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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Thinking In Drafts: A Subtle Mental Shift to Unlock More & Better Creative Work
A few years ago, I heard author Tim Grahl give a talk about his experience with writing his fantastic book on making a living as a creative, Running Down A Dream .
He shared that before publishing the book, he’d been working on some version of of it for nearly ten years.
Many of the drafts during that time involved scrapping nearly everything he had previously written and starting from scratch.
In some versions, the content wasn’t right.
In some versions, the tone wasn’t right.
In some versions, everything seemed like it should have been right… but it still felt wrong in some intangible way.
Over the course of those ten years, Tim shared each of the many iterations of his book with a tight-knit group of guides, peers, and accountability partners who understood his goals, style, and potential, and asked for their unvarnished feedback.
That feedback was often painful. Good feedback usually is.
But draft by draft by draft, Tim was able to take that feedback and improve each version of the book until it was good enough to finally ship.
Not perfect, perhaps, but good enough to put out into the world with pride.
Tim’s story sounds extreme.
But for many creative fields, a years-long process of painful revisions is entirely normal.
We know every movie has multiple cuts, test screenings, revisions, and even reshoots before the final, public release.
We know the initial manuscript of a book is only the very first in a long series of milestones on the road to getting it published.
And yet we rarely apply the idea of working in drafts to our own creative practices.
Which is a shame.
Because the emotional and creative dynamics of working on a draft are dramatically different from working on something we know will be the definitive, finished product.
Drafts Dial Down the Pressure
Whether it’s a big project like a product launch or website, or a smaller piece of content like a newsletter issue, podcast episode, or YouTube video, we tend to approach everything we publish as though we only have one chance to get it right.
There are a couple of problems with this approach, however, that undermine our long-term progress.
The first and most obvious problem is classic perfectionism.
We’re less likely to ever ship our work when we only have one shot to get it right. Because how could we possibly create the best version of any project now when we know that by next month (let alone next year) we’ll be more knowledgeable, talented, and capable?
The second problem is that if we do manage to ship it, we tend to put too much emotional stock in the feedback we receive.
A positive reception can lead us to believe our work is done. No further improvements required.
A single piece of negative feedback on the other hand might convince us that the entire idea is stupid and not worth investing in further.
Both responses sell our work short.
Unlike finished versions, the goal of a draft is simple: Create something that is merely good enough to get the next round of feedback on.
Good enough to put into the world and assess how the world interacts with it before heading back to the drawing board to work on the next draft.
When we approach our work in drafts we tap into a bit of creative magic.
It allows us some detachment from criticism as we know we’ll have an opportunity to make improvements in the future.
This allows us to ship our work more boldly, understanding that of course there are flaws! Of course it’s not perfect! It’s only a draft after all, not the finished product.
In fact, the finished product might never arrive.
But thinking in drafts allows us to adopt a mindset of experimentation, iteration, and bravery as we put out version after version after version of our work out into the world for it to collide with, shape, and be shaped by in return.
Even if we never achieve perfection, however, the continual pursuit of it has a way of opening doors and leading to unexpected creative success.
Results Come From Iteration, Not Perfection
I recently attended a workshop where Tiago Forte, the creator behind the wildly successful course (and now book) Building A Second Brain talked about his process for building the course into a multi-million dollar business.
He started by sharing this graph which details the cohort launches from June 2014 to July 2022.
Then he gave this context.
“Notice the left, half of this graph, there are cohort launches in there but you can barely tell, right?
I basically consider cohorts one through nine as betas.
In retrospect, they were tests. They were so small and insignificant compared to what would happen later that all that really mattered for those first nine cohorts was that we learned, and that the revenue was just enough to make it to the next cohort.”
That’s thinking in drafts.
Like Tiago, I’ve applied thinking in drafts to big projects like Podcast Marketing Academy where each launch and cohort builds a little bit on the last .
But I’ve also applied it to smaller—even micro—projects.
Take this newsletter, for example.
With three years of writing to pull from, I’ve started revisiting my favourite ideas, updating them, and republishing them in the newsletter a second time.
Often, the second draft of an idea is almost unrecognizable from the first.
Take this issue, which I originally published in October 2020. I was happy enough with the issue at the time, but I didn’t feel like I’d fully got my head around the idea.
In revisiting it, I’ve been able to update it with new ideas and examples I’ve picked up as my thinking has evolved.
Being a topic that I’ve already thought about on a near-daily basis for more than two years already, I have no doubt that this draft will be further revised and updated in the future.
Nothing Is Set In Stone
While thinking in drafts is valuable as part of your creative practice, its most liberating use case may be in choosing to view your life and career through the lens of drafts.
Sure you might not be where you’d like to be right now. But no matter where that is, it’s only one in a series of continually improving drafts.
Your goal today, this month, or this year is not to achieve or become the perfect final version of yourself.
Your goal today (and every day) is simply to put yourself out into the world and collect feedback, so that tomorrow’s version can be a tiny bit better.
We can approach our work and our lives with a whole lot less seriousness when the next thing we do isn’t the be-all end-all, definitive version of what we’re trying to create or who we’re trying to be.
If you’re not getting the results you’d like with the work you create, that’s not a referendum on you or the idea behind your work.
Instead, it’s simply a sign that there’s more work to be done. That you need to write a few more drafts to get your work and yourself to where they need to be.
Identify your group of guides, peers, and accountability partners who understand what you’re trying to achieve. Ask them regularly to give you their unvarnished feedback.
Then get back to work and make the next draft.
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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Why Do You Exist?
Why do you exist?
The answer to this question forms the basis of any brand story that resonates.
And a brand story that resonates is essential to building a brand that attracts the people who will help you make the change you’re looking to make in the world.
Your story and your mission can reach far beyond the product you sell. Your product can be a bland commodity, but if the story behind it resonates, you can become the one and only to a certain group of people.
