When I opened up the weather forecast earlier this week, this is what was waiting for me.

Of course, I knew Texas in July and August was hot. But this?

To a cold-blooded Canadian like me, this reads as more of a cruel joke than a weather forecast.

And yet, it appears that for the next few weeks I’ll be in Texas, this is the unavoidable reality.

On past trips to visit my partner Kelly’s family in Texas, I’ve simply avoided going outside altogether, hiding inside with the blinds drawn and the AC cranked.

The result of this approach is perhaps best told by my step counter app, which tends to contain conspicuous extended streaks of three-digit step totals during my time in the state.

And yet, while this approach helped me succeed at staying comfortable, it wasn’t without its downsides.

My daily walks are where and when I come up with the bulk of my ideas and work through the problems and challenges I’m facing in my business.

Without those daily walks, my creative mind begins to reflect the parched landscape outside.

In addition to a dearth of new ideas, these periods often coincide with my least productive work periods of work, even on tasks and projects that aren’t inherently “creative”.

Aware of the impact this has on my work and life, this time, I’ve decided to take a new approach.

While I’ve pushed my walks to the fringes of the day when the heat is least oppressive, I’ve otherwise accepted the sticky, sweaty discomfort that accompanies them regardless and ventured outside.

The change started with a realization: That I could wallow in the circumstances I found myself in. Or I could accept them and do what I could to work with and around them.

In the case of the current Texas heat wave, I’m fortunate.

I’ll be in Texas for just a few weeks and will then be off elsewhere, hopefully to cooler temperatures.

But as is becoming painfully clear, the heat—everywhere—is only rising and spreading. Which means sooner or later, all of us will need to find a way to live with it.

The same is true for the environments in which we do our creative work.

Whether it’s AI threatening to make us obsolete, Google or Instagram’s latest algorithm update, or old reliable tactics that no longer seem to work, the climate is constantly shifting around us.

And as it does, we face a choice.

We can bury our heads in the sand, holding onto hope that things will go back to the way they were.

Or we can adapt to the new conditions and make the most of them.

In many cases, this will probably mean letting go of the norms, expectations, and habits we’ve established around how we do things.

In many cases, the new normal will almost certainly be objectively worse than the old normal.

And yet, what choice do we have?

The summers of our youths won’t return simply because we preferred them.

Neither will the conditions that allowed our creative work and businesses to take root and grow.

And while we may have little control over the climate in which we find ourselves, we’re not at the mercy of it.

Not entirely at least.

We have at least one choice available to us:

Wallow and wither?

Or adapt & persevere?

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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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If you ever find yourself parking a trailer, tire chocks are an invaluable piece of equipment.

Tire chocks are essentially wedges, often concave and plastic (though 2×4 pieces of lumber are commonly used as well) that are placed behind or in front of the wheels of a vehicle to keep it from rolling.

When placed intentionally, these simple tools perform their job remarkably well.

Unfortunately, the same principles of leverage that allow tire chocks to keep everything from jumbo jets to 450 tonne mining trucks in place, also apply to our creative projects.

Only, we don’t often realize the chock is in place.

If you’ve ever found yourself inexplicably stalled on a project that you can’t seem to make progress on, chances are, there’s an unseen chock wedged in a key location.

And until you find it and remove it, chances are, you’re not going anywhere.

Overcoming a Year-Long Chock

Until recently, I had been stuck on a tire chock with one of my projects for more than a year.

The project is a quiz audit allowing podcast creators to answer a series of questions about their current approach to marketing and then receive a personalized grading and breakdown of each of the categories of marketing.

I was excited about the idea, knew it would be incredibly valuable for my audience of podcast creators, and recognized that it was going to be a central part of the  Podcast Marketing Academy  marketing strategy going forward.

Despite my excitement and the clear incentives, however, I found myself inexplicably stuck.

For a year.

Finally, a couple weeks ago, I forced myself to sit down and do a simple brain-dump a list of possible questions that might eventually make up the audit.

Almost like magic, as soon as I had written down the first few questions and their possible responses, the rest of questions followed.

From there, I signed up for the quiz software I’d been eyeing since I first had the idea for the audit, uploaded up the quiz and quickly set up the scoring system.

