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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Acorn Picking: How to Spot Ideas & Opportunities Hiding In Plain Sight
The final stretch of my morning walk to coffee passes through a wide oak-lined path.
Over the past month, the ground has regularly been littered with acorns, crunching underfoot as I walk by, the branches above filled with dozens more.
There’s something I love about the size, shape, and feel of acorns. The symbolism of small beginnings and slow growth is a nice reminder as well. And so almost every day I’ll either stoop to pick up, or reach to pluck down a handful of the smooth seeds to bring back home to decorate the base of my office plant.
As winter has drawn steadily nearer, however, fresh acorns are becoming harder to come by.
That doesn’t keep me from looking, however.
At this point, most of the acorns on the ground have either been trampled and crushed by the time I walk by or are lying next to the proliferation of dog shit in the tree planters beside the path.
And so I’ve turned my gaze to the increasingly bare trees.
One quiet morning, when there was no one else around, I decided to examine the trees more closely.
As I stopped in front of one of the trees to have a better look, I immediately saw great bunches of acorns still crowding the branches just above the reach of the average person.
Around the back of the tree, off the path and overhanging a low retaining wall, the bounty of acorns continued, these all well within arms reach.
Finally, I realized that there were, in fact, still plenty of acorns within reach, directly along my walking route. They were disguised behind leaves, however, and difficult to spot while walking by at full speed.
It made me think about how similar spotting and collecting acorns is to spotting and collecting good ideas.
Ideas Are More Abundant than We Realize
The most obvious and easily accessible ideas in any space are always the first to be picked over.
Some of those get claimed and put to use by other people. Others get tossed aside, trampled, and covered in whatever the idea equivalent of dog shit is.
It’s often at precisely this point when most of us make our entrance into a new space, survey the landscape, and draw the mistaken conclusion that the bubble has burst and there are no good ideas left to be had.
Of course, there are almost always still plenty of good ideas worth picking, but in order to find them, we need to get creative
Fortunately, the distribution of acorns on the oak tree provides a framework for finding the seeds of ideas anywhere.
4 Methods For Idea Discovery
When we understand where ideas tend to get picked over fastest—within easy reach along the most well-traveled path—it’s not hard to come up with solutions to find and harvest the less accessible ideas.
These solutions are divided into four categories.
1. Exertion
The first opportunity is to work harder than other people are willing to.
When it comes to picking acorns this might mean jumping in order to grasp the acorns that would otherwise be out of reach.
For ideas, this might be getting in more reps in our niche or with our subject matter or medium than other, more opportunistic people are willing to put in.
Get to know the ins and outs of any space by working in it and plenty of non-obvious opportunities have a way of presenting themselves.
2. Ingenuity
While exertion is certainly one way to access hard-to-reach ideas, ingenuity and creativity allow us to reach higher.
On an oak tree, this might mean getting a ladder, using a stick to knock down acorns suspended higher up in the tree, or shaking the trunk until they fall.
In our creative work, ingenuity might mean pattern-matching ideas that have worked in other industries or niches with ours, or focusing on growing a network in the space that continually presents feeds us new perspectives and ideas organically, rather than needing to go out and find them ourselves.
3. Inconvenience
As I discovered with the oak, there are often plenty of good ideas within easy reach if we’re willing to step off the most well-traveled path.
Every niche and industry has a dominant audience segment that the majority of people & brands cater to. But that doesn’t mean they’re the only segment. In fact, they’re often the hardest to gain traction with because of the amount of noise and competition.
Explore the fringes of your space and you’ll find all kinds of ideas and opportunities ripe for the picking.
4. Patience
Finally, there’s the method of simply slowing down enough to actually see our surroundings for what they are as we pass through them before writing them off as barren & devoid of opportunity.
We’d be surprised by what turns up when we settle into a space and participate in the existing community for a while.
On the oak, simply stopping to stand beneath it for 30 seconds was enough to spot acorns that had previously been invisible to me.
Perhaps the epitome of this approach is the patience of continuing to return to the tree, day after day, season after season, year after year, with the knowledge that even if the tree is barren today, it’s only a matter of time before new acorns begin to emerge.
The spaces in which we live and work are constantly shifting, morphing, and evolving.
Which means new opportunities are always developing, budding beneath the surface, and waiting to break through.
When they do, the people who will be in position to take advantage of them will be those who have been patiently tending to the space long before the new batch of ideas showed up.
Our challenge then, as creator entrepreneurs might not be finding ideas.
But finding the tree we’re willing to weather the seasons under, and then reaping the bounty it provides.
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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You’re Here Now
Timing is tough to get right.
You’ve probably had ideas that were too early, and you’ve probably had ideas that were too late.
These ideas can look perfect in the moment, a rosy hue cast over them by the fact that you know you don’t really need to act on them, maybe can’t act on them.
Despite their impossibility, it’s easy to get hung up on these ideas, thinking about the “what if’s” and the “if only’s”.
You can imagine yourself in a past or future world in which the timing is right, and the pieces fall into place for you one after another as if synchronized, elegant in their simplicity and perfection.
“It would all be so easy,” you think.
But you’re here now.
And that’s a fantastic thing.
If you’re here now, you have a fantastic opportunity, an opportunity your future and past selves do not have.
An opportunity to create something today that will change things tomorrow.
While you may have had ideas for which the timing was off, you’ve probably had many more ideas for which the timing was perfectly right.
Maybe you didn’t recognize them for what they were.
Maybe they didn’t look quite so elegant when you could see all the potential problems, challenges, and competition.
Maybe they looked like work.
They probably were.
But if you’re here now, you have the opportunity to do work that matters. Work that has the ability to change things for one person, or for the world.
Never has there been a time with more resources to tap into and more interesting problems to solve.
Never has it been easier for you to play a part in shaping our collective future.
Never have there been more ideas floating around freely, waiting for the right person to tap into them and take the lead.
For one of them, perhaps many of them, you are that right person.
All it takes is to recognize that the time has never been more right for you to make a difference and to get to work.
You already have everything you need.
Two Options For When Shit Happens
Nothing in life is certain but death, taxes and that at some point, Shit is going to happen.
While we’re amending famous quotes, let’s take it one step further.
At many points, Shit is going to happen.
As long as you’re breathing, you can be sure that your plans are not always going to work out the way you hope.
Shit doesn’t discriminate, it happens to all of us.
It happens in big ways and small, and happens in every size, shape, and colour.
You can plan for the Shit, make contingencies to lessen the frequency of it happening and the impact on your life and work when it does.
But make no mistake, Shit is still going to happen, and it’s not going to be in the way you expect.
That’s what makes it Shit instead of an obstacle you expected and prepared for in advance.
It’s going to hurt, knock you off balance, pummel your ego and cause you to question your abilities.
When the Shit has you at your lowest, you have a couple of options.
You can follow your natural instinct and retreat to your cave, hide and blame others, yourself or fate for the Shit that happened.
Or, you can accept the Shit that’s happened, pick yourself up and get back to work.
Most people won’t hold it against you if you choose the cave. We’ve all felt the same urge to protect ourselves when shit happens to us.
You may even need to spend some time in the cave to lick your wounds and heal.
But the cave can become safe, comfortable, familiar. It’s all too easy to retreat to the cave, shut out the outside world and let the years pass by, pushing down any urge to get out and stretch your legs again for fear of what might happen if you venture too far from your den.
If you believe in the work you do and your vision for the world, when Shit happens you need to force yourself out of the cave.
Accept that Shit happened to you, but accept that while your Shit may be unique, it’s not so different from the Shit that happens to everyone else.
Learn what lessons you can from it, or don’t. Shit doesn’t always come with a lesson.