I don’t know that I’ve ever spent more than $70 on jeans before, but after watching the brand story mini-documentary for Huit Denim Co. I fell in love with their story and their ethos and had to step away from my computer to avoid filling up my cart with $300 pairs of jeans from their online store.
I don’t need more jeans. Before watching the video I didn’t even want more jeans. After watching the video, however, I wanted to support people doing work that I believed in.
Their story resonated with me.
Does your brand story have that impact on the people who hear it?
A good brand story is not about your product. Rather, it’s about emotion, belief, the reason behind the what, why and how you do what you do, in a way that no one else can.
A good brand story is about people. This might include you, your team, your customers, or your community. Regardless of the people involved, however, it’s essential to show the connection you and your work facilitate.
Your story will take time and thought to hone, perfect, and learn to tell in a way that resonates most deeply with the people who are intended to hear it. Don’t rush it.
But don’t neglect it. If told right, your story is one of the most powerful assets you have.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!
If you’re ready to build your audience and become the go-to authority in your space using podcasting, reach out to our team at Counterweight Creative and see how we can help.
https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/best-in-the-world-66ec53d9adeb
Don’t Let Me off Easy
We all want to quit before the tank is truly empty.
Despite the high standards we set for ourselves and our work, we often hold just a little bit back, settling for something complete, functional, but falling shy of remarkable.
If our goal is to create products, services and experiences worth talking about then, how do we build the structure to do so?
Maybe the most important part of a structure designed to create remarkable work is the selection of people we surround ourselves with and invite into our creative process.
Their role is not to flatter us, to be in awe of the incredible work we’ve created, to build up our egos so we can face down The Hard Stuff that comes with creative work. We need people like that, but we also need others.
We need people who know us, what we’re truly capable of, and won’t let us off the hook for failing to live up to the potential they know we have.
When they look at what we’ve created, they’ll acknowledge it, honour it, and then push.
They’ll ask why we made this choice over that, dig into what we’re trying to achieve and point out potential flaws or shortcomings. They’ll tell us flat out that they know we have more to give on this project if we choose to do so, and they’ll do all of this with generosity and kindness.
The remarkable is often contained in the last few drops of the tank, well past the point at which we’ve created something functional.
We just need to ensure we have someone to help us squeeze out those last few drops.
If you’re ready to build your audience and become the go-to authority in your space using podcasting, reach out to our team at Counterweight Creative and see how we can help.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!
https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/creating-remarkable-work-c3b57b25ea7chttps://medium.com/@jeremyenns/creating-remarkable-work-c3b57b25ea7c
Building Supportive Creative Communities
You know the feeling when you open your email and read a message from someone who has honestly, genuinely been impacted by the work you do?
While they might not seem to be as important as landing a big new client or pulling off a successful launch, as creators and entrepreneurs, these small moments of acknowledgment are often the lifelines that keep us going while buried deep in the grind.
We’ve all experienced the feeling of putting our heart and soul into our work and then releasing it into the void, unsure if anyone is even engaging with it let alone being impacted by it.
I’m a believer that you get what you give, and as such, the more positivity you put out to your fellow creators, the more you’ll find coming back to you.
If we want to foster supportive creative communities, we need to take the lead in creating a culture of generous praise, encouragement and support ourselves.
I’ve had a number of experiences where I’ve jotted down a quick note to someone I admire on Twitter, Instagram, or through their company’s messenger bot platform and have more than once had the founder of the company respond telling me how much they needed that encouragement right then.
Next time you come across someone who’s work you admire, tell them. You don’t need to write a long, heartfelt message, just tell them you appreciate what they’re doing, and as a fellow creator you know it’s not easy.
It doesn’t cost us anything to be generous our praise, let’s give as much as we can.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!
https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/leadership-times-of-crisis-de0248ee4bbhttps://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/leadership-times-of-crisis-de0248ee4bb
Work With What You Have
You don’t have the brains or raw talent of some of your competition.
You don’t have the head start, the level of privilege, the auspicious beginnings.
You don’t have the funding, the connections, the support.
But only you have your eye, your perspective, and your heart.
We all start with less than someone else did, maybe even our direct competition. We can complain about it, use it as an excuse as to why we can’t do what they’ve done.
Or we can decide that we don’t want to do what they’ve done. We can work with what we were given and make something remarkable for a specific group of people who are looking for what we have to offer.
Besides, just as surely as someone had a headstart on us, there’s someone behind us who started with even less, but who isn’t going to let that stop them from making an impact.
Use what you have and make something worth talking about.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!
https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/mining-for-remarkable-514bc9152e99https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/mining-for-remarkable-514bc9152e99
Faith Over Fear
When things are spiraling out of control, and the world as we know it feels like it’s on its way to a sudden and definitive end, we have a couple of options.
The first is to turn inward, close ourselves off and view the actions of everyone else with suspicion, pointing fingers and casting blame.
Fear can justify our instinct to hoard, to become greedy, to look out for ourselves at the expense of others. At the extreme end of this response, we may even seek to profiteer from the crisis.
The second option is to choose to see that we are all in this together, that we are all sacrificing, all doing our best with what we have.
We can recognize that amidst the chaos is a shared humanity, that the fear we feel, the losses we have already suffered or will yet suffer mirror those of countless others the world over.
We can choose to support each other, to give the benefit of the doubt, to focus on the many more stories of people coming together than the few of people pulling apart.
We can step up as leaders in our communities by offering what we can to get the most vulnerable through the crisis, setting a tone of generosity, empathy, steadiness.
We can choose faith in each other over fear of each other.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!
https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/leadership-times-of-crisis-de0248ee4bbhttps://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/leadership-times-of-crisis-de0248ee4bb
Mining for Remarkable
Entrepreneurs, creators, and marketers often have the wrong idea of what their goal should be when it comes to producing their work.
They think it’s about creating new work that consistently wows people, and then doing it again and again and again, never missing a beat, becoming an endless hit machine.