Then, I designed the landing page, wrote out all the copy and analysis on the results page, and scripted out the follow-up email course.

Within just a few days, the project I’d been stalled on for more than a year was nearly complete.

So what happened?

The (Unfortunate) Power of Leverage

At first glance, it seems silly that a simple low-stakes task like brain-dumping a list of potential questions might be the chock that holds up an entire project.

And yet, in my experience, almost all creative project chocks are equally small and seemingly simple.

Which is exactly why we overlook them.

The truth is, if placed in juuuuuust the right location, even a tiny chock can hold back the weight of a much larger object.

In fact, relatively small 100 lb chocks are routinely used to prevent the aforementioned 450 tonne (1,000,000 lb) mining trucks from rolling down hills.

Is it so surprising, then, that seemingly insignificant tasks routinely stall our creative projects?

The good news is that despite chocks being both plentiful and incredibly effective in their ability to prevent our progress, in the end, they’re fairly easy obstacles to overcome.

At least if we know where to look for them and how to remove them.

Three Types of Creative Chocks

A chock keeping a project in place can be almost anything. But in my experience, they most commonly fall into one of three categories.

1. An external circumstance that needs to fall into place
2. An action or task to complete
3. A decision to be made

Let’s have a closer look at each type.

An External Circumstance That Needs To Fall Into Place

These chocks show up most regularly in projects involving other people.

In these cases, the chock is often a task or decision that someone other than us needs to make for the project to move forward.

Another type of chock in this category might be that the timing isn’t quite right for our project and we need to wait for the conditions to change for our project to be viable.

This category of chocks are particularly frustrating because, while we may be able to influence the situation, we don’t have direct control to remove the chock ourselves.

Fortunately, these types of external chocks are less common than the other two categories, over which we have full and direct control.

An Action or Task to Complete

Perhaps most commonly, the chock on a creative project is one, often simple task that holds the rest of the project up until it’s been completed.

This was the case in my own quiz audit project.

And as in my case, the reason we tend to avoid and procrastinate on these tasks is often not the work involved with the task itself, but an underlying lack of clarity.

That lack of clarity might be centered on whether this is, in fact, the right task to work on, whether it will achieve the desired result, how to approach the task in the first place, or any number of other doubts, big and small, rational and irrational.

The irony is that these tasks are often exceedingly small, taking no more than 15 or 30 minutes to knock out of the way, paving the way for the rest of the project to roll downhill and build momentum.

And yet, our desire for certainty before starting them often keeps us inert for weeks, months, or even years.

When encountering this type of chock, the most productive action we can take is to simply force ourselves to take the first step forward without perfect clarity.

Because more often than not, once we take that step, we realize we already have all the clarity we need.

A Decision to be Made

The final category of creative chock is a decision that must be made in order for a project to move forward.

This might be a decision about which software to use for a project, how to allocate tasks among your team, mapping out a schedule, or determining the priority of a given project in relation to other initiatives.

These chocks are perhaps the most insidious, because we’re often not aware of them.

These decisions can be large and important, but as with most chocks, are more often small and inconsequential, though often magnified in scope and significance in our minds.

To remove these chocks, I personally like to convert them into a task, getting them out of the vague recesses of my brain and into my task manager where I can schedule them to be addressed.

In most cases, when made plain and approached directly, a decision I’ve spent weeks mulling over can be made in a matter of minutes or even seconds.

Removing Creative Chocks & Building Momentum

For all the problems chocks make for us, they present an incredible opportunity.

Because once we train ourselves to spot and remove them, we quickly realize that most of the challenges keeping us from progress are not giant, immovable boulders blocking our path, but tiny pebbles to be nudged aside.

Once out of the way, we then build momentum, making it harder for future chocks to slow or stall us.

The first step when we’re stuck, then, is to identify the type and location of the chock.

Personally, I’ve created a field in my Notion project management system specifically to write down the current chock that’s holding each project up.

Because, if a project isn’t moving forward, it’s almost certainly because of a chock.

Clearly identifying the chock as specifically as possible reduces my frustration around projects I feel stuck on and gives me a clear map to getting them moving.

Once the chock has been identified and removed, the next step is to focus on building momentum.