Seek out the people who see the value in your work and won’t let you settle for hiding.
Understand however that ultimately you will be the one who needs to decide to own your Shit and get back to work.
Your work is too important to keep in the dark.
Pay Your Respects
I get it, there’s a lot of competition out there.
Whatever you’re doing, there are almost certainly others doing it better.
Maybe even dozens, hundreds, or thousands of others!
Let’s not even talk about the others who are at the same level as you that you’re battling against to reach that next level first.
With all that competition it’s easy to feel the need to horde any attention you do get. To constantly scramble to keep the focus of those whose attention you already have while trying to siphon off ever more attention from your competition.
But this is not the way to get to that next level.
Lead With Generosity
The way to the next level is by being generous in creating and putting our work out into the world.
But we also need to be generous in promoting the work of others whose work fills the gaps in ours.
If we believe in the work we’re doing, others doing similar work are not competition, but allies in our quest to realize our vision for the world and move the culture forward.
If we can become the go-to source for one super-specific topic, that’s enough.
If we can become known for doing one thing better than anyone else, we don’t need to scramble to catch and hold the attention of everyone.
The people our work is for will gravitate to and engage with us naturally.
Those who our work is not for will probably leave, but that’s fine. It was never for them anyway.
Let them go.
Point them to others who can serve them better than you can. Sometimes the greatest gift you can give is to be a generous resource.
And the universe has a funny way of returning the generosity you put into it.
Are You Indispensable To Your Audience?
I typed in my email address — you know the junk one solely reserved for email marketing from people I’d rather not actually hear from — and was about to hit “Sign Up”.
But something didn’t feel quite right as a wave of worry rolled through me, so I quickly cleared the sign-up form and reconsidered…
Email marketing is a tricky game.
On the one hand, you’ve probably been told a bazillion times that you need a list, and should always be focused on growing that list.
You probably have some opt-ins, landing pages, content upgrades scattered around the internet to entice people back onto your list. Maybe they’re converting, maybe they’re not, but hey, you’re trying.
On the other hand, you probably have a junk email address that you use just to sign up to people’s lists from whom you don’t really want to hear from, but do want whatever glimmering freebie they’re dangling in front of you to entice you back to their list.
If you’ve looked through the addresses on your own list you’ve probably realized that nope, you’re far from the only one using this technique, I do it too.
Many of us recognize the necessity of building our list, of owning the means of communicating with our audience, but feel a little bit sleazy about the whole opt-in process.
We feel like we’re just tricking people into signing up, maybe because we don’t believe our opt-in is actually that useful, maybe because we know that even when we’ve found a genuinely useful opt-in ourselves, we don’t really want to get all those additional emails from its creator.
The Target We Should Be Aiming For
Over the past couple months, I’ve been binging on Seth Godin’s Akimbo podcast. I’ll listen to 2–3 episodes a day, and now that I’m nearing the end of the back catalog, I’m beginning to worry about where I’ll get my next fix once I’m fully up to speed (maybe I’ll work through his 7000+ blog post catalogue…)
Given my obsession, it surprised me to realize that I hadn’t signed up for his newsletter yet, despite being a long-time admirer.
I suppose I hardly needed reminding that he was there when I was opening up my phone a couple of times a day to cue up the next podcast episode, and had browser tabs on both my computer and phone permanently opened to his blog…
Regardless, I was not on his list, so I trotted over to my already-open browser window, quickly found the signup form, and hesitated…
I was about to submit my email address for my email-marketing-only account, when a wave of fear rushed through me.
“I don’t check this account that often,” I thought. “What if Seth sends out something new and I miss it??”
I quickly erased my junk email address and typed in my personal one.
I was about to hit submit when again I hesitated…
“I don’t typically have my personal email open during the day. What if Seth puts out something new and I don’t see it until the next morning?”
Again, I cleared the email form and this time entered my primary business address, the one reserved for clients and other important, fancy people.
I still felt like this might not be enough, but since there was no option to submit my phone number and I thought it might be a step too far to find out where Seth lived and look up real estate listings on his street, I settled for my work email address and hit submit.
Become Indispensable
Over the next few days I found myself thinking more and more about what I had done and why I had done it.
There was no opt-in. No need to entice me to sign up. The email list wasn’t even mentioned on any of the podcast episodes or blog posts I read.
Instead, I had voluntarily gone looking for a way to sign up.
Isn’t this what we should all be aiming for as creators and entrepreneurs?
To be of value to the people we serve that they go out of their way to deepen their relationship with us?
No need for tricks, freebies, incentives. No feeling you’re imposing on people’s lives every time you hit “send” on a new email to your list.
Just people who really, truly want to hear what you have to say, and are in fact waiting for it.
So How Do We Do This?
Obviously, Seth Godin has a multi-decade headstart over most of us, helped create email marketing in the first place, and is one of the premier thought leaders around business and marketing.
But we shouldn’t be working to compete with Seth Godin.
Rather we should be working to become to our audience what Seth is to his.
Working towards providing insight, thoughtfulness, resources, and value to the people we serve that they can’t find anywhere else.
We can’t do that by writing another listicle, rehashing the same content that’s already been published ad nauseam in our niche or industry, even if it’s helpful.
If we want to become indispensable to our audience, we have to work on developing our opinion, our point of view, our philosophy about the work we do.
This is hard. It’s scary even.
It’s hard for internet trolls to dispute a listicle based on facts, stats, or generally accepted wisdom (though they’ll give it a shot anyway).
But publish an opinion or subjective viewpoint?? You’re setting yourself up for a world of criticism.
You also, however, are opening yourself up to being a breath of fresh air to your audience. Someone who sparks ideas they haven’t heard before, who challenges the established way of doing things because you know there’s a better way.
This takes bravery.
It takes time, energy and thought to develop your ideas, to build stories around them, to learn how to convey them so that people get it.
But if you’re looking to create change in the world, sooner or later you’re going to need to step up and become that indispensable person to a specific group of people.
People who sign up for your newsletters with their work email addresses, text you their phone numbers just so you have them on file, and look into the real estate market in your neighbourhood — even if they back off when they realize that might be a little weird.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!
https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/people-dont-understand-marketing-36e60826516fhttps://medium.com/@jeremyenns/people-dont-understand-marketing-36e60826516f
Don’t Measure Your Worth By The Wrong Things
Let’s face it. Whether we readily admit to it or not, we’re pretty much all looking for validation in some area (or many areas) of our lives.
We’re aware that our desire for validation isn’t necessarily “healthy” and it can feel weak to admit that other’s people’s admiration and respect matters to us as much as we feel it does, so we don’t really acknowledge it.
But as humans, we all need to be seen.
As people who put so much of ourselves into the work we do, to be told by others that that work is meaningful and worth the struggle is often what carries us through and motivates us to keep going.
But because we don’t acknowledge this need, even to ourselves, we can end up measuring our worth — and that of our work — by the wrong things.
Rather than inviting in a few, carefully chosen people who understand the process of our craft in on the real challenges and triumphs of our work, we keep everyone at arm’s length and prop our egos up based on metrics that sound impressive — especially to those who may not know what’s really going on inside.
Numbers Can Lie
We might subtly slip in how our team has grown to 15 members, an impressive-sounding stat that leaves out that they’re contractors, not actual employees, which feels a little less impressive (I’ve done that).
Or, we might share that we work with 30 clients. Wow! Buuuuuut we leave out that with a third of them you’re barely making a profit, and a bunch of them haven’t sent us new work in months (yup, I’ve done that too).
And then of course, you might proudly trot out your impressive revenue numbers when someone asks, conveniently omitting the fact that you as the owner are working for minimum wage, maybe even less (you guessed it, I’ve been there too…).