Of course, this is fantastic if you’re able to achieve it, but I have yet to hear of someone who has.
The risk of this mentality is first that you never release anything that you aren’t 100% sure will amaze everyone who engages with it, and second that you become discouraged at your perceived lack of talent and conclude that you don’t have anything to offer to the field.
In my own experience, creating an offer that resonates with people always takes a leap into the unknown. The offers that I’ve been most sure would take off like wildfire have consistently fallen flat, while the successes have been offers that I barely gave a second glance.
What we need to understand as people looking to produce remarkable work that changes the people who engage with it is that there is no creating remarkable work without creating a great deal more less-than-remarkable work first.
Remarkable work is the byproduct of a consistent process of work , not one-off projects brought on when inspiration strikes.
If we want to create work that matters, we need to adopt the mindset of miners, seeking to uncover something valuable.
Grab Your Pickaxe
Miners understand that finding a vein of valuable ore requires commitment and effort, trial and error, patience and persistence.
They might have done some testing which informed the area in which they chose to start digging, but no matter how certain they are of finding something valuable there, they know that they’re still going to have to dig through a monumental pile of worthless dirt, rock, and other debris to reach their target.
As they dig, they might find greater and greater concentrations of valuable ore in their buckets, but even at highest concentrations, the ore is mixed in with a lot of junk that will take refining to uncover fully.
This is the process of tapping into your best work, into work that has the potential to change people, into work that is remarkable.
Accept that finding it will require you to put on your hard hat and go to work, to pick up your axe and your shovel every morning and dig a little deeper, bucket by bucket, following the flecks of value you find along the way, and always remembering that even your best, most valuable work will take some refining.
Are you ready to get digging?
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!
https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/getting-job-done-changing-people-9e4b99f96de4https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/getting-job-done-changing-people-9e4b99f96de4
The Way Things Are vs the Way They Should Be
Why don’t people just recognize what’s best for them and then do it?
While people like you and I can clearly see, from our lofty vantage points the best course of action for the people we’re seeking to engage with and serve, they seem more than happy to persist in their irrationality.
They walk in circles, bang their heads against any of the many walls they encounter, and then have the temerity to whine about how hard life is.
Can’t they see that we have the solution available to their problems? We’ve offered it to them dozens of times, clearly explained its benefits and features, and demonstrated how it will help them get to where they’re looking to go.
Shouldn’t that be enough?
It probably should. But it’s often not.
No matter how obvious the road maps and solutions are to us, our audiences will seldomly make cool level-headed decisions based on data and facts alone.
It’s easy to assess our marketing, our website, our podcast and say “This should be working!” But the world, and the people that make it up, seldom behave as they should.
As marketers and creators, as much as we might wish that the equation {customer problem + our product = customer solution + our profit} was enough to make a living off the work we do, it’s rarely the case.
The world doesn’t exist on paper or formulas, but in relationships, beliefs, biases, internal stories, and all of the other messiness that makes us humans the intolerable, confounding, surprising and sometimes inspiring creatures we are.
Our job when marketing the work we do then is not to structure our marketing around the way the world should be, the way our audience should react, but to meet them where they’re at, and adapt our work to the way they are.
This takes empathy, patience, and curiosity. But the relationships it leads to are worth the effort.
Besides, surely someone further ahead of you and me is currently watching us bang our own heads against walls of our own.
Wouldn’t you rather they met us where we’re at, took us by the hand and showed us the way around the wall in a language we understand?
https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/good-marketing-starts-with-empathy-a0b239c2bafahttps://medium.com/@jeremyenns/good-marketing-starts-with-empathy-a0b239c2bafa
Identity Crisis
What do you believe about yourself that’s currently preventing you from reaching your goals?
We all have a series of identities that guide our every action, often without us even realizing it.
What you eat, where you get your coffee, where you went to school, what you studied, your politics, how trusting you are of strangers, how open to change or disruption and on and on and on. All these decisions and more are rooted in the identities we’ve adopted for ourselves.
Often these identities are benign, helping us navigate a complex society by narrowing the near-infinite choices we face on a daily basis to a more manageable number of options that people like us would be open to.
Sometimes they serve us and the world, like, “I’m not the type of person who litters,” or “I’m not the type of person who eats meat.”
Owning the identity of a survivor, fighter, or hustler can help us persevere through incredibly challenging situations and emerge intact on the other side.
But while many identities we own for ourselves may serve us, many do not. In fact, many actively stunt, undermine, or otherwise sabotage the productive work we might otherwise be doing. Again, usually without us realizing it.
The most pernicious of these are identities that have served us well in the past and which we may wear proudly.
Frugality may have been a necessity at one point, but can easily transition to being miserly.
Pulling yourself up from your bootstraps as the lone wolf may have helped you start and build a business based on hard work and ingenuity, but there may come a point where that identity keeps you from asking for and bringing on the help you need to grow further.
Many freelancers and small business owners find themselves topping out at the revenue they remember their parent’s salaries being growing up, often accompanied with negative conceptions of the wealthy.
If you’ve hit a plateau that you can’t seem to break past, it’s might be time to look inward and ask which beliefs and identities are holding you back from taking the next step in your journey.
Humble Beginnings
Despite the myriad horror stories floating around the online freelancing circles, when I started out my career as a freelance podcast editor, one of the first places I turned to find work was UpWork.
I was working a full-time job at the time and could afford to work for less than what I knew my work was worth, at least at the start, while I built up my portfolio and client base.
It turns out that if you do it right, UpWork is not the career death many freelancers make it out to be, and I connected with some truly fantastic clients, one of whom I’m still working with many years later, no longer on the platform.
But while UpWork was instrumental in getting my business up and off the ground in the first few months, without realizing it, it had also embedded an identity in me that wreaked havoc behind the scenes in my business for the next year and a half before I realized what was happening.