Chocks are most easily placed when we’re standing still, such as at the start of a project or between distinct phases such as moving from building a product to marketing it.

But they also have a way of lodging themselves in front of the wheels of projects that aren’t getting our full time or attention.

To avoid this, it’s helpful to choose your timing to remove your current chock wisely, ensuring you have the bandwidth to continue rolling with the project once the impediment has been removed.

If you don’t, there’s a good chance the next task in line will quickly solidify into a new chock, stalling any potential to build momentum.

Of course, no matter how much momentum we build, various chocks will always find a way to stall and disrupt our work.

They call to mind Archimedes’ famous quote about leverage, which in this case, might be slightly rephrased as:

“Give me a wedge and a gap to place it, and I shall hold back the world.”

Learn, to spot and remove them, however, and the world is yours for the taking.

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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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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.

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Explore how to navigate a creative life that matters

This article originally appeared in my weekly Creative Wayfinding Newsletter. Each issue is the product of a week of work, and contains something not available for sale.

A fresh perspective, a shot of encouragement when you need it most, and maybe even some genuine wisdom from time to time.

Each week, we explore a different facet of the question “How do we navigate the wilds of creating work that matters?”

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

Subscribe

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Before powering down at the end of every day, I review my task list and bump everything I didn’t complete to a future date, often the next day.

On good days, it’s a small number of non-urgent or unimportant tasks.

On less-than-good days it’s a large number of both urgent and important tasks that got crowded out by even more urgent and important tasks.

Regardless of the day, however, for the past six months there’s been one particular task that’s appeared on my task list every single day… and without fail, been bumped, incomplete, to the next day.

The task?

“Catch up on email”

I know, it’s wildly optimistic to harbour any kind of belief that this task could ever truly be completed. In fact, the mountain of unreplied-to email has only grown since adding the daily reminder.

And yet, I persist in deluding myself.

I created the task after wrapping up the PMA5 launch in the spring.

Launches have a way of crowding out everything but the most essential daily action items—of which there are always more than can possibly get done—and after spending 10 weeks in launch and then cohort delivery mode, I had fallen severely behind on all manner of non-urgent correspondence.

I did what I could to chip away at my inbox following the launch, but it wasn’t enough.

Because before I could catch up, I once again found myself neck deep in planning, executing, and delivering the launch of my next cohort, adding another 2.5 months of email backlog.

Last Friday night, from 9-11 pm I sat down and made the most significant dent in my inbox to date, working through 75 of the 300 or so emails awaiting a response.

It felt good to make a dent in the mountain.

But more interestingly, in going through the emails that had been piling up, I made a realization that instantly reframed my email problems.

The Price of Projects Gaining Traction

In sifting through and responding to the emails, I noticed that the majority of them fall into one of two categories:

1. New subscribers to either Creative Wayfinding or Scrappy Podcasting who are responding to the prompt in my welcome emails to tell me a bit about themselves and their work.
2. Requests to collaborate, guest on podcasts, contribute to projects, etc.

Based on these categories it’s clear that far from being a problem, the number and type of emails occupying my inbox are a sign that things are working.

The first category is the direct result of people subscribing to my newsletters (my #1 goal in my business). The second, a result of becoming better known and seen as an interesting voice in my industry.

Despite the positive underlying causes of my inbox overwhelm, the situation bothers me.

For one, the lack of responsiveness doesn’t send the message I want myself or my brand to convey, especially to new subscribers reaching out for the first time.

More personally, I have a natural inclination toward, structure and order, which means the lack of control over a task as simple as answering email is deeply uncomfortable.

And yet, one of the things I’ve had to come to terms with over the past two years as more and more of my projects have started to gain traction is that this type of discomfort is an inevitable price of creative progress.

Obligation Overwhelm

At the beginning of a project, our obligations tend to be low.

We likely don’t have an audience expecting anything from us on a consistent schedule. We don’t have paying customers and clients with deadlines and deliverables. And we don’t have partners and other stakeholders to whom we’ve made promises.

On the personal side, the project likely isn’t supporting us financially, so we have little obligation to ourselves to keep the project running.

Pure creative freedom in other words.