Balancing Optimism With Realism
I’m all for looking at the positives, and with each of the above examples, there are certainly elements to be proud of.
But we need to be real with ourselves about why these numbers matter to us. Are they really important markers of the impact of the work we’re doing? Or are they papering over issues that we don’t want or know how to confront?
In my case, it was definitely the latter.
I came to a point where I realized that by measuring our success at Counterweight Creative solely on the above metrics was placating me, lending less urgency to addressing issues head on, and ultimately taking up brain space and energy by actively ignoring the problems that I knew needed to be resolved.
I realized that while a 15-member team sounds impressive and I love each and every one of them, in the long term, I’d rather move to a smaller team of 3–5 full and part-time employees who are more engaged in the success of the company, supplemented with contractors as needed.
I realized that keeping the inactive clients on my “active client” database made me feel good when I looked at it, but that it didn’t reflect the truth of the current situation, and wasn’t making it easy to clearly assess our client base, offerings and revenue forecasting.
Once I pruned the list, my view of where we were at snapped into sharper focus and I immediately felt more agile and confident in my decision making.
Lastly, I realized that I was measuring the success of the company largely by the overall gross revenue, completely discounting the fact that I was not able to pay myself an adequate wage, and that I needed to take action to change that.
I had been ignoring overhead costs, paying too little attention to profit margins, and vaguely hoping that as we scaled, things would improve.
Don’t Cheat Yourself
By taking a hard look at the numbers, I realized that not only was I cheating myself, I wasn’t structuring the business and our pricing in a way that would allow me to consistently give raises to my team, bring on full-time employees, or to invest in further growth of the business.
Acknowledging that I was measuring the success of the business, and my own worth by these vanity metrics was like plunging into an ice bath. But once I got past the initial shock, I found myself more energized to focus on making real changes and improvements.
Find The Others
Most of us do work that few people in our lives might actually understand completely, and rather than explaining what’s really going on in our businesses, we opt for the cheap validation we can get from a surface level statistic that “clearly” conveys our success.
The nuance of both the struggle and the triumph of creating work that matters, that impacts even just one person in a meaningful way is often lost on outsiders.
The answer is to find people who understand what it means to do that work. People who are on the same journey you’re on and invite them in.
Sure, give them your vanity metrics, but follow it up with the reality of where you’re at.
Share with them your real successes, your real challenges.
Chances are they’re either going through the same thing right now, are going to go through it soon and will appreciate your insight from the experience, or have already gone through it and can provide useful guidance to help you move through the problem.
It takes real bravery to be vulnerable, to share the truth of who you are and where you’re at with your work.
But the validation, recognition, and support are so much much deeper when you’ve shared them with those who really, truly see you. Who understand where you’re at, where you’ve been, and where you’re trying to go, because they’re right there alongside you.
Quit hiding. We need your best work.
Beware Single Metric Assessments
So you’ve spent the time and energy to create something that’s meaningful to at least a few people, built up the courage to release it into the world, and have distanced yourself enough — at least for a time — to gather data before assessing and tweaking your strategy.
But when the time comes to assess your work, what are you actually looking for?
Avoid Overvaluing The Low Hanging Fruit
Of course, there are the easy metrics to judge the “success” your work on.
Pageviews, revenue, downloads, claps, followers and the like make it oh so easy to rate and measure our work.
As a bonus, many of these metrics are publically visible, making it handy for us to get-into-the-comparison-game-feel-bad-about-ourselves-pack-up-go-home-and-never-create-again.
Huzzah!
Sure, these stats are important, and sometimes even essential to understanding how our work is being received and measuring the effectiveness of any future tweaks, experiments or campaigns, but they often don’t tell the whole story.
Ok, so maybe if the sole purpose of what you’re doing is to make money, then you can probably stick to the aforementioned hard numbers.
But for people like us creating work that means something both to us and others, we have to expand the assessment of our work to consider other variables, which are often much harder to measure.
Looking Beyond Hard Metrics
Depending on the work you do, the less tangible costs and benefits will vary. You’re likely going to have to do some thinking to define them for yourself initially.
Working with podcasters, the easy metric to judge the success of a show on is downloads. You can then look past that to email list signups, product sales, website page views and so on.
All of those are useful and almost everyone who starts a podcast will have a goal of growing each of those metrics. After all, they’re an easy way to judge whether your content is resonating with your audience.
But in my experience working with dozens of podcasters, I see time and time again that one of the most impactful and beneficial side effects of starting a podcast doesn’t appear anywhere in those metrics.
What our clients tell me over and over is that the podcast would be worth continuing — even if they never got another download — simply because of the opportunities it grants them to reach out and make connections with interesting people.
These are people who are often more than a little out of their league who they would otherwise never have an excuse to sit down and talk with for 30–60 minutes and maybe even begin an ongoing relationship with.
There’s no metric to neatly measure the impact that these relationships might have on a podcast host’s life and business.
But it’s impossible to argue they’re not valuable.
Let’s Talk Writing Intangibles
Or take this blog for example.
I set the goal of writing every day for three primary reasons, all hard to measure.
The first was to give myself an opportunity to improve my writing by doing it regularly, this might be the easiest to measure.
The second was to build a habit around writing and break down any resistance I had around it. Basically to keep the wheels greased for future writing projects with more intention and purpose behind them.
The last, hardest to measure and most valuable to me is that I found myself jotting down dozens of bullet point notes throughout my weeks but never set aside the time or energy to think through any of them.
I wanted a chance to define, explore, expand on and then share those ideas in a structured manner.
Sometimes there’s not much to an idea once I’ve explored it than the initial thought itself. Sometimes there’s something there that invites me to look closer and dig deeper. Either way, it’s worth it to me to know whether something is worth thinking more about or not.
Right now, the ideas are rough. The writing is rough.
But two weeks in, I can already identify some broader themes to my thought patterns that are interesting and exciting to me. And while I highly doubt there will be any measurable ROI in the short term, I’m convinced that there will be massive ROI in the long term by giving myself a forum to think and explore.
Know Why You’re Doing The Work
Understanding the less measurable, less tangible outcomes of your work can certainly help you make decisions about the direction of your work, but it can also help keep you going when the metrics aren’t where you’d like them to be.
Maybe it’s that while your new product isn’t selling as much as you’d like, you learned a ton that you’ll be able to put into use in all your future campaigns.
Maybe it’s that you can see the impact your work has on the people who interact with it.
Maybe it’s the people you get to meet through the work you do.
Maybe it’s that you just enjoy the work itself. In the long run, that matters more than almost anything else.
By taking into account the full spectrum of both what we put into and what we get out of our work, we can make better decisions about why we’re doing what we’re doing and ultimately create better work.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!
https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/know-when-assess-work-af24ef790c6ahttps://medium.com/@jeremyenns/know-when-assess-work-af24ef790c6a
Know When To Assess Your Work
This is how it always happens.
You spend time making something. It could be a product, a business, art, an event, etc.
You’re really excited about it. You know it’s got the potential to change people.
You put it out into the world.
You rush to check your stats. Downloads, sales, site visits, they’re all basically the same.
Most likely, those stats are underwhelming. They might even be nonexistent.
This discourages you from doing everything you can to promote your creation and get it in front of new people.
Already you feel like you’ve failed. Like you’ve created something and the market has delivered a resounding referendum on your work.
But here’s the deal. Unless you’ve spent months or even years of building up and grooming an audience for whom your creation was specifically designed, you should go in expecting 100% that no one is going to show up.
At least not immediately.
Choose Your Milestones
Whenever I start a new project, be it some new product, podcast offering for Counterweight Creative, or something personal, like this blog, I set specific milestones at which I’ll evaluate the stats and performance and make decisions about the future direction of the endeavor.