It was Thanksgiving, and a client’s poor planning meant that my team and I were going to have to go into work over the weekend to ensure the client’s podcast episode was produced and went out on schedule on the Monday following the holiday weekend.
My girlfriend, Kelly, was not happy about my willingness to defer to the client’s requests and let work take priority over our holiday plans, and she let me know about it.
It was over a tense Thanksgiving brunch that I came face to face with the identity that was making life difficult for me, my team, clearly Kelly, and even my clients as well.
The Freelancer Mentality
Despite the fact that I had grown my client base, transitioned to an agency model, and was doing very little podcast editing myself anymore, I was still holding onto the identity of a gun-for-hire freelancer.
Instead of realizing that most people hire an agency to be the experts, dictate the terms and drive the work in order to get results, I was deferring to my clients at every turn.
I charged less than I should have, worked insane hours to appease them, didn’t set or enforce clear boundaries and it was severely crippling my ability to grow the business further.
I had faced burnout multiple times, and though things were slowly improving, the current status was untenable for much longer. The cracks in the foundation were starting to show.
My identity as a customer-focused freelancer had allowed me to quit my full-time job and establish a business where I could travel the world and work from anywhere, which had been my entire life’s dream.
But holding onto that identity was not going to allow me to build a team and agency capable of working with the level of clients I wanted to serve.
Shifting Identities Takes Time
Facing my own identity crisis was the first step, but it didn’t solve everything overnight.
It would take another year to dig my way out of that identity — one that had helped me achieve what had been my biggest dream in life — and seed and enforce a new one that would serve me better going forward.
Since that experience, however, I’ve become much quicker to recognize existing identities that are holding me back in one way or another.
When I find myself reaching a plateau en route to some goal or other, it’s become my standard practice to reflect and ask myself what the identity of someone who’s already achieved that goal is and if my current view of who I am and how I behave is in alignment with that.
Most often, I find that there’s some identity I’m holding, often proudly, that is holding me back from moving in the direction I want.
At these times, I thank that identity for serving me to this point, for keeping me safe, helping me get to where I am, and bid it farewell.
Each of us gets to choose who we want to be in any given moment, and those choices will ultimately define what we’re able to achieve and the lives we’re able to create for ourselves.
Choose intentionally.
https://counterweight-creative.ck.page/5854fb23c2
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!
https://counterweight-creative.ck.page/5854fb23c2https://counterweight-creative.ck.page/5854fb23c2
Check Your Excuses
Things don’t always go right. For you, for me, for anyone.
In fact, the very best case scenario might be that most things will go wrong but a few of the right things, the big things, will eventually go right, probably after many failed attempts.
Given the reality, then, that we’ll likely spend the majority of our lives banging our heads against one wall or another, the least (and most helpful thing) we can do is to develop a productive mindset regarding out state of near-perpetual frustration and failure.
For most of us, myself definitely included, our first and most delicious reaction when something goes wrong is to blame someone else.
It doesn’t much matter who, it doesn’t even need to be a person! It might be your annoying colleague, your spouse, your neighbour who borrowed your leaf blower two years ago and never gave it back, your cat, the government, climate change, the media or even all of the above!
Ahhhhhh, doesn’t that feel better now?
Of course it does, that’s the whole point! But does it help us improve our current situation or do better next time?
If you didn’t get the hint, the answer is no. No, it does not.
Excuses, while an effective temporary salve, do us little good in the long run, and the sooner we can eliminate them from our background mental dialogue, the better.
If you have big goals for your business, your work, and your life, the surest way to see that you never achieve them is to shift responsibility for the repeated failures and missteps along the way to anyone but yourself.
Of course, this applies not only to singular events but also to long, drawn-out circumstances, the current state of things, the status quo in our niche, industry or world.
If you want your current situation to change, you need to change.
Eliminating Excuses In 3 Steps
Excuses are a habit and a deeply ingrained one at that. You’re not going to be able to eliminate them overnight.
But fear not! We’re going to eliminate excuses the fun* way by turning it into a game. Huzzah!
*Yes this is the kind of fun “game” your parents used to get you to eat your vegetables, do your homework, or shut up in the back seat of the car on family road trips… But play along, k?
Here’s how it works.
1. Catch Your Excuses
Ok, I’m not gonna lie, the first step is the hardest, but once you’ve developed this habit, everything else going forward is going to be much easier.
Before you can eliminate excuses from your vocabulary, you have to realize you’re actually making them.
Most of us don’t think we’re whiners, complainers, or excuse-makers even when we often are, which can make spotting our excuses difficult.
Set a daily goal of intentionally seeking out 3 excuses you make, either mentally to yourself or out loud to others, and write them down.
By conditioning your brain to keep an eye out for them, your eyes will likely soon be opened (hopefully in horror) to the sheer amount of subconscious blame-shifting you do on an average day.
While this may be a painful realization, especially to those of us who hold a personal identity of being self-sufficient, pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps-type people, it’s the necessary first step towards reshaping our mindset around ownership over our circumstances.
2. Matching Excuses with Ownership
Once you’ve developed a keen eye for your own excuses, the next step is countering them with personal ownership.
The next time you catch yourself making an excuse or blaming someone else for something that happened, catch yourself, identify the excuse, and then come up with one tiny way in which you are responsible for the situation.
You don’t have to believe it, you don’t have to accept the whole of the blame, but you do have to come up with something.
Build the habit of matching excuses with responsibility until it becomes natural to at least split the blame for any negative circumstance that befalls you.
If you want to really annoy the people around you (and let’s be honest, don’t we all?) go out of your way to take ownership over everything and everything to the point that people argue with you to show how it was, in fact, their fault and not yours…
3. Determine a Possible Solution
Ok, so you’re aware of your excuses, you’re taking personal responsibility when they arise, and if you’re lucky you’ve thoroughly annoyed everyone around you with your newfound holier-than-thou attitude*.
