns/ideas-need-leaders-25950eaa90b
What Are You Saying?
If you’re looking to build an audience, it’s not just enough to create good work.
Yes, your work needs to be good, and while work that meets (and maybe even exceeds) the minimum bar of acceptability might be one of the only necessary ingredients if you’re creating a commodity, chances are, you’re dreaming bigger than that.
No, in order to build an audience around the work you do, you — and your work — must have something to say.
There’s no one specific stance or opinion all creators should take, that’s up to you to figure out. But your work needs to tell a consistent coherent story that resonates with your audience.
Often, this story might center on how your work was designed and created intentionally to serve people who were underrepresented in your space, or maybe as a pushback to a worldview or way of being that is no longer working for the people you’re seeking to serve.
At Counterweight Creative, we have a client who’s a dietician and health coach whose messaging revolves around creating a non-sexualized space for women who are interested in living healthier lives but who are sick of scrolling through Instagram feeds of scantily clad fitness models who look nothing like them.
Her methods are likely very similar to a lot of other health coaches who may run the very Instagram accounts she’s pushing back against, but her messaging tells a very different story and appeals to a very different group of people.
The story you tell must be true, and if you want it to resonate with others, it will need to resonate with you first.
Your story should be chosen thoughtfully. It’s the through-line that is going to run through everything you create after all, and it’s essential to be consistent in your messaging.
The best way to find a story that will resonate with the people you’re seeking to engage with is to talk to them. Discover their dreams, challenges, and frustrations and then create work that speaks to those sentiments.
You don’t have to have the perfect messaging right out of the gate, you probably won’t. Tweak and experiment until you’ve found a story that resonates with a small group of people and then run with it.
Most of all, just make sure you’re saying something.
Every Sunday I publish an exclusive article on my newsletter that hopefully provides a new perspective, encouragement, and maybe even some occasional wisdom.
It’s something I’m proud to create and I’d be honoured to deliver it to you. If you’d like me to share it with you please subscribe here.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads.
https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/your-work-good-enough-11e82fe6178bhttps://medium.com/@jeremyenns/your-work-good-enough-11e82fe6178b
As the Crow Flies Isn’t Usually the Most Efficient Route
Sometimes there’s no road leading directly from where you are to where you want to go.
The most direct route might be to bushwhack your way in a straight line to your destination, but that doesn’t mean it’s the most efficient or fastest.
Sometimes the best route is to orient yourself in the general direction you need to head and follow the existing roads.
Then you can decide to either cut back to your destination on a back road or begin your bushwhacking at the shortest possible point between the main road and your target.
Unless you can grow wings, as the crow flies is rarely a feasible option. Better to avoid getting hung up on “if only’s”, look for an alternative — if roundabout — route, and then get moving.
Every Sunday I publish an exclusive article on my newsletter that hopefully provides a new perspective, encouragement, and maybe even some occasional wisdom.
It’s something I’m proud to create and I’d be honoured to deliver it to you. If you’d like me to share it with you please subscribe here.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads.
https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/facing-the-gap-253b7ac6b56chttps://medium.com/@jeremyenns/facing-the-gap-253b7ac6b56c
Pick a Gear
Think about growing your business like driving a car.
The road to your end destination is winding, hilly, and varied, and it requires you to shift gears every now and then in order to most effectively navigate the terrain.
Sure, you can try to crawl up hills in fifth gear, and you just might have enough momentum to do it. But you might not. To avoid stalling out before you reach the summit, it might make more sense to downshift, simplify, and take on the hill in a gear better suited for the climb.
Likewise, when you hit an open, level straightaway, you can certainly drive in any gear you want, but you’ll make more progress, faster by shifting up to take advantage of the favorable conditions.
The mistake is not so much in choosing the wrong gear entirely, however. Most of us probably rarely feel that we are in precisely the right gear for our current conditions.
The mistake is to get caught between gears, to refuse to commit to a single gear in which to drive.
When we fail to commit, we can rev our engines all we want without moving ourselves forward, or worse, end up grinding the gears down to nothing as we frenetically try to jump between all of them without committing to any.