What’s more, we’re in experimentation mode, which means we might be playing with half a dozen (or more!) ideas, testing them out to see which has the greatest potential.

As some of those projects inevitably begin to gain traction, however, our obligations to each of them increase.

As traction leads to growth, it doesn’t take long for our obligations to even one such project to begin to crowd out other pursuits.

Which means that if we want to navigate this stage of the creative journey intact, triage becomes an increasingly important skill for us to develop.

Because the more success our projects accrue, the more difficult the choices we’ll face about what gets our best time and attention, what gets the leftovers, and what gets ignored.

Creative Triage

When we first begin to bump up against the limits of our bandwidth, the choices about what to focus on and what to ignore are fairly easy to make.

Other low-traction projects are often the first to be pushed outside the limits of our current bandwidth to focus on the more promising endeavours.

But as the project continues to gain momentum (which of course is our goal), it’s only a matter of time before other aspects of our lives begin to be pushed outside of our ability to stay on top of them.

Relationships with family and friends, our health, hobbies, and yes, correspondence—both business and personal—all have a way of becoming secondary to the demands of a successful—yet not fully self-sufficient creative project.

As with any type of triage, creative triage involves making many painful decisions.

In fact, the more painful a decision, the more potential upside the decision likely offers.

This means turning down promising projects and opportunities you desperately want to take on.

It means letting many of the fires in your business burn unabated—often indefinitely.

It means learning to accept the inevitable discomfort of never being able to get to everything you want to, or perhaps even feel you need to do.

All this, in the service of making progress on the small number of things that matter most—both for the project to be successful, as well as for yourself.

Such is the price of success.

We can try to fight the need to triage our various projects, tasks, and endeavours, attempting to maintain control over everything on our plate even as the demands of our creative platform exceed our bandwidth.

More often than not, this achieves little but undermining the quality and consistency of our work, not to mention our health, sanity, and satisfaction.

The alternative is to choose to embrace making difficult choices about where we focus our time and attention as an essential skill we must develop to reach the next level of success.

Because in the end, we’re most often held back not by the opportunities we fail to grab ahold of, but by those we fail to release.

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Explore how to navigate a creative life that matters

This article originally appeared in my weekly Creative Wayfinding Newsletter. Each issue is the product of a week of work, and contains something not available for sale.

A fresh perspective, a shot of encouragement when you need it most, and maybe even some genuine wisdom from time to time.

Each week, we explore a different facet of the question “How do we navigate the wilds of creating work that matters?”

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

Subscribe

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Spend much time wandering the countryside of the UK and it’s only a matter of time before you begin to notice a curious set of landmarks.

These landmarks generally come in the form of squat, truncated obelisks or pillars about three feet tall that are most often perched atop prominent hills.

The landmarks have an aura of mystique around them, which they also seem to transfer onto the landscape.

Other than a cryptic set of inscriptions consisting of a few letters and numbers, they lack any kind of identifying signage.

They are concrete, decidedly utilitarian, obviously manufactured… And yet somehow manage to feel like a natural part of their surroundings.

Looking at them, it’s easy to think that they have always been there, and will always be there.

The truth, while interesting in its own right, is far more pedestrian.

The pillars—or trig points as they’re locally known—were initially constructed between 1935 and 1962 as part of the Retriangulation of Britain, an effort to provide more accurate maps of the country.

In case you need a refresher, triangulation is a mathematical concept stating that if you know the distance between two reference points, you can calculate the exact distance to any third point by measuring the angles to it at each of those initial references.

In other words, if we know the distance between A & B and the angles of x & y, **we can determine the distances of both AC and BC.

It’s a simple but brilliant concept with a long history dating back nearly 2,000 years.

In addition to being used to create the first truly accurate maps of countries, triangulation has been used to determine the heights of mountains (such as Mt. Everest) and even to determine the size of the Earth.

It’s safe to say that triangulation is one of the most tried and true mapping techniques we have available.

And while the mapping of physical geography has now been overtaken by more accurate and responsive GPS networks, when it comes to mapping and navigating the landscapes of our creative work, the older analog method of triangulation persists as perhaps the best tool we have available.

Triangulating Your Location

Perhaps the two most fundamental and persistent challenges we face as creators are understanding where we’re going and understanding how to get there.