*If they complain, tell them you can go back to blaming them for everything that goes wrong in your life if they want…
In short, you’re on the right track. But there’s one more step.
On top of the personal ownership you now meet every excuse with, stack on one action you could take to improve the situation.
Again, this doesn’t need to be a Herculean effort that solves the problem in one fell swoop. The point is to condition your brain to default to meeting each challenge with a potential solution, or at least an action that will make things better, even marginally, than they currently are.
As an added bonus, you’ll find that developing this skill and sharing your solutions to other people’s problems and excuses is yet another way to annoy everyone around you!
Countering excuses and developing this mindset won’t reduce the number of lemons life hands you, but it will drastically affect the quality and quantity of the lemonade you’re able to turn them into.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!
https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/two-options-when-shit-happens-e76234c5cccdhttps://medium.com/@jeremyenns/two-options-when-shit-happens-e76234c5cccd
Getting the Job Done vs. Changing People
We have a couple of options when we set out to create the work that matters to us.
We can aim to create a solid product that gets the job done, or we can aim higher and shoot to create something that changes the people who engage with it.
Neither is inherently better than the other, in fact, each may be better for different groups of people.
What’s important is knowing what we’re creating, who it’s for, and why from the start.
Work that gets the job done almost certainly has a larger potential audience for us to tap into. There is likely more competition, however, with little differentiating our product from our competitors and we risk the commoditization of our work.
Work that changes people requires us to narrow our focus down to a tiny, niche within a niche and creating something specifically for them. If we choose the right audience and create something that resonates, we may have created a monopoly for ourselves within that community.
If we mistarget our niche within a niche, however, we may create something that resonates with no one.
Creating something that gets the job done requires us to put on our engineering hat and figure out how to create something functional, utilitarian, maybe even robust. It requires cunning, decisiveness and action.
Creating something that changes people requires us to first understand and empathize with our audience before creating something that not only gets the job done but moves and connects with people emotionally. It requires patience, thoughtfulness, and heart.
Getting the job done can be achieved with visibility and flashy marketing. People may be quick to engage with us, but equally quick to move on when the next best thing arrives.
Changing people requires building a relationship with the people we seek to serve over time. Our audience may be slow to engage until a foundation of trust has been established, but once built, they’ll stick with us through our blunders and missteps so long as our intentions remain honest.
Investing in getting the job done means keeping our audience at a distance. Provider and user, creator and consumer.
Investing in changing people means enrolling them on a mutual journey. Guiding each other’s actions along the way to our shared destination.
Getting the job done is hard.
Changing people is harder.
The world needs both, and it’s up to each of us to decide what we want to create.
https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/creating-remarkable-work-c3b57b25ea7chttps://medium.com/@jeremyenns/creating-remarkable-work-c3b57b25ea7c
Creative Wayfinding For Ambitious Optimists.
The Best Time to Change is Now
We’ve all heard, if not lived through stories of someone given a crushing diagnosis — cancer, heart disease, diabetes, etc — then being forced to reckon with the consequences of continuing to live the way they have, or change.
Maybe it’s changing their diet and lifestyle overnight to eliminate junk food, focus on consuming only whole foods, make exercise an integral part of their life, and so on.
Faced with the alternative, death, these changes, however drastic, seem to be the only reasonable choice, one that most of us would willingly take as well.
But why do we wait so long to make these changes?
Eating well and exercising didn’t become good choices only because of the crisis we faced. We all know we should be doing them regularly, and yet for so many of us, it takes extreme circumstances to force us out of our old habits and into new ones.
Too often we wait for the breaking point before admitting to ourselves that we need to change things. This is true as much for our businesses and work as it is for our health.
It might be sweeping our cash flow issues under the rug, failing to address poor communication with our team members, or neglecting to establish boundaries with our clients who end up making life harder for us on a daily basis.
Sooner or later, each of these issues will reach a breaking point that will force us to make a painful, monumental shift in the way we approach our work.
So why wait until then?
It will be far less painful to start chipping away at the granite block of issues today and piece by piece, starting to sculpt our work into the shape we really want it to take.
We sell the potential of both ourselves and our work short by waiting to make changes until we’re left with no other choice.
Creating work that matters and living a life that matters requires us to regularly be assessing, honing, re-shaping our actions and habits to better suit who we want to become and what we want to create.
Remember, sculptures take time, you won’t carve it all in one sitting. But you can start today by chipping off the tiniest most manageable piece.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!
If you’re ready to build your audience and become the go-to authority in your space using podcasting, reach out to our team at Counterweight Creative and see how we can help.
https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/dont-let-me-off-easy-56387f881abfhttps://medium.com/@jeremyenns/dont-let-me-off-easy-56387f881abf
Why Do You Exist?
Why do you exist?
The answer to this question forms the basis of any brand story that resonates.
And a brand story that resonates is essential to building a brand that attracts the people who will help you make the change you’re looking to make in the world.
Your story and your mission can reach far beyond the product you sell. Your product can be a bland commodity, but if the story behind it resonates, you can become the one and only to a certain group of people.
I don’t know that I’ve ever spent more than $70 on jeans before, but after watching the brand story mini-documentary for Huit Denim Co. I fell in love with their story and their ethos and had to step away from my computer to avoid filling up my cart with $300 pairs of jeans from their online store.
I don’t need more jeans. Before watching the video I didn’t even want more jeans. After watching the video, however, I wanted to support people doing work that I believed in.
Their story resonated with me.
Does your brand story have that impact on the people who hear it?
A good brand story is not about your product. Rather, it’s about emotion, belief, the reason behind the what, why and how you do what you do, in a way that no one else can.
A good brand story is about people. This might include you, your team, your customers, or your community. Regardless of the people involved, however, it’s essential to show the connection you and your work facilitate.
Your story will take time and thought to hone, perfect, and learn to tell in a way that resonates most deeply with the people who are intended to hear it. Don’t rush it.