Yes, I’ll check the stats. Maybe even daily. Maybe even more than daily.
But I will not draw any conclusions on the audience reception, make any changes to the original plan, or let myself dwell on the numbers until I reach those set milestone review dates.
For this daily writing experiment, I’ve set those initial markers at days 50 and 100. Assuming that I continue writing past day 100 at the same cadence, I’ll probably continue to assess at 50-day intervals, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here…
For the podcasters we work with, I often recommend that those with weekly shows seriously review their stats and strategy at 25 and 50 episodes.
Obviously, there are time-limited promotions and events that require a tighter review schedule.
I ran a 5-day bundle sale last year that required near-constant attention and review given the timeframe. (Sadly, no amount of in-the-moment review and tweaking could save that product, but that’s a story for another time…)
Stick To The Schedule
Once you’ve set your milestones and determined your review schedule for yourself, your sole job is to stick to your plan.
Don’t start making tweaks to the way you’re doing things based on the inital numbers.
The point is to collect data, and your data won’t be worth much if it’s a mish-mash of varying techniques and strategies.
Once you’ve reached your first milestone, lay out potential tweaks to the way you’ve been operating to this point and choose one of them to introduce.
Again, you want to be able to define what exactly is working and what’s not, so changing everything isn’t really useful strategically, even if you randomly hit upon a combination that performs better than your current plan.
Keep Emotion Out Of It
At the beginning of a new project, we’re extremely sensitive to the opinions (or perceived opinions) of others.
We’ve spent weeks, months or even years creating something that we’re in love with, and without the equalizing weight of the positive reviews that an offering that’s been out for years has accrued, even the smallest bit of negative reaction can crush us.
Too often, that initial blow causes us to pull our creation back into our cave and hide it, and ourselves, from further hurt, without ever putting in the effort of getting it in front of the people it was actually meant for.
The problem is that when we’re in the middle of a lackluster launch, we conflate no reaction with negative reaction when that’s often not the case.
Many of us don’t start out with an audience of people on hand who would actually appreciate what we’ve made. Instead, we’ve bought into the myth of “build it and they will come.”
Sorry, but it almost never works that way.
That means that releasing what we’ve made is only really the very beginning of the work.
Our job now is to do the not-quite-as-sexy work of continually honing our pitch and systematically getting our creation in front of the right people, the people it was really made for.
This process doesn’t work if you’re taking every bit of feedback as a personal affront and every bit of positive feedback as a world-conquering victory.
It works best when you keep your emotion out of it and take every bit of feedback as neutral data.
Only when you reach your defined review milestones should you draw any conclusions and subsequently dance around your apartment in glee or curl up and cry on the floor in despair.
Once you’ve finished your review, defined any tweaks to your plan and had your chosen dance/sob and the accompanying champagne/entire-pint-of-ice-cream, it’s time to push your emotion back out of it, at least until the next milestone.
There’s so much more to creating anything than the creation itself.
If we can view our projects as living, breathing and constantly evolving, we can understand that there is no definitive failure until we decide ourselves that the work is no longer worth doing.
Just because nobody showed up for the grand opening doesn’t mean our ideal audience isn’t out there.
More likely we just haven’t done the work to find them yet.
Embrace Your Eagerness
It’s easy to dismiss eagerness and those who embody it as childish, naive, or inexperienced to the cruel ways of the world.
We used to call these people “Keeners” in high school, but that may have been a Canadian-ism. It may have even been a Saskatchewan-ism…
You might have called them nerds or some other regional variation on the concept of your own.
Whatever you called them, the fact of the matter is this: It was not cool to be too eager.
This made it a little difficult for those of us who actually liked school and learning, but also wanted to have friends and, ya know, not be made fun of…
We had to learn to hide that eagerness, tone it down, cover it up and even slather on a light coating of indifference, maybe even outright apathy if we really wanted to distance ourselves from the Keeners (cuz, gross…)
The problem took new shape, however, when we left school — and the many obvious opportunities for judgment by our peers — behind, but retained that adopted indifference to the world.
Over the years, we became more and more jaded toward any sign of initiative, of keen-ness, of interest beyond what’s considered acceptable within our chosen subculture of mostly-equally jaded peers.
We found ourselves looking down on the masses and mainstream, but also on pretty much any pursuit that others took on eagerly. Somehow we built ourselves up onto a pedestal of absolute authority on what’s ok to be excited or eager about.
This makes for a boring world.
Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of things people take seriously that I think are stupid.
But I also recognize that there are more than a few pursuits that I enjoy with various levels of enthusiasm that other people could (and do) consider stupid.
A short list includes Ultimate Frisbee, Star Wars, podcasts, calligraphy, reading business books, reading fantasy books, reading science fiction books and vegetarianism. Oh and let’s not forget the massive number of personal development/self-help books I read.
The thing I’ve come to realize is that the more you learn about any given subject, the more interesting it becomes.
I may never be able to match a fanatic’s passion for bitcoin, acro-yoga, slam poetry, or modern pop music, but by learning even just a little bit about them, I almost always gain an appreciation and interest in them.
Time and again, I’m reminded that my best ideas and biggest breakthroughs are most often triggered by exposing myself to something new, something that I may have previously had no knowledge of, interest in, or care for.
A jaded world view keeps us from experimenting, wandering off the beaten path, exploring the whole wide world of all that we don’t already know (which is a lot), and as a result, our work stagnates.
Nothing magical can emerge from this state. It’s essential that as creators, entrepreneurs, and people looking to create change in the world that we push back against apathy and embrace our work with eagerness.
We’ll probably be judged, looked down on, maybe even ridiculed at times.
But there’s no other way to uncover our best work.
In the end, despite the stereotypes, it’s the Keeners who become the real Shit-Disturbers.
We Could All Use More Raving Fans
What if the primary question behind how we did the work that we do was “How can we create raving clients?”
We’d all prefer happy clients.
At this point, some of us would be happy to settle for neutral clients.
But how would we do our work, interact with others, and structure our client experiences if the entire purpose was to create a process and an environment that people couldn’t help but share about with everyone they knew?
It wouldn’t be easy, few things that have the potential to transform our businesses are.
But too few of us even stop to ask the question of what a rave-worthy client experience would even look like in our business.
And that’s a shame.
So here’s my challenge. Set aside 15 minutes to just think about what could conceivably cause your clients, customers or audience to rave about their experience with you.
Your ideas don’t have to be easy to implement.
They don’t have to be practical.
They don’t have to be affordable.
Do it anyway.
My guess is once you have a list of possibilities, you’re going to subconsciously start looking for ways to slip in stripped-down versions of those crazy ideas into your everyday interactions with clients.
We could all use more raving fans.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!
https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/real-metrics-effective-marketing-b572d3c23051https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/real-metrics-effective-marketing-b572d3c23051
How To Solve Creative Problems In A Way That Resonates
When it really comes down to it, almost everything we do in our work boils down to solving problems.
Solving problems for other people, for our teams, for ourselves.
Problems, problems, problems, everywhere we look.
Given that this is our reality, it helps to have a framework before we begin to work on a given problem to determine how to best go about attempting to solve it, and indeed if we should even be the ones working on it in the first place.
Before accepting any project, or beginning to solve any problem we should ask ourselves 3 questions to help calibrate our view of what needs to happen and how it needs to be done.
Who is it for?
Most of us are not in the business of mass-market product or service manufacturing.
Who we are doing the work for, be that our audience, a client, a client’s audience, or anyone else will have a huge effect on the final product.
Designing a new website for Nike is not going to look the same as designing a new website for Ford, let alone designing a website for the new podcast you’re launching for your own audience.
Too often we think we’re making something for a client, when we’re really making it for their audience.