While we often think of our most pressing problems as tactical (ie. “How do I grow my email list?”). In my experience, however, when we have clarity on our destination and direction, the tactics take care of themselves.

Clarity then, is a necessary first step to real progress toward our destination.

While we innately understand this, however, our understanding tends to lead us into the trap of waiting for clarity before attempting to move forward at all.

This is far from an efficient or useful way to gain clarity, however.

Because while clarity may be a pre-requisite for meaningful forward progress, movement is a pre-requisite for clarity.

Unfortunately, this idea doesn’t align with the way most of us think about progress, that any effort that doesn’t lead us closer to our goals is wasted.

But this couldn’t be further from the truth.

In fact,that effort—and the accompanying movement—is a necessary part of establishing a series of reference points necessary to triangulate where we are in relation to where we want to be.

If we’re feeling lost or stuck, then, the most productive action we can take might be to simply pick a direction and climb the nearest hill to establish a new reference point.

It’s entirely likely—probable even—that the direction we pick won’t be the shortest or most efficient route to our ultimate destination. But if it gets us moving and helps us find clarity, it may just end up being the fastest, **even if it takes us in the entirely opposite direction from where we want to end up.

When it comes to clarity, all reference points are helpful. And the more we have, the more their benefits compound.

While we can triangulate our way to a given destination based on as little as two reference points, the accuracy and range of our route-making increases the more reference points we have.

So too does the level of nuance in our understanding of the landscape through which we’re traveling as well as our awareness of opportunities adjacent to our route.

What’s more, the reference points we establish have a way of being useful beyond simply calculating our immediate next step.

Sure, the hill ahead of us will provide a useful vantage point from which to plan our next move. But the trig point we set there may continue to be a useful reference in helping us triangulate the moves we’ll make 6 months or 6 years from now.

As a result, each hill we ascend increases the resolution of our internal map, both of the terrain we’ve already covered, as well as that which lays ahead.

It’s slow going, slogging up hill after hill, only to find we need to adjust our course, descend, and aim for a different hill on the horizon.

And yet this is precisely the type of wayfinding that sets us up for long-term success in any field.

One that, thanks to our extensive exploration and cartography we now know better than almost anyone else.

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Explore how to navigate a creative life that matters

This article originally appeared in my weekly Creative Wayfinding Newsletter. Each issue is the product of a week of work, and contains something not available for sale.

A fresh perspective, a shot of encouragement when you need it most, and maybe even some genuine wisdom from time to time.

Each week, we explore a different facet of the question “How do we navigate the wilds of creating work that matters?”

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

Subscribe

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There are few things in life better than a loaf of freshly baked bread.

At least for me, there’s a good chance that if there’s fresh bread in the house, I’ll eat pretty much nothing else until it’s gone.

Part of fresh bread’s appeal comes down to its tangible attributes. The smell it fills the house with as it bakes, the way it feels in your mouth as you bite through the hard crust into the soft, still-warm center, and of course, the flavour, understated though it may be.

Another part of the appeal, however, is its hearty simplicity.

Fresh bread is humble, unpretentious, made of simple ingredients that have remained largely unchanged over centuries if not millennia.

In an increasingly experimental culinary world highlighted by flashy, exotic, Instagram-worthy ingredients and presentations, good simple bread persists—and in many cases remains uniquely capable of stealing the show out from under a more ostentatious main course.

Perhaps part of the magic of good bread is that it defies our expectations of what a few simple ingredients are capable of adding up to.

Or perhaps we’re presented with so much bland, mundane, mass-produced bread that when it’s done right, we can’t help but take notice.

Whatever it is, for all its simplicity, good bread is–often literally–remarkable.

Bread is not alone in its simple, durable remarkability.

Beer, wine, cheese, olive oil, a steaming bowl of soup, stew or goulash—all of which pair excellently with a fresh loaf of bread by the way—are just a few products of simple ingredients that have continued to persist, comfort, and delight through the centuries.

In a world that is changing ever more quickly, the fact that these foods, made often from just a few simple ingredients have not only endured in their appeal is incredible.

But what if these foods have persisted not in spite of their simple, pedestrian, unassuming ingredients but because of them?