Any gear will get you where you’re looking to go, some faster, some slower, some more or less suited to your present conditions.
But when the time comes to shift down or shift up, make the decision fully and commit to the gear you want to drive in. Things stop moving when you get stuck between.
Every Sunday I publish an exclusive article on my newsletter that hopefully provides a new perspective, encouragement, and maybe even some occasional wisdom.
It’s something I’m proud to create and I’d be honoured to deliver it to you. If you’d like me to share it with you please subscribe here.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads.
https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/hunting-blind-spots-2ccbd619887ahttps://medium.com/@jeremyenns/hunting-blind-spots-2ccbd619887a
Facing The Gap
Imagine a fissure in the Earth between where you’re currently standing and where you want to be.
It’s deep, dark, and you can’t see the bottom. You can’t even see the other side.
Between the life you have and the life you want, there’s almost certainly a gap like this that you’ll reach at some point.
It might be a gap in knowledge, skill, connections, mindset or any number of other variables, but regardless of the area in which you’re currently lacking, you’re going to need to step into the unknown to cross that gap and get to where you really want to be.
The gap is not a short little hop you can cross through a few days of concerted effort, however.
No, the problem with the gap is that you can have no idea of how wide it is and what’s involved in getting through it.
There’s no going over or around the gap. The only way to cross it is to lower yourself down into it and face whatever comes your way.
No matter how bad your current situation and how alluring the life you could have on the other side, convincing yourself to face traversing the gap is enough to plant a healthy dose of doubt in your mind about whether the journey is worth it.
And so you, like so many people, might choose to resign yourself to live out your days with the known, even if the known is uncomfortable, painful, stressful, and entirely not what your soul truly wants.
Transition periods are full of pain, uncertainty, and stress. They require us to face all that we don’t know, humble ourselves in order to improve ourselves, make sacrifices, work harder than we thought we were capable of, and grapple with how much we want the lives we say we do.
The other side of our gap might be our dream life, but for too many of us, the thought of the short term turmoil, struggle, and uncertainty of the transition period to realizing that life keeps us from taking even the first steps toward it.
If we can recognize the discomfort, the pain, and the uncertainty that comes with lowering ourselves into the gap, we can prepare ourselves to better tackle them when they arrive.
Don’t let the fear of short-term discomfort keep you from the reality of long term happiness. The only way to get where you’re looking to go is by setting your course, facing down your fear, and putting one foot in front of the other.
Every Sunday I publish an exclusive article on my newsletter that hopefully provides a new perspective, encouragement, and maybe even some occasional wisdom.
It’s something I’m proud to create and I’d be honoured to deliver it to you. If you’d like me to share it with you please subscribe here.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads.
https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/find-your-guiding-stars-30c025467e30https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/find-your-guiding-stars-30c025467e30
Creative Systems
To many creators, the idea of systems being helpful, let alone essential to creativity is anathema.
There’s a deeply ingrained belief in many of us that the purest form of creativity — the kind the produces the most transcendent work with the most depth — can only come from sudden, sporadic bursts of inspiration.
Systems evoke images of factories and assembly lines, decidedly uncreative work, and as a result, we find ourselves rejecting the basic concept of systems on principal.
But there are many types of systems, some of which can greatly lubricate the creative process and allow us to get to the crux of what we’re trying to say with our work faster.
These systems can be set up within our creative process itself or to simplify the rest of our lives and make more space for our creativity to thrive.
When I used to write and record music, I had a highly systematized folder structure on my computer. I had a system for storing my instruments and recording equipment so that within two minutes of having an idea, I could be recording it and working on it.
These were all organizational systems that enabled me to bypass what had previously been a tedious setup process that often resulted in the idea dying while I was busy finding and plugging in microphones, cables, hard drives, and so on.
These days, when it comes to writing my daily blog posts, I have a similar system of digital organization, wherein I can sit down at my computer first thing in the morning and have everything I need to get started writing ready to go, laid out the night before.
Systems can be routines, practices, organizational structures, or automation that minimizes the tedium that can often accompany certain parts of the creative process.
I have automation set up to continually publish and promote my favourite articles, for example, something that I know I won’t set aside the time to do on my own.