We need to dig deeper, because who it’s really for matters.
What’s it for?
At the start of a new project, especially one we’re excited about, it can be easy to get ahead of ourselves and dive in headfirst without taking the time to ask what the bigger purpose is behind it.
Sometimes the reason is obvious, such as building a landing page with the sole purpose of selling a product, but it isn’t always so clear.
When it comes to the website for your podcast, for example, there’s a lot to consider.
You may be launching the podcast to educate your audience, build a loyal following for yourself, create and sell products and services, level up your network by connecting with interesting guests, and build up clout in your industry.
How will the website serve each of those goals? A website that focuses only on one of those goals will be a lot different than one that supports all of them.
Why Am I Doing It?
The first side of this question addresses whether you should actually be the person doing this project.
It’s more than likely on any number of potential problems that you get invited to solve that you may not be the best person to take it on.
Knowing that you’re not the ideal choice and taking on the project regardless has a way of backfiring, if not in the form of failed or underwhelming project results, then in the form of intense periods of stress while trying to keep your head above water on a project you’re ill-equipped for.
Part of doing work that people rave about is knowing your strengths and capabilities and operating within them.
This question takes on additional meaning when it’s not just you doing the work.
As our team at Counterweight Creative has grown, I’ve been finding myself asking this question more and more about tasks I’ve always done but should perhaps no longer be doing.
Every month I look at my time tracking report and for each task-category ask myself why I am the person handling that task.
Sometimes it’s because I’m the only one who has the skills, knowledge, or relationships to do it.
But sometimes it’s habit, fear of handing it off, or because I just haven’t created the training resources and structure to hand it off.
Regardless of what the reason is, it’s essential to be aware of it.
If you’ve decided that you are the person to be taking on a project, this question can be asked from an additional angle as well.
Why am I DOING it?
In a perfect world, every project we took, every problem we solved would be in the service of changing the world for the better, and the impact of our work would be obvious.
But let’s not kid ourselves. There are a lot of reasons that we might agree to solve a problem, either for someone else or for ourselves.
Sometimes we do take on projects that we believe deeply in with an obvious impact.
Even when that’s the case, money usually plays some factor in our decision to sign on.
Some projects we take on only for the money.
Others we forgo money entirely either to give back or to gain experience or skill.
There are no universal “wrong” reasons to do the work you do, just so long as you’re clear on why you’re doing it.
Remind yourself that if the only reason you’re doing a project is for the paycheque, it may not be worth getting as emotionally attached to the work, especially when the client starts making meaningless revisions that reduce the value of your contributions.
I’m not saying to detach yourself from your work entirely.
Care about the work you do. Care deeply and fight for it when you need to.
But understand which projects are worth the extra energy of championing and fighting over, and which you’re better letting go and moving on from.
Knowing why you’re doing the work will help you maintain the appropriate temperament, make the work more enjoyable, and keep you sane.
Revisit These Questions Regularly
While it’s essential to ask these questions and get clear on your reasoning before beginning on a project, it’s equally important to build a habit of revisiting these questions at regular intervals throughout the project.
This keeps you on track, making decisions that serve the audience and the goal of the project and helps ensure you’re doing your best work, which when it comes down to it, is solving problems in the most appropriate way possible.
Creative Wayfinding For Ambitious Optimists.
You Can’t Yell Loud Enough (But You Don’t Need To)
There’s a lot of noise out there.
A lot of it is spam, a lot of it is amateur, a lot of it is vapid.
But a lot of it is good. Really good.
You already know that of course. You might spend your days trying to shout above that noise in an attempt to be heard.
You know your work has an audience out there that can be impacted by it, who can be changed by it, who may be actively looking for just what you’ve got.
But they’ve done their best to tune out you and the rest of the noise out of sheer exhaustion.
You strain your vocal cords, shout just a little louder, hoping to break through, catch just a sliver of their attention.
You’re sure that once they hear your frantically delivered pitch they’ll be yours for life.
But you can only shout so loud for so long before your voice gives out.
What if getting heard wasn’t about shouting though?
What if getting heard was actually about dropping your voice and speaking directly, intimately to people who were willing to lean in to hear what you had to say?
What if instead of trying to share your message to a football stadium of people waiting for you to finish so the game can start up again, you shared it around a campfire, to a small, rapt audience who huddled closer, eyes fixed on you, ears tuned in to your every word, your every gesture.
This is what building an audience today is about.
This is how to create and share work that changes people.
It isn’t quick. It isn’t easy.
It requires you to commit to the long game. To show up again and again to a small group of people when what you really want is to show up for everyone.
It requires you to build up trust, person by person. To speak so intimately to them that they feel like they’re the only one you’re speaking to at all.
It requires you to understand that movements are built by creating a culture and an experience that people rave about, share, invite others into who could benefit.
Be incredibly generous with your work, your knowledge, your time. Give everything away to your audience for now.
Understand that the attention, the returns and the impact will come, there is a time to reap and a time to sow. Besides, you’ll have new work, better work, more meaningful work to share when the time comes to charge for it.
But that time is not here yet.
Prove your work can change even just one person, hone your message and build up just a little more momentum every day.
You’re going to need to push the thing yourself at the start, but do the work and eventually, it will pull you forward on its own.
Find out how to get in front of the right people where you don’t need to yell to catch and hold their attention, but where you can intrigue them enough to lean in a little closer to hear what else you have to say.
This is the way for people like us to change the world.
You’re Here Now
Timing is tough to get right.
You’ve probably had ideas that were too early, and you’ve probably had ideas that were too late.
These ideas can look perfect in the moment, a rosy hue cast over them by the fact that you know you don’t really need to act on them, maybe can’t act on them.
Despite their impossibility, it’s easy to get hung up on these ideas, thinking about the “what if’s” and the “if only’s”.
You can imagine yourself in a past or future world in which the timing is right, and the pieces fall into place for you one after another as if synchronized, elegant in their simplicity and perfection.
“It would all be so easy,” you think.
But you’re here now.
And that’s a fantastic thing.
If you’re here now, you have a fantastic opportunity, an opportunity your future and past selves do not have.
An opportunity to create something today that will change things tomorrow.
While you may have had ideas for which the timing was off, you’ve probably had many more ideas for which the timing was perfectly right.
Maybe you didn’t recognize them for what they were.
Maybe they didn’t look quite so elegant when you could see all the potential problems, challenges, and competition.
Maybe they looked like work.
They probably were.
But if you’re here now, you have the opportunity to do work that matters. Work that has the ability to change things for one person, or for the world.
Never has there been a time with more resources to tap into and more interesting problems to solve.
Never has it been easier for you to play a part in shaping our collective future.
Never have there been more ideas floating around freely, waiting for the right person to tap into them and take the lead.
For one of them, perhaps many of them, you are that right person.
All it takes is to recognize that the time has never been more right for you to make a difference and to get to work.
You already have everything you need.
Two Options For When Shit Happens
Nothing in life is certain but death, taxes and that at some point, Shit is going to happen.
While we’re amending famous quotes, let’s take it one step further.
At many points, Shit is going to happen.
As long as you’re breathing, you can be sure that your plans are not always going to work out the way you hope.
Shit doesn’t discriminate, it happens to all of us.
It happens in big ways and small, and happens in every size, shape, and colour.
You can plan for the Shit, make contingencies to lessen the frequency of it happening and the impact on your life and work when it does.
But make no mistake, Shit is still going to happen, and it’s not going to be in the way you expect.
That’s what makes it Shit instead of an obstacle you expected and prepared for in advance.
It’s going to hurt, knock you off balance, pummel your ego and cause you to question your abilities.
When the Shit has you at your lowest, you have a couple of options.