But don’t neglect it. If told right, your story is one of the most powerful assets you have.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!
If you’re ready to build your audience and become the go-to authority in your space using podcasting, reach out to our team at Counterweight Creative and see how we can help.
https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/best-in-the-world-66ec53d9adeb
Don’t Let Me off Easy
We all want to quit before the tank is truly empty.
Despite the high standards we set for ourselves and our work, we often hold just a little bit back, settling for something complete, functional, but falling shy of remarkable.
If our goal is to create products, services and experiences worth talking about then, how do we build the structure to do so?
Maybe the most important part of a structure designed to create remarkable work is the selection of people we surround ourselves with and invite into our creative process.
Their role is not to flatter us, to be in awe of the incredible work we’ve created, to build up our egos so we can face down The Hard Stuff that comes with creative work. We need people like that, but we also need others.
We need people who know us, what we’re truly capable of, and won’t let us off the hook for failing to live up to the potential they know we have.
When they look at what we’ve created, they’ll acknowledge it, honour it, and then push.
They’ll ask why we made this choice over that, dig into what we’re trying to achieve and point out potential flaws or shortcomings. They’ll tell us flat out that they know we have more to give on this project if we choose to do so, and they’ll do all of this with generosity and kindness.
The remarkable is often contained in the last few drops of the tank, well past the point at which we’ve created something functional.
We just need to ensure we have someone to help us squeeze out those last few drops.
If you’re ready to build your audience and become the go-to authority in your space using podcasting, reach out to our team at Counterweight Creative and see how we can help.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!
https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/creating-remarkable-work-c3b57b25ea7chttps://medium.com/@jeremyenns/creating-remarkable-work-c3b57b25ea7c
Building Supportive Creative Communities
You know the feeling when you open your email and read a message from someone who has honestly, genuinely been impacted by the work you do?
While they might not seem to be as important as landing a big new client or pulling off a successful launch, as creators and entrepreneurs, these small moments of acknowledgment are often the lifelines that keep us going while buried deep in the grind.
We’ve all experienced the feeling of putting our heart and soul into our work and then releasing it into the void, unsure if anyone is even engaging with it let alone being impacted by it.
I’m a believer that you get what you give, and as such, the more positivity you put out to your fellow creators, the more you’ll find coming back to you.
If we want to foster supportive creative communities, we need to take the lead in creating a culture of generous praise, encouragement and support ourselves.
I’ve had a number of experiences where I’ve jotted down a quick note to someone I admire on Twitter, Instagram, or through their company’s messenger bot platform and have more than once had the founder of the company respond telling me how much they needed that encouragement right then.
Next time you come across someone who’s work you admire, tell them. You don’t need to write a long, heartfelt message, just tell them you appreciate what they’re doing, and as a fellow creator you know it’s not easy.
It doesn’t cost us anything to be generous our praise, let’s give as much as we can.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!
https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/leadership-times-of-crisis-de0248ee4bbhttps://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/leadership-times-of-crisis-de0248ee4bb
Work With What You Have
You don’t have the brains or raw talent of some of your competition.
You don’t have the head start, the level of privilege, the auspicious beginnings.
You don’t have the funding, the connections, the support.
But only you have your eye, your perspective, and your heart.
We all start with less than someone else did, maybe even our direct competition. We can complain about it, use it as an excuse as to why we can’t do what they’ve done.
Or we can decide that we don’t want to do what they’ve done. We can work with what we were given and make something remarkable for a specific group of people who are looking for what we have to offer.
Besides, just as surely as someone had a headstart on us, there’s someone behind us who started with even less, but who isn’t going to let that stop them from making an impact.
Use what you have and make something worth talking about.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!
https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/mining-for-remarkable-514bc9152e99https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/mining-for-remarkable-514bc9152e99
Faith Over Fear
When things are spiraling out of control, and the world as we know it feels like it’s on its way to a sudden and definitive end, we have a couple of options.
The first is to turn inward, close ourselves off and view the actions of everyone else with suspicion, pointing fingers and casting blame.
Fear can justify our instinct to hoard, to become greedy, to look out for ourselves at the expense of others. At the extreme end of this response, we may even seek to profiteer from the crisis.
The second option is to choose to see that we are all in this together, that we are all sacrificing, all doing our best with what we have.
We can recognize that amidst the chaos is a shared humanity, that the fear we feel, the losses we have already suffered or will yet suffer mirror those of countless others the world over.
We can choose to support each other, to give the benefit of the doubt, to focus on the many more stories of people coming together than the few of people pulling apart.
We can step up as leaders in our communities by offering what we can to get the most vulnerable through the crisis, setting a tone of generosity, empathy, steadiness.
We can choose faith in each other over fear of each other.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!
https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/leadership-times-of-crisis-de0248ee4bbhttps://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/leadership-times-of-crisis-de0248ee4bb
Mining for Remarkable
Entrepreneurs, creators, and marketers often have the wrong idea of what their goal should be when it comes to producing their work.
They think it’s about creating new work that consistently wows people, and then doing it again and again and again, never missing a beat, becoming an endless hit machine.
Of course, this is fantastic if you’re able to achieve it, but I have yet to hear of someone who has.
The risk of this mentality is first that you never release anything that you aren’t 100% sure will amaze everyone who engages with it, and second that you become discouraged at your perceived lack of talent and conclude that you don’t have anything to offer to the field.
In my own experience, creating an offer that resonates with people always takes a leap into the unknown. The offers that I’ve been most sure would take off like wildfire have consistently fallen flat, while the successes have been offers that I barely gave a second glance.
What we need to understand as people looking to produce remarkable work that changes the people who engage with it is that there is no creating remarkable work without creating a great deal more less-than-remarkable work first.
Remarkable work is the byproduct of a consistent process of work , not one-off projects brought on when inspiration strikes.
If we want to create work that matters, we need to adopt the mindset of miners, seeking to uncover something valuable.