There are always going to be the parts of the creative process that we thrive on, and those that we put off due to lack of time, expertise, or interest.
When it comes to building systems that enable your creativity, it’s not about creating assembly lines to duplicate your past work.
Rather, it’s about creating systems to minimize your time spent in the aspects you don’t enjoy, and freeing up more time, space, and energy to do the work only you can do.
Every Sunday I publish an exclusive article on my newsletter that hopefully provides a new perspective, encouragement, and maybe even some occasional wisdom.
It’s something I’m proud to create and I’d be honoured to deliver it to you. If you’d like me to share it with you please subscribe here.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads.
https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/creativity-fills-vacuum-4ce3ce4b1549https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/creativity-fills-vacuum-4ce3ce4b1549
Creative Wayfinding For Ambitious Optimists.
Bring the Enthusiasm
Your content can be solid, your value proposition obvious, and your audience targeting impeccable.
But without genuine enthusiasm from you, as the creator, salesperson, and entire marketing department, it often all falls flat.
Before you can convince others that it’s worth their time, attention, and money to listen to your podcast, sign up for your program or buy your product, you need to be convinced of it yourself.
People will get excited if the offer is a fit, but you need to set the tone.
If you can’t bring the enthusiasm for the work you put out, ask yourself why. It might be that it’s not quite at the level it needs to be at yet. Go back and work on it until it’s good enough, until it’s something you’re truly excited to share with others.
But remember, at some point, you need to ship the work, and if you want it to be met with enthusiasm, you have to bring it yourself.
All Receiving Begins with Giving
None of us is so altruistic that we expect nothing in return for the work we create.
Yes, we care deeply about our work and the people we create it for, yes we might feel compelled to create regardless of any return on the other side of it.
But we also would love to receive validation for our effort from others. We might want to make a living off of the work. We might even want to become famous, at least in our field, for our work.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to receive. But too often we find our focus slipping more toward the receiving end of the equation, spending less time on the giving.
In order to receive, we have to start by being incredibly generous with the work we create and our marketing to connect it to the people who will benefit.
It can feel like simply creating the work is a generous act, and sometimes it is. But if we’re not careful, as time goes by with little return on the time, energy, and money we’ve poured into our creations, we can pull back, creating shallower, less generous work as we clench up and tighten our fists, trying to squeeze out some sustenance.
In fact, if we’re not seeing the return, we need to be more generous with the work we create. We need to give more of our knowledge, more of our insight, more of our heart to the people we’re seeking to engage with.
If our work isn’t resonating, a good place to start is to ask how we can be more generous.
Every Sunday I publish an exclusive article on my newsletter that hopefully provides a new perspective, encouragement, and maybe even some occasional wisdom.
It’s something I’m proud to create and I’d be honoured to deliver it to you. If you’d like me to share it with you please subscribe here.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads.
https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/what-does-it-mean-to-serve-your-audience-7a86e2c3bf3ahttps://medium.com/@jeremyenns/what-does-it-mean-to-serve-your-audience-7a86e2c3bf3a
The Simple Secret to Getting Better at Marketing
Marketing is seen by many as something of a dark art.
Creators, in particular, may feel entirely competent when it comes to the ideation and creation stage of a project, but when it comes to getting the finished work in front of the people it was intended to benefit, they draw a blank.
If you’ve ever wished you were a better marketer, someone able to connect others to your work, spread ideas, and make a living off the work you do, there’s a simple practice you can do to massively improve the effectiveness of your marketing.
Pay attention to your own reactions to marketing.
As you go through your days, become aware of what marketing, branding, copywriting, and imagery resonates with you and what turns you off. Regardless of your reaction, ask yourself “why?”
I keep a journal of marketing that works on me and why I resonate with it. Most often, I find that the marketing I resonate most strongly with clearly conveys a shared worldview and value system. That might not be the case for you, but it’s an obvious trend for me.
By training yourself to recognize which types of marketing work on you and which don’t, you’ll begin to build your own marketing style and vocabulary which you can then use to start testing in your own marketing.