You can follow your natural instinct and retreat to your cave, hide and blame others, yourself or fate for the Shit that happened.
Or, you can accept the Shit that’s happened, pick yourself up and get back to work.
Most people won’t hold it against you if you choose the cave. We’ve all felt the same urge to protect ourselves when shit happens to us.
You may even need to spend some time in the cave to lick your wounds and heal.
But the cave can become safe, comfortable, familiar. It’s all too easy to retreat to the cave, shut out the outside world and let the years pass by, pushing down any urge to get out and stretch your legs again for fear of what might happen if you venture too far from your den.
If you believe in the work you do and your vision for the world, when Shit happens you need to force yourself out of the cave.
Accept that Shit happened to you, but accept that while your Shit may be unique, it’s not so different from the Shit that happens to everyone else.
Learn what lessons you can from it, or don’t. Shit doesn’t always come with a lesson.
Seek out the people who see the value in your work and won’t let you settle for hiding.
Understand however that ultimately you will be the one who needs to decide to own your Shit and get back to work.
Your work is too important to keep in the dark.
Pay Your Respects
I get it, there’s a lot of competition out there.
Whatever you’re doing, there are almost certainly others doing it better.
Maybe even dozens, hundreds, or thousands of others!
Let’s not even talk about the others who are at the same level as you that you’re battling against to reach that next level first.
With all that competition it’s easy to feel the need to horde any attention you do get. To constantly scramble to keep the focus of those whose attention you already have while trying to siphon off ever more attention from your competition.
But this is not the way to get to that next level.
Lead With Generosity
The way to the next level is by being generous in creating and putting our work out into the world.
But we also need to be generous in promoting the work of others whose work fills the gaps in ours.
If we believe in the work we’re doing, others doing similar work are not competition, but allies in our quest to realize our vision for the world and move the culture forward.
If we can become the go-to source for one super-specific topic, that’s enough.
If we can become known for doing one thing better than anyone else, we don’t need to scramble to catch and hold the attention of everyone.
The people our work is for will gravitate to and engage with us naturally.
Those who our work is not for will probably leave, but that’s fine. It was never for them anyway.
Let them go.
Point them to others who can serve them better than you can. Sometimes the greatest gift you can give is to be a generous resource.
And the universe has a funny way of returning the generosity you put into it.
Are You Indispensable To Your Audience?
I typed in my email address — you know the junk one solely reserved for email marketing from people I’d rather not actually hear from — and was about to hit “Sign Up”.
But something didn’t feel quite right as a wave of worry rolled through me, so I quickly cleared the sign-up form and reconsidered…
Email marketing is a tricky game.
On the one hand, you’ve probably been told a bazillion times that you need a list, and should always be focused on growing that list.
You probably have some opt-ins, landing pages, content upgrades scattered around the internet to entice people back onto your list. Maybe they’re converting, maybe they’re not, but hey, you’re trying.
On the other hand, you probably have a junk email address that you use just to sign up to people’s lists from whom you don’t really want to hear from, but do want whatever glimmering freebie they’re dangling in front of you to entice you back to their list.
If you’ve looked through the addresses on your own list you’ve probably realized that nope, you’re far from the only one using this technique, I do it too.
Many of us recognize the necessity of building our list, of owning the means of communicating with our audience, but feel a little bit sleazy about the whole opt-in process.
We feel like we’re just tricking people into signing up, maybe because we don’t believe our opt-in is actually that useful, maybe because we know that even when we’ve found a genuinely useful opt-in ourselves, we don’t really want to get all those additional emails from its creator.
The Target We Should Be Aiming For
Over the past couple months, I’ve been binging on Seth Godin’s Akimbo podcast. I’ll listen to 2–3 episodes a day, and now that I’m nearing the end of the back catalog, I’m beginning to worry about where I’ll get my next fix once I’m fully up to speed (maybe I’ll work through his 7000+ blog post catalogue…)
Given my obsession, it surprised me to realize that I hadn’t signed up for his newsletter yet, despite being a long-time admirer.
I suppose I hardly needed reminding that he was there when I was opening up my phone a couple of times a day to cue up the next podcast episode, and had browser tabs on both my computer and phone permanently opened to his blog…
Regardless, I was not on his list, so I trotted over to my already-open browser window, quickly found the signup form, and hesitated…
I was about to submit my email address for my email-marketing-only account, when a wave of fear rushed through me.
“I don’t check this account that often,” I thought. “What if Seth sends out something new and I miss it??”
I quickly erased my junk email address and typed in my personal one.
I was about to hit submit when again I hesitated…
“I don’t typically have my personal email open during the day. What if Seth puts out something new and I don’t see it until the next morning?”
Again, I cleared the email form and this time entered my primary business address, the one reserved for clients and other important, fancy people.
I still felt like this might not be enough, but since there was no option to submit my phone number and I thought it might be a step too far to find out where Seth lived and look up real estate listings on his street, I settled for my work email address and hit submit.
Become Indispensable
Over the next few days I found myself thinking more and more about what I had done and why I had done it.
There was no opt-in. No need to entice me to sign up. The email list wasn’t even mentioned on any of the podcast episodes or blog posts I read.
Instead, I had voluntarily gone looking for a way to sign up.
Isn’t this what we should all be aiming for as creators and entrepreneurs?
To be of value to the people we serve that they go out of their way to deepen their relationship with us?
No need for tricks, freebies, incentives. No feeling you’re imposing on people’s lives every time you hit “send” on a new email to your list.
Just people who really, truly want to hear what you have to say, and are in fact waiting for it.
So How Do We Do This?
Obviously, Seth Godin has a multi-decade headstart over most of us, helped create email marketing in the first place, and is one of the premier thought leaders around business and marketing.
But we shouldn’t be working to compete with Seth Godin.
Rather we should be working to become to our audience what Seth is to his.
Working towards providing insight, thoughtfulness, resources, and value to the people we serve that they can’t find anywhere else.
We can’t do that by writing another listicle, rehashing the same content that’s already been published ad nauseam in our niche or industry, even if it’s helpful.
If we want to become indispensable to our audience, we have to work on developing our opinion, our point of view, our philosophy about the work we do.
This is hard. It’s scary even.
It’s hard for internet trolls to dispute a listicle based on facts, stats, or generally accepted wisdom (though they’ll give it a shot anyway).
But publish an opinion or subjective viewpoint?? You’re setting yourself up for a world of criticism.
You also, however, are opening yourself up to being a breath of fresh air to your audience. Someone who sparks ideas they haven’t heard before, who challenges the established way of doing things because you know there’s a better way.
This takes bravery.
It takes time, energy and thought to develop your ideas, to build stories around them, to learn how to convey them so that people get it.
But if you’re looking to create change in the world, sooner or later you’re going to need to step up and become that indispensable person to a specific group of people.
People who sign up for your newsletters with their work email addresses, text you their phone numbers just so you have them on file, and look into the real estate market in your neighbourhood — even if they back off when they realize that might be a little weird.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!
https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/people-dont-understand-marketing-36e60826516fhttps://medium.com/@jeremyenns/people-dont-understand-marketing-36e60826516f
Don’t Measure Your Worth By The Wrong Things
Let’s face it. Whether we readily admit to it or not, we’re pretty much all looking for validation in some area (or many areas) of our lives.
We’re aware that our desire for validation isn’t necessarily “healthy” and it can feel weak to admit that other’s people’s admiration and respect matters to us as much as we feel it does, so we don’t really acknowledge it.
But as humans, we all need to be seen.
As people who put so much of ourselves into the work we do, to be told by others that that work is meaningful and worth the struggle is often what carries us through and motivates us to keep going.
But because we don’t acknowledge this need, even to ourselves, we can end up measuring our worth — and that of our work — by the wrong things.