And if so, what can we learn about cooking with simple ingredients when it comes to our creative practices?

Simplicity is a Feature Not a Bug

A basic loaf of sourdough bread is made from just three ingredients, flour, salt, and water.

For most of us, these ingredients are not only easily-accessible, but ubiquitous. If we don’t already have our cupboard stocked with them, we can get them quickly and cheaply.

The basic building blocks of creative work are even more ubiquitous.

At its core, all creative work comes down to just two basic ingredients:

1. A novel idea
2. A way to express it

We’re all equally capable of finding good ideas if we’re willing to learn how to look for, notice, and develop them.

And while there are certainly complex and expensive ways of expressing ideas, most of us have the ability, both physically & technically, to share our ideas in either written or recorded form.

Writing, in particular, has persisted as a durable form of communicating ideas for millennia.

Despite the limited number of prerequisites, we have a hard time believing that these simple ingredients are enough to succeed creatively.

And so we start adding in trendy, exotic, and flashy ingredients, thinking that what our recipe is missing is more spice, more garnish, or more “Wow” factor.

In the hands of a skilled chef, these finishing touches might elevate a dish from great to extraordinary.

In the hands of an amateur, they lead to a dish that may look impressive… but leaves a disappointing taste in your mouth.

Perhaps it’s the most skilled chef of all who is able to deliver an extraordinary, remarkable experience without the ornamentation. With nothing but a few simple ingredients, prepared masterfully.

And indeed, it’s precisely the method of preparation that has the ability to transform many a set of simple ingredients into something exponentially greater than the sum of their parts.

The Magic is in the Process

For all the joy a loaf of fresh bread is capable of bringing us, it’s surprising we don’t bake them more often.

The reason, I think, is that while the ingredients may be simple and readily available, the process required to transform those ingredients into something special requires more time, patience, and commitment than we’re typically willing to invest.

A single loaf of sourdough, for example, can take over a week to create, with regular attention and adjustments to the fermenting sourdough starter mix.

So instead, more often than not, we settle for an off-the-shelf, pre-packaged loaf that—while it might occupy the same space in our stomach—lacks the substance and the magic of the carefully and attentively prepared alternative.

It turns out, sourdough is not alone in its patient magic.

The same slow, caring, attentive process transforms all kinds of simple ingredients into something special.

Wine, whiskey, beer, barbecue, stew, cheese, and many other foods all improve with age. Many even require it.

Balsamic vinegar, for example, takes anywhere from 12-25 years to prepare from scratch.

The same concept holds true for us as creators, both in regard to our individual ideas and projects as well as our broader careers.

Applying Time & Patience to Your Creative Work

Every full-time creator I know has a slew of ideas for blog posts, podcast episodes, or videos they’ve been patiently allowing to ferment for multiple years without publishing.

On the surface, these ideas are almost always simple, mundane, quotidian.

And yet… for one reason or another, there’s something about the idea they can’t quite shake or articulate.

And they begin to obsess over it.

When the time finally comes to publish, the process of fermentation has done what it always does: Transformed the simple base ingredients into something entirely unrecognizable and, perhaps even, remarkable.

The same process of fermentation occurs at the career level as well.

It’s absurd to think that someone who’s been creating around a topic, genre, or medium for two years would have anywhere near the level of nuanced insight, mastery of the tools, or ability to articulate ideas as effectively as someone who’s been baking with those same ingredients for a decade (let alone three, or five).

The most successful creators are often those who dedicate an entire body of work to a simple topic others overlook as unworthy of more than a single blog post or podcast episode.

Think Ryan Holiday with Stoicism applied to modern life.

Brene Brown with vulnerability.

Krista Tippett with what it means to be a human today.

None of their work is defined by exotic spice or extravagant garnish, but instead, a few simple ingredients, given decades to ferment and transform into something magical.

Which is all any of us needs.

The ingredients are all around us. In fact, we likely already have them.

Which means the surest path to success might be to stop looking outward for the ingredients we feel we’re missing and instead look inward.

To the simple ingredients that have already been fermenting, perhaps for years, unseen, waiting patiently to be combined, nurtured, and distilled into something entirely magical.

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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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