We’re all bombarded with marketing messages throughout our days, so you’ll have no difficulty in finding material to analyze and build up your knowledge base from.
Just remember. Your views do not reflect everyone’s views. Just because you react one way to certain marketing messages doesn’t mean your audience will react the same way. You’ll still have to apply plenty of experimentation to your messaging and presentation to find the best way to connect with your audience.
But you need a starting point. And the best place to look to analyze the emotional resonance of marketing is inward.
Every Sunday I publish an exclusive article on my newsletter that hopefully provides a new perspective, encouragement, and maybe even some occasional wisdom.
It’s something I’m proud to create and I’d be honoured to deliver it to you. If you’d like me to share it with you please subscribe here.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads.
You Don’t Need All the Answers
You’re probably not exactly where you’d like to be in life right now.
Your business isn’t as profitable as you’d like it to be.
You don’t have enough time to do everything you want to be doing
You don’t see your friends and family as often as you’d like to.
You have a few more pounds around your waist than you’d like to have.
You can picture the life you’d love to have but you don’t have the answers on how to create it.
Sometimes it’s not about having the answers, though.
It can be enough to accept that while you don’t have the answers today, you’re on a path that will lead you to the answers as long as you keep moving forward.
It might not be tomorrow, next month, or even next year. But by building small habits, practices, and systems you can develop the confidence that every day you’re moving one step closer to finding the answers, and the life, you’re seeking.
Learn. Meet new people. Ask more questions. Admit you don’t know. Commit time to deep work. Take the long view. Find the things that help and do more of them more regularly.
Accept that you don’t need all the answers today in order to take one small step closer to where you want to be.
Take comfort in the fact that you’re moving in the right direction and enjoy the journey.
Every Sunday I publish an exclusive article on my newsletter that hopefully provides a new perspective, encouragement, and maybe even some occasional wisdom.
It’s something I’m proud to create and I’d be honoured to deliver it to you. If you’d like me to share it with you please subscribe here.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads.
https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/this-will-do-for-now-67604a1a42b1https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/this-will-do-for-now-67604a1a42b1
The Answers Are Right in Front of You
I’m sorry to burst your bubble, but someone’s already done that creative thing you were looking to do.
Maybe it was starting a podcast teaching people how to live healthier lives, maybe it was starting a blog helping people become better photographers, maybe it was a YouTube channel documenting your trip around the world.
Whatever your big, unique idea was, it’s been done.
Actually, more likely, it’s been done to death.
For almost any idea imaginable, there are multiple other creators teaching the same thing, sharing similar content and building audiences around the topic you want to build yours around.
This is a good thing, however.
If someone’s already done it you know it’s possible for you to do it as well. Better yet, if you’re willing to do the research, they’ve probably left you a decent roadmap that will give you a good idea of how to get started or get to the next level.
Everything new is a remixing and reimagining of everything that’s come before. New marketing techniques and strategies are built on top of old ones.
You now have multiple decades of examples of people building audiences online to gain insight and take away lessons from. The mediums and technology might have changed, but the core principals of connecting with the people you seek to engage with have not.
The answers might not be laid out for you on a silver platter. You might have to look to other mediums, audiences or topics, but make no mistake…
The answers you seek are right in front of you if you choose to look for them.
Every Sunday I publish an exclusive article on my newsletter that hopefully provides a new perspective, encouragement, and maybe even some occasional wisdom.
It’s something I’m proud to create and I’d be honoured to deliver it to you. If you’d like me to share it with you please subscribe here.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads.
https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/marketing-hacks-wont-work-be860c8e7463https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/marketing-hacks-wont-work-be860c8e7463
Revisit Bad Ideas
For years, I’ve kept a notebook that I carry with me at all times to record ideas.
At times this book has been a real, paper, physical notebook, and more recently it’s shifted to an app on my phone.
Over the years I’ve written down probably thousands of ideas, from fully mapped out business or product ideas to thoughts, phrases, or even single words that I found interesting at the time.
A lot of the ideas I write down are good, or at least interesting. Almost every blog post I write has its beginnings on this list, as do many of our products and offerings at Counterweight Creative.