Rather than inviting in a few, carefully chosen people who understand the process of our craft in on the real challenges and triumphs of our work, we keep everyone at arm’s length and prop our egos up based on metrics that sound impressive — especially to those who may not know what’s really going on inside.
Numbers Can Lie
We might subtly slip in how our team has grown to 15 members, an impressive-sounding stat that leaves out that they’re contractors, not actual employees, which feels a little less impressive (I’ve done that).
Or, we might share that we work with 30 clients. Wow! Buuuuuut we leave out that with a third of them you’re barely making a profit, and a bunch of them haven’t sent us new work in months (yup, I’ve done that too).
And then of course, you might proudly trot out your impressive revenue numbers when someone asks, conveniently omitting the fact that you as the owner are working for minimum wage, maybe even less (you guessed it, I’ve been there too…).
Balancing Optimism With Realism
I’m all for looking at the positives, and with each of the above examples, there are certainly elements to be proud of.
But we need to be real with ourselves about why these numbers matter to us. Are they really important markers of the impact of the work we’re doing? Or are they papering over issues that we don’t want or know how to confront?
In my case, it was definitely the latter.
I came to a point where I realized that by measuring our success at Counterweight Creative solely on the above metrics was placating me, lending less urgency to addressing issues head on, and ultimately taking up brain space and energy by actively ignoring the problems that I knew needed to be resolved.
I realized that while a 15-member team sounds impressive and I love each and every one of them, in the long term, I’d rather move to a smaller team of 3–5 full and part-time employees who are more engaged in the success of the company, supplemented with contractors as needed.
I realized that keeping the inactive clients on my “active client” database made me feel good when I looked at it, but that it didn’t reflect the truth of the current situation, and wasn’t making it easy to clearly assess our client base, offerings and revenue forecasting.
Once I pruned the list, my view of where we were at snapped into sharper focus and I immediately felt more agile and confident in my decision making.
Lastly, I realized that I was measuring the success of the company largely by the overall gross revenue, completely discounting the fact that I was not able to pay myself an adequate wage, and that I needed to take action to change that.
I had been ignoring overhead costs, paying too little attention to profit margins, and vaguely hoping that as we scaled, things would improve.
Don’t Cheat Yourself
By taking a hard look at the numbers, I realized that not only was I cheating myself, I wasn’t structuring the business and our pricing in a way that would allow me to consistently give raises to my team, bring on full-time employees, or to invest in further growth of the business.
Acknowledging that I was measuring the success of the business, and my own worth by these vanity metrics was like plunging into an ice bath. But once I got past the initial shock, I found myself more energized to focus on making real changes and improvements.
Find The Others
Most of us do work that few people in our lives might actually understand completely, and rather than explaining what’s really going on in our businesses, we opt for the cheap validation we can get from a surface level statistic that “clearly” conveys our success.
The nuance of both the struggle and the triumph of creating work that matters, that impacts even just one person in a meaningful way is often lost on outsiders.
The answer is to find people who understand what it means to do that work. People who are on the same journey you’re on and invite them in.
Sure, give them your vanity metrics, but follow it up with the reality of where you’re at.
Share with them your real successes, your real challenges.
Chances are they’re either going through the same thing right now, are going to go through it soon and will appreciate your insight from the experience, or have already gone through it and can provide useful guidance to help you move through the problem.
It takes real bravery to be vulnerable, to share the truth of who you are and where you’re at with your work.
But the validation, recognition, and support are so much much deeper when you’ve shared them with those who really, truly see you. Who understand where you’re at, where you’ve been, and where you’re trying to go, because they’re right there alongside you.
Quit hiding. We need your best work.
Beware Single Metric Assessments
So you’ve spent the time and energy to create something that’s meaningful to at least a few people, built up the courage to release it into the world, and have distanced yourself enough — at least for a time — to gather data before assessing and tweaking your strategy.
But when the time comes to assess your work, what are you actually looking for?
Avoid Overvaluing The Low Hanging Fruit
Of course, there are the easy metrics to judge the “success” your work on.
Pageviews, revenue, downloads, claps, followers and the like make it oh so easy to rate and measure our work.
As a bonus, many of these metrics are publically visible, making it handy for us to get-into-the-comparison-game-feel-bad-about-ourselves-pack-up-go-home-and-never-create-again.
Huzzah!
Sure, these stats are important, and sometimes even essential to understanding how our work is being received and measuring the effectiveness of any future tweaks, experiments or campaigns, but they often don’t tell the whole story.
Ok, so maybe if the sole purpose of what you’re doing is to make money, then you can probably stick to the aforementioned hard numbers.
But for people like us creating work that means something both to us and others, we have to expand the assessment of our work to consider other variables, which are often much harder to measure.
Looking Beyond Hard Metrics
Depending on the work you do, the less tangible costs and benefits will vary. You’re likely going to have to do some thinking to define them for yourself initially.
Working with podcasters, the easy metric to judge the success of a show on is downloads. You can then look past that to email list signups, product sales, website page views and so on.
All of those are useful and almost everyone who starts a podcast will have a goal of growing each of those metrics. After all, they’re an easy way to judge whether your content is resonating with your audience.
But in my experience working with dozens of podcasters, I see time and time again that one of the most impactful and beneficial side effects of starting a podcast doesn’t appear anywhere in those metrics.
What our clients tell me over and over is that the podcast would be worth continuing — even if they never got another download — simply because of the opportunities it grants them to reach out and make connections with interesting people.
These are people who are often more than a little out of their league who they would otherwise never have an excuse to sit down and talk with for 30–60 minutes and maybe even begin an ongoing relationship with.
There’s no metric to neatly measure the impact that these relationships might have on a podcast host’s life and business.
But it’s impossible to argue they’re not valuable.
Let’s Talk Writing Intangibles
Or take this blog for example.
I set the goal of writing every day for three primary reasons, all hard to measure.
The first was to give myself an opportunity to improve my writing by doing it regularly, this might be the easiest to measure.
The second was to build a habit around writing and break down any resistance I had around it. Basically to keep the wheels greased for future writing projects with more intention and purpose behind them.
The last, hardest to measure and most valuable to me is that I found myself jotting down dozens of bullet point notes throughout my weeks but never set aside the time or energy to think through any of them.
I wanted a chance to define, explore, expand on and then share those ideas in a structured manner.
Sometimes there’s not much to an idea once I’ve explored it than the initial thought itself. Sometimes there’s something there that invites me to look closer and dig deeper. Either way, it’s worth it to me to know whether something is worth thinking more about or not.
Right now, the ideas are rough. The writing is rough.
But two weeks in, I can already identify some broader themes to my thought patterns that are interesting and exciting to me. And while I highly doubt there will be any measurable ROI in the short term, I’m convinced that there will be massive ROI in the long term by giving myself a forum to think and explore.
Know Why You’re Doing The Work
Understanding the less measurable, less tangible outcomes of your work can certainly help you make decisions about the direction of your work, but it can also help keep you going when the metrics aren’t where you’d like them to be.
Maybe it’s that while your new product isn’t selling as much as you’d like, you learned a ton that you’ll be able to put into use in all your future campaigns.
Maybe it’s that you can see the impact your work has on the people who interact with it.
Maybe it’s the people you get to meet through the work you do.
Maybe it’s that you just enjoy the work itself. In the long run, that matters more than almost anything else.
By taking into account the full spectrum of both what we put into and what we get out of our work, we can make better decisions about why we’re doing what we’re doing and ultimately create better work.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!
https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/know-when-assess-work-af24ef790c6ahttps://medium.com/@jeremyenns/know-when-assess-work-af24ef790c6a
Know When To Assess Your Work
This is how it always happens.