Grab Your Pickaxe
Miners understand that finding a vein of valuable ore requires commitment and effort, trial and error, patience and persistence.
They might have done some testing which informed the area in which they chose to start digging, but no matter how certain they are of finding something valuable there, they know that they’re still going to have to dig through a monumental pile of worthless dirt, rock, and other debris to reach their target.
As they dig, they might find greater and greater concentrations of valuable ore in their buckets, but even at highest concentrations, the ore is mixed in with a lot of junk that will take refining to uncover fully.
This is the process of tapping into your best work, into work that has the potential to change people, into work that is remarkable.
Accept that finding it will require you to put on your hard hat and go to work, to pick up your axe and your shovel every morning and dig a little deeper, bucket by bucket, following the flecks of value you find along the way, and always remembering that even your best, most valuable work will take some refining.
Are you ready to get digging?
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!
https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/getting-job-done-changing-people-9e4b99f96de4https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/getting-job-done-changing-people-9e4b99f96de4
The Way Things Are vs the Way They Should Be
Why don’t people just recognize what’s best for them and then do it?
While people like you and I can clearly see, from our lofty vantage points the best course of action for the people we’re seeking to engage with and serve, they seem more than happy to persist in their irrationality.
They walk in circles, bang their heads against any of the many walls they encounter, and then have the temerity to whine about how hard life is.
Can’t they see that we have the solution available to their problems? We’ve offered it to them dozens of times, clearly explained its benefits and features, and demonstrated how it will help them get to where they’re looking to go.
Shouldn’t that be enough?
It probably should. But it’s often not.
No matter how obvious the road maps and solutions are to us, our audiences will seldomly make cool level-headed decisions based on data and facts alone.
It’s easy to assess our marketing, our website, our podcast and say “This should be working!” But the world, and the people that make it up, seldom behave as they should.
As marketers and creators, as much as we might wish that the equation {customer problem + our product = customer solution + our profit} was enough to make a living off the work we do, it’s rarely the case.
The world doesn’t exist on paper or formulas, but in relationships, beliefs, biases, internal stories, and all of the other messiness that makes us humans the intolerable, confounding, surprising and sometimes inspiring creatures we are.
Our job when marketing the work we do then is not to structure our marketing around the way the world should be, the way our audience should react, but to meet them where they’re at, and adapt our work to the way they are.
This takes empathy, patience, and curiosity. But the relationships it leads to are worth the effort.
Besides, surely someone further ahead of you and me is currently watching us bang our own heads against walls of our own.
Wouldn’t you rather they met us where we’re at, took us by the hand and showed us the way around the wall in a language we understand?
https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/good-marketing-starts-with-empathy-a0b239c2bafahttps://medium.com/@jeremyenns/good-marketing-starts-with-empathy-a0b239c2bafa
Identity Crisis
What do you believe about yourself that’s currently preventing you from reaching your goals?
We all have a series of identities that guide our every action, often without us even realizing it.
What you eat, where you get your coffee, where you went to school, what you studied, your politics, how trusting you are of strangers, how open to change or disruption and on and on and on. All these decisions and more are rooted in the identities we’ve adopted for ourselves.
Often these identities are benign, helping us navigate a complex society by narrowing the near-infinite choices we face on a daily basis to a more manageable number of options that people like us would be open to.
Sometimes they serve us and the world, like, “I’m not the type of person who litters,” or “I’m not the type of person who eats meat.”
Owning the identity of a survivor, fighter, or hustler can help us persevere through incredibly challenging situations and emerge intact on the other side.
But while many identities we own for ourselves may serve us, many do not. In fact, many actively stunt, undermine, or otherwise sabotage the productive work we might otherwise be doing. Again, usually without us realizing it.
The most pernicious of these are identities that have served us well in the past and which we may wear proudly.
Frugality may have been a necessity at one point, but can easily transition to being miserly.
Pulling yourself up from your bootstraps as the lone wolf may have helped you start and build a business based on hard work and ingenuity, but there may come a point where that identity keeps you from asking for and bringing on the help you need to grow further.
Many freelancers and small business owners find themselves topping out at the revenue they remember their parent’s salaries being growing up, often accompanied with negative conceptions of the wealthy.
If you’ve hit a plateau that you can’t seem to break past, it’s might be time to look inward and ask which beliefs and identities are holding you back from taking the next step in your journey.
Humble Beginnings
Despite the myriad horror stories floating around the online freelancing circles, when I started out my career as a freelance podcast editor, one of the first places I turned to find work was UpWork.
I was working a full-time job at the time and could afford to work for less than what I knew my work was worth, at least at the start, while I built up my portfolio and client base.
It turns out that if you do it right, UpWork is not the career death many freelancers make it out to be, and I connected with some truly fantastic clients, one of whom I’m still working with many years later, no longer on the platform.
But while UpWork was instrumental in getting my business up and off the ground in the first few months, without realizing it, it had also embedded an identity in me that wreaked havoc behind the scenes in my business for the next year and a half before I realized what was happening.
It was Thanksgiving, and a client’s poor planning meant that my team and I were going to have to go into work over the weekend to ensure the client’s podcast episode was produced and went out on schedule on the Monday following the holiday weekend.
My girlfriend, Kelly, was not happy about my willingness to defer to the client’s requests and let work take priority over our holiday plans, and she let me know about it.
It was over a tense Thanksgiving brunch that I came face to face with the identity that was making life difficult for me, my team, clearly Kelly, and even my clients as well.
The Freelancer Mentality
Despite the fact that I had grown my client base, transitioned to an agency model, and was doing very little podcast editing myself anymore, I was still holding onto the identity of a gun-for-hire freelancer.
Instead of realizing that most people hire an agency to be the experts, dictate the terms and drive the work in order to get results, I was deferring to my clients at every turn.
I charged less than I should have, worked insane hours to appease them, didn’t set or enforce clear boundaries and it was severely crippling my ability to grow the business further.