But a lot of the ideas — when I revisit them sometimes only a day or a week later — are just bad. Sometimes even entirely nonsensical.
I don’t delete the bad ideas, however.
Occasionally, I’ll go back through my idea list to review and organize everything I’ve written down, and this practice always surprises me. What I’ve found is that often the ideas I thought of as “bad” at one point or another are often not, in fact, bad ideas after all.
Rather, with the perspective of time and different circumstances (sometimes I’ll go back a year or more), I find that while some ideas certainly were bad and are still bad, many of them were simply not a good fit for who I was or where I was at when I first wrote them down.
When revisiting my old notes, many of the ideas I had initially dismissed and passed over have become the projects that I’ve become most excited about going forward.
Bad is subjective. It’s subject to timing, circumstances, present skill set, knowledge, and a host of other variables. If you trust your thought process, it’s worth regularly revisiting those gifts from your subconscious that may have not made sense at the time.
What was a bad idea for you in the past might inspire you in the present, and be just the thing to take you where you’re looking to go in the future.
Every Sunday I publish an exclusive article on my newsletter that hopefully provides a new perspective, encouragement, and maybe even some occasional wisdom.
It’s something I’m proud to create and I’d be honoured to deliver it to you. If you’d like me to share it with you please subscribe here.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads.
https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/ideas-need-leaders-25950eaa90bhttps://medium.com/@jeremyenns/ideas-need-leaders-25950eaa90b
What Are You Saying?
If you’re looking to build an audience, it’s not just enough to create good work.
Yes, your work needs to be good, and while work that meets (and maybe even exceeds) the minimum bar of acceptability might be one of the only necessary ingredients if you’re creating a commodity, chances are, you’re dreaming bigger than that.
No, in order to build an audience around the work you do, you — and your work — must have something to say.
There’s no one specific stance or opinion all creators should take, that’s up to you to figure out. But your work needs to tell a consistent coherent story that resonates with your audience.
Often, this story might center on how your work was designed and created intentionally to serve people who were underrepresented in your space, or maybe as a pushback to a worldview or way of being that is no longer working for the people you’re seeking to serve.
At Counterweight Creative, we have a client who’s a dietician and health coach whose messaging revolves around creating a non-sexualized space for women who are interested in living healthier lives but who are sick of scrolling through Instagram feeds of scantily clad fitness models who look nothing like them.
Her methods are likely very similar to a lot of other health coaches who may run the very Instagram accounts she’s pushing back against, but her messaging tells a very different story and appeals to a very different group of people.
The story you tell must be true, and if you want it to resonate with others, it will need to resonate with you first.
Your story should be chosen thoughtfully. It’s the through-line that is going to run through everything you create after all, and it’s essential to be consistent in your messaging.
The best way to find a story that will resonate with the people you’re seeking to engage with is to talk to them. Discover their dreams, challenges, and frustrations and then create work that speaks to those sentiments.
You don’t have to have the perfect messaging right out of the gate, you probably won’t. Tweak and experiment until you’ve found a story that resonates with a small group of people and then run with it.
Most of all, just make sure you’re saying something.
Every Sunday I publish an exclusive article on my newsletter that hopefully provides a new perspective, encouragement, and maybe even some occasional wisdom.
It’s something I’m proud to create and I’d be honoured to deliver it to you. If you’d like me to share it with you please subscribe here.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads.
https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/your-work-good-enough-11e82fe6178bhttps://medium.com/@jeremyenns/your-work-good-enough-11e82fe6178b
As the Crow Flies Isn’t Usually the Most Efficient Route
Sometimes there’s no road leading directly from where you are to where you want to go.
The most direct route might be to bushwhack your way in a straight line to your destination, but that doesn’t mean it’s the most efficient or fastest.
Sometimes the best route is to orient yourself in the general direction you need to head and follow the existing roads.
Then you can decide to either cut back to your destination on a back road or begin your bushwhacking at the shortest possible point between the main road and your target.
Unless you can grow wings, as the crow flies is rarely a feasible option. Better to avoid getting hung up on “if only’s”, look for an alternative — if roundabout — route, and then get moving.