You spend time making something. It could be a product, a business, art, an event, etc.
You’re really excited about it. You know it’s got the potential to change people.
You put it out into the world.
You rush to check your stats. Downloads, sales, site visits, they’re all basically the same.
Most likely, those stats are underwhelming. They might even be nonexistent.
This discourages you from doing everything you can to promote your creation and get it in front of new people.
Already you feel like you’ve failed. Like you’ve created something and the market has delivered a resounding referendum on your work.
But here’s the deal. Unless you’ve spent months or even years of building up and grooming an audience for whom your creation was specifically designed, you should go in expecting 100% that no one is going to show up.
At least not immediately.
Choose Your Milestones
Whenever I start a new project, be it some new product, podcast offering for Counterweight Creative, or something personal, like this blog, I set specific milestones at which I’ll evaluate the stats and performance and make decisions about the future direction of the endeavor.
Yes, I’ll check the stats. Maybe even daily. Maybe even more than daily.
But I will not draw any conclusions on the audience reception, make any changes to the original plan, or let myself dwell on the numbers until I reach those set milestone review dates.
For this daily writing experiment, I’ve set those initial markers at days 50 and 100. Assuming that I continue writing past day 100 at the same cadence, I’ll probably continue to assess at 50-day intervals, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here…
For the podcasters we work with, I often recommend that those with weekly shows seriously review their stats and strategy at 25 and 50 episodes.
Obviously, there are time-limited promotions and events that require a tighter review schedule.
I ran a 5-day bundle sale last year that required near-constant attention and review given the timeframe. (Sadly, no amount of in-the-moment review and tweaking could save that product, but that’s a story for another time…)
Stick To The Schedule
Once you’ve set your milestones and determined your review schedule for yourself, your sole job is to stick to your plan.
Don’t start making tweaks to the way you’re doing things based on the inital numbers.
The point is to collect data, and your data won’t be worth much if it’s a mish-mash of varying techniques and strategies.
Once you’ve reached your first milestone, lay out potential tweaks to the way you’ve been operating to this point and choose one of them to introduce.
Again, you want to be able to define what exactly is working and what’s not, so changing everything isn’t really useful strategically, even if you randomly hit upon a combination that performs better than your current plan.
Keep Emotion Out Of It
At the beginning of a new project, we’re extremely sensitive to the opinions (or perceived opinions) of others.
We’ve spent weeks, months or even years creating something that we’re in love with, and without the equalizing weight of the positive reviews that an offering that’s been out for years has accrued, even the smallest bit of negative reaction can crush us.
Too often, that initial blow causes us to pull our creation back into our cave and hide it, and ourselves, from further hurt, without ever putting in the effort of getting it in front of the people it was actually meant for.
The problem is that when we’re in the middle of a lackluster launch, we conflate no reaction with negative reaction when that’s often not the case.
Many of us don’t start out with an audience of people on hand who would actually appreciate what we’ve made. Instead, we’ve bought into the myth of “build it and they will come.”
Sorry, but it almost never works that way.
That means that releasing what we’ve made is only really the very beginning of the work.
Our job now is to do the not-quite-as-sexy work of continually honing our pitch and systematically getting our creation in front of the right people, the people it was really made for.
This process doesn’t work if you’re taking every bit of feedback as a personal affront and every bit of positive feedback as a world-conquering victory.
It works best when you keep your emotion out of it and take every bit of feedback as neutral data.
Only when you reach your defined review milestones should you draw any conclusions and subsequently dance around your apartment in glee or curl up and cry on the floor in despair.
Once you’ve finished your review, defined any tweaks to your plan and had your chosen dance/sob and the accompanying champagne/entire-pint-of-ice-cream, it’s time to push your emotion back out of it, at least until the next milestone.
There’s so much more to creating anything than the creation itself.
If we can view our projects as living, breathing and constantly evolving, we can understand that there is no definitive failure until we decide ourselves that the work is no longer worth doing.
Just because nobody showed up for the grand opening doesn’t mean our ideal audience isn’t out there.
More likely we just haven’t done the work to find them yet.
Embrace Your Eagerness
It’s easy to dismiss eagerness and those who embody it as childish, naive, or inexperienced to the cruel ways of the world.
We used to call these people “Keeners” in high school, but that may have been a Canadian-ism. It may have even been a Saskatchewan-ism…
You might have called them nerds or some other regional variation on the concept of your own.
Whatever you called them, the fact of the matter is this: It was not cool to be too eager.
This made it a little difficult for those of us who actually liked school and learning, but also wanted to have friends and, ya know, not be made fun of…
We had to learn to hide that eagerness, tone it down, cover it up and even slather on a light coating of indifference, maybe even outright apathy if we really wanted to distance ourselves from the Keeners (cuz, gross…)
The problem took new shape, however, when we left school — and the many obvious opportunities for judgment by our peers — behind, but retained that adopted indifference to the world.
Over the years, we became more and more jaded toward any sign of initiative, of keen-ness, of interest beyond what’s considered acceptable within our chosen subculture of mostly-equally jaded peers.
We found ourselves looking down on the masses and mainstream, but also on pretty much any pursuit that others took on eagerly. Somehow we built ourselves up onto a pedestal of absolute authority on what’s ok to be excited or eager about.
This makes for a boring world.
Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of things people take seriously that I think are stupid.
But I also recognize that there are more than a few pursuits that I enjoy with various levels of enthusiasm that other people could (and do) consider stupid.
A short list includes Ultimate Frisbee, Star Wars, podcasts, calligraphy, reading business books, reading fantasy books, reading science fiction books and vegetarianism. Oh and let’s not forget the massive number of personal development/self-help books I read.
The thing I’ve come to realize is that the more you learn about any given subject, the more interesting it becomes.
I may never be able to match a fanatic’s passion for bitcoin, acro-yoga, slam poetry, or modern pop music, but by learning even just a little bit about them, I almost always gain an appreciation and interest in them.
Time and again, I’m reminded that my best ideas and biggest breakthroughs are most often triggered by exposing myself to something new, something that I may have previously had no knowledge of, interest in, or care for.
A jaded world view keeps us from experimenting, wandering off the beaten path, exploring the whole wide world of all that we don’t already know (which is a lot), and as a result, our work stagnates.
Nothing magical can emerge from this state. It’s essential that as creators, entrepreneurs, and people looking to create change in the world that we push back against apathy and embrace our work with eagerness.
We’ll probably be judged, looked down on, maybe even ridiculed at times.
But there’s no other way to uncover our best work.
In the end, despite the stereotypes, it’s the Keeners who become the real Shit-Disturbers.
We Could All Use More Raving Fans
What if the primary question behind how we did the work that we do was “How can we create raving clients?”
We’d all prefer happy clients.
At this point, some of us would be happy to settle for neutral clients.
But how would we do our work, interact with others, and structure our client experiences if the entire purpose was to create a process and an environment that people couldn’t help but share about with everyone they knew?
It wouldn’t be easy, few things that have the potential to transform our businesses are.
But too few of us even stop to ask the question of what a rave-worthy client experience would even look like in our business.
And that’s a shame.
So here’s my challenge. Set aside 15 minutes to just think about what could conceivably cause your clients, customers or audience to rave about their experience with you.
Your ideas don’t have to be easy to implement.
They don’t have to be practical.
They don’t have to be affordable.
Do it anyway.
My guess is once you have a list of possibilities, you’re going to subconsciously start looking for ways to slip in stripped-down versions of those crazy ideas into your everyday interactions with clients.
We could all use more raving fans.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!
https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/real-metrics-effective-marketing-b572d3c23051https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/real-metrics-effective-marketing-b572d3c23051
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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.