I had faced burnout multiple times, and though things were slowly improving, the current status was untenable for much longer. The cracks in the foundation were starting to show.
My identity as a customer-focused freelancer had allowed me to quit my full-time job and establish a business where I could travel the world and work from anywhere, which had been my entire life’s dream.
But holding onto that identity was not going to allow me to build a team and agency capable of working with the level of clients I wanted to serve.
Shifting Identities Takes Time
Facing my own identity crisis was the first step, but it didn’t solve everything overnight.
It would take another year to dig my way out of that identity — one that had helped me achieve what had been my biggest dream in life — and seed and enforce a new one that would serve me better going forward.
Since that experience, however, I’ve become much quicker to recognize existing identities that are holding me back in one way or another.
When I find myself reaching a plateau en route to some goal or other, it’s become my standard practice to reflect and ask myself what the identity of someone who’s already achieved that goal is and if my current view of who I am and how I behave is in alignment with that.
Most often, I find that there’s some identity I’m holding, often proudly, that is holding me back from moving in the direction I want.
At these times, I thank that identity for serving me to this point, for keeping me safe, helping me get to where I am, and bid it farewell.
Each of us gets to choose who we want to be in any given moment, and those choices will ultimately define what we’re able to achieve and the lives we’re able to create for ourselves.
Choose intentionally.
https://counterweight-creative.ck.page/5854fb23c2
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!
https://counterweight-creative.ck.page/5854fb23c2https://counterweight-creative.ck.page/5854fb23c2
Check Your Excuses
Things don’t always go right. For you, for me, for anyone.
In fact, the very best case scenario might be that most things will go wrong but a few of the right things, the big things, will eventually go right, probably after many failed attempts.
Given the reality, then, that we’ll likely spend the majority of our lives banging our heads against one wall or another, the least (and most helpful thing) we can do is to develop a productive mindset regarding out state of near-perpetual frustration and failure.
For most of us, myself definitely included, our first and most delicious reaction when something goes wrong is to blame someone else.
It doesn’t much matter who, it doesn’t even need to be a person! It might be your annoying colleague, your spouse, your neighbour who borrowed your leaf blower two years ago and never gave it back, your cat, the government, climate change, the media or even all of the above!
Ahhhhhh, doesn’t that feel better now?
Of course it does, that’s the whole point! But does it help us improve our current situation or do better next time?
If you didn’t get the hint, the answer is no. No, it does not.
Excuses, while an effective temporary salve, do us little good in the long run, and the sooner we can eliminate them from our background mental dialogue, the better.
If you have big goals for your business, your work, and your life, the surest way to see that you never achieve them is to shift responsibility for the repeated failures and missteps along the way to anyone but yourself.
Of course, this applies not only to singular events but also to long, drawn-out circumstances, the current state of things, the status quo in our niche, industry or world.
If you want your current situation to change, you need to change.
Eliminating Excuses In 3 Steps
Excuses are a habit and a deeply ingrained one at that. You’re not going to be able to eliminate them overnight.
But fear not! We’re going to eliminate excuses the fun* way by turning it into a game. Huzzah!
*Yes this is the kind of fun “game” your parents used to get you to eat your vegetables, do your homework, or shut up in the back seat of the car on family road trips… But play along, k?
Here’s how it works.
1. Catch Your Excuses
Ok, I’m not gonna lie, the first step is the hardest, but once you’ve developed this habit, everything else going forward is going to be much easier.
Before you can eliminate excuses from your vocabulary, you have to realize you’re actually making them.
Most of us don’t think we’re whiners, complainers, or excuse-makers even when we often are, which can make spotting our excuses difficult.
Set a daily goal of intentionally seeking out 3 excuses you make, either mentally to yourself or out loud to others, and write them down.
By conditioning your brain to keep an eye out for them, your eyes will likely soon be opened (hopefully in horror) to the sheer amount of subconscious blame-shifting you do on an average day.
While this may be a painful realization, especially to those of us who hold a personal identity of being self-sufficient, pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps-type people, it’s the necessary first step towards reshaping our mindset around ownership over our circumstances.
2. Matching Excuses with Ownership
Once you’ve developed a keen eye for your own excuses, the next step is countering them with personal ownership.
The next time you catch yourself making an excuse or blaming someone else for something that happened, catch yourself, identify the excuse, and then come up with one tiny way in which you are responsible for the situation.
You don’t have to believe it, you don’t have to accept the whole of the blame, but you do have to come up with something.
Build the habit of matching excuses with responsibility until it becomes natural to at least split the blame for any negative circumstance that befalls you.
If you want to really annoy the people around you (and let’s be honest, don’t we all?) go out of your way to take ownership over everything and everything to the point that people argue with you to show how it was, in fact, their fault and not yours…
3. Determine a Possible Solution
Ok, so you’re aware of your excuses, you’re taking personal responsibility when they arise, and if you’re lucky you’ve thoroughly annoyed everyone around you with your newfound holier-than-thou attitude*.
*If they complain, tell them you can go back to blaming them for everything that goes wrong in your life if they want…
In short, you’re on the right track. But there’s one more step.
On top of the personal ownership you now meet every excuse with, stack on one action you could take to improve the situation.
Again, this doesn’t need to be a Herculean effort that solves the problem in one fell swoop. The point is to condition your brain to default to meeting each challenge with a potential solution, or at least an action that will make things better, even marginally, than they currently are.
As an added bonus, you’ll find that developing this skill and sharing your solutions to other people’s problems and excuses is yet another way to annoy everyone around you!
Countering excuses and developing this mindset won’t reduce the number of lemons life hands you, but it will drastically affect the quality and quantity of the lemonade you’re able to turn them into.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!
https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/two-options-when-shit-happens-e76234c5cccdhttps://medium.com/@jeremyenns/two-options-when-shit-happens-e76234c5cccd
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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.