Every Sunday I publish an exclusive article on my newsletter that hopefully provides a new perspective, encouragement, and maybe even some occasional wisdom.
It’s something I’m proud to create and I’d be honoured to deliver it to you. If you’d like me to share it with you please subscribe here.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads.
https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/facing-the-gap-253b7ac6b56chttps://medium.com/@jeremyenns/facing-the-gap-253b7ac6b56c
Pick a Gear
Think about growing your business like driving a car.
The road to your end destination is winding, hilly, and varied, and it requires you to shift gears every now and then in order to most effectively navigate the terrain.
Sure, you can try to crawl up hills in fifth gear, and you just might have enough momentum to do it. But you might not. To avoid stalling out before you reach the summit, it might make more sense to downshift, simplify, and take on the hill in a gear better suited for the climb.
Likewise, when you hit an open, level straightaway, you can certainly drive in any gear you want, but you’ll make more progress, faster by shifting up to take advantage of the favorable conditions.
The mistake is not so much in choosing the wrong gear entirely, however. Most of us probably rarely feel that we are in precisely the right gear for our current conditions.
The mistake is to get caught between gears, to refuse to commit to a single gear in which to drive.
When we fail to commit, we can rev our engines all we want without moving ourselves forward, or worse, end up grinding the gears down to nothing as we frenetically try to jump between all of them without committing to any.
Any gear will get you where you’re looking to go, some faster, some slower, some more or less suited to your present conditions.
But when the time comes to shift down or shift up, make the decision fully and commit to the gear you want to drive in. Things stop moving when you get stuck between.
Every Sunday I publish an exclusive article on my newsletter that hopefully provides a new perspective, encouragement, and maybe even some occasional wisdom.
It’s something I’m proud to create and I’d be honoured to deliver it to you. If you’d like me to share it with you please subscribe here.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads.
https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/hunting-blind-spots-2ccbd619887ahttps://medium.com/@jeremyenns/hunting-blind-spots-2ccbd619887a
Facing The Gap
Imagine a fissure in the Earth between where you’re currently standing and where you want to be.
It’s deep, dark, and you can’t see the bottom. You can’t even see the other side.
Between the life you have and the life you want, there’s almost certainly a gap like this that you’ll reach at some point.
It might be a gap in knowledge, skill, connections, mindset or any number of other variables, but regardless of the area in which you’re currently lacking, you’re going to need to step into the unknown to cross that gap and get to where you really want to be.
The gap is not a short little hop you can cross through a few days of concerted effort, however.
No, the problem with the gap is that you can have no idea of how wide it is and what’s involved in getting through it.
There’s no going over or around the gap. The only way to cross it is to lower yourself down into it and face whatever comes your way.
No matter how bad your current situation and how alluring the life you could have on the other side, convincing yourself to face traversing the gap is enough to plant a healthy dose of doubt in your mind about whether the journey is worth it.
And so you, like so many people, might choose to resign yourself to live out your days with the known, even if the known is uncomfortable, painful, stressful, and entirely not what your soul truly wants.
Transition periods are full of pain, uncertainty, and stress. They require us to face all that we don’t know, humble ourselves in order to improve ourselves, make sacrifices, work harder than we thought we were capable of, and grapple with how much we want the lives we say we do.
The other side of our gap might be our dream life, but for too many of us, the thought of the short term turmoil, struggle, and uncertainty of the transition period to realizing that life keeps us from taking even the first steps toward it.
If we can recognize the discomfort, the pain, and the uncertainty that comes with lowering ourselves into the gap, we can prepare ourselves to better tackle them when they arrive.
Don’t let the fear of short-term discomfort keep you from the reality of long term happiness. The only way to get where you’re looking to go is by setting your course, facing down your fear, and putting one foot in front of the other.
Every Sunday I publish an exclusive article on my newsletter that hopefully provides a new perspective, encouragement, and maybe even some occasional wisdom.
It’s something I’m proud to create and I’d be honoured to deliver it to you. If you’d like me to share it with you please subscribe here.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads.
https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/find-your-guiding-stars-30c025467e30https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/find-your-guiding-stars-30c025467e30
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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.