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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Work with What You Have
While I have a wide variety of taste in music, my hands down favourite artist is Gregory Alan Isakov.
The first time I ever heard one of his songs was, was—believe it or not—in the background of a McDonald’s holiday commercial on TV (as a lifelong vegetarian and farmer, he donated the licensing fee to a sustainable farming non-profit).
Immediately, I was hooked.
Unable to get the Shazam app on my phone up in time, I did my best to memorize the lyrics I’d heard, ran to my computer, furiously typed them into Google, hit enter, and held my breath.
“Big Black Car by Gregory Alan Isakov” came back as the top result.
A quick listen confirmed that this was the song that had captivated me and from that moment on, (what I can only imagine will be) a lifelong bond was formed.
Since then, I’ve probably listened to Gregory’s music more than anyone other artist. I’ve seen him perform live 5 times, in 4 countries (most recently in Paris, though the most memorable show was in Edinburgh). I know all the lyrics to every one of his songs and can play at least a dozen on guitar.
Most of all, however, I’ve spent considerable time and angst wishing I could write songs like him.
See, something about his music resonates with me in a way that feels like I could have written it, as though he’s put the perfect words to my experience of life in a way I never could.
What’s more, our vocal ranges overlap nearly identically, meaning the melodies I might write, align as closely as the lyrics.
Despite the overlap, however, the fact remains that when it comes to songwriting, the magic I find in Gregory’s music is something I simply can’t replicate.
During the time of my life when I still imagined my greatest creative contributions would be as a songwriter and musician, this was a bitter pill to swallow. As my creative identity has shifted from musician to writer and teacher, however, I’ve come to peace with it.
At this point, I can appreciate the magic Greg’s music holds over me and simply behold and appreciate it.
Of course, with the shift in identity, new comparisons have emerged.
As a writer, I now envy James Clear’s single-minded drive, the clarity, precision & background research of his writing, and his systematic approach to building a brand around his work.
I envy Ann Handley’s seemingly effortless injection of wit and humour into business writing.
I envy Robert Macfarlane’s masterful vocabulary, especially when it comes to his lucid descriptions of the natural world.
And I envy David Hiatt’s incredibly personal, story-driven, bordering-on-poetic sales copy.
The list of comparisons doesn’t end there.
And of course, when I think of all the fantastic writers whose work I’ve yet to read, I think it’s safe to say the list of comparisons is potentially limitless.
And yet, despite all the myriad ways in which I might feel my own writing doesn’t measure up, I still regularly get emails like this one.
These emails remind me:
I can’t write songs like Gregory Alan Isakov.
I can’t write non-fiction like James Clear, Ann Handley, or Robert Macfarlane.
I can’t write sales copy like David Hieatt.
But I can do something.
I can work with what I have.
And do the best I can with it.
Because if I don’t do it, no one else will.
We often struggle to perceive our own creative magic.
But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Don’t hide it.
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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Why Most Marketing Strategies Won’t Work for You (And How to Tweak Them So They Do)
How many strategies have you subscribed to help you achieve one goal or another, only to quickly discard them in favour of something else?
If you’re anything like me, the list is both long and wide.
These strategies promise to help us grow our audiences, email lists, or businesses, hit New & Noteworthy with our podcasts, and improve our productivity. Regardless of the goal, the pattern plays out the same way every time.
We approach each new strategy with a sense of optimism, and in some cases, even certainty, that this new strategy is the one that will take us where we’re seeking to go. Soon enough, however, that strategy is lying crumpled, and discarded on the floor, having been tossed aside for a new tactic promising a quick win.
The problem isn’t that these strategies don’t work as described.
It’s that we approach these recipes to success without considering the ingredients required or whether or not they suit our individual tastes.
If we want to be successful in any pursuit, we need to understand that all recipes are merely starting points from which to adapt and experiment.
Working With What You Have
I recently spent 5 days at an Airbnb while in town for a friend’s wedding.
By dinner time on day 4, I had reached the end of my limited supply of groceries. The most substantial ingredient in the near-empty fridge was the carton of eggs which had already formed the foundation of lunch and breakfast.
I cracked two eggs and began frying them before returning to the now even emptier fridge.
Two jars stocked the shelf. One salsa, one pesto. After a moment’s consideration, I reached for the salsa having already had pesto on my lunchtime bagel-egg sandwich.
Having depleted the fridge of its meager resources I turned to the similarly sparse pantry. Nothing to go with eggs, except…
My eyes landed on the box of Breton multigrain crackers.
“Multigrain crackers aren’t that far off from tortilla chips…” I thought to myself, an idea taking shape as I removed the eggs from the stove and assembled my very DIY chilaquiles.
It wasn’t fancy, but given the limited ingredients, the meal wasn’t bad.
To be honest, this surprised me.
My typical style of cooking (if you can call it that) is far from experimental.
I can’t confidently take stock of the ingredients on-hand and whip up something delicious at a moment’s notice. When I cook, it requires a careful following of the recipe, reading and re-reading each line to ensure the finished dish comes out correctly.
When I get lucky it does.
To me, the idea of experimenting in the kitchen is intimidating.
Cooking has always felt like a sacred art form, best left to people who actually understand the relationships between different flavours and ingredients, the tools and techniques of the trade, and generally understand what the hell they’re doing.
ie. Not me.
And so I’ve stuck to the recipes as printed, and left the customizing and experimenting to the experts.
We often approach our work with the same mentality.
Each Result Has Many Potential Recipes
We tend to imagine that there are a finite number of “recipes” for growing an audience, launching a course, building a business, or achieving any other goal we have in mind.
And recipes do exist.
For almost any pursuit imaginable, there are one or more tried and true paths to achieve the desired result. Many people use these recipes to great effect, and it’s easy to get swept up in the hype when a new strategy takes off.
The problem is when we think that any one strategy is the only way to achieve a certain desired result.
Website pop-ups, welcome mats, and lead magnets are proven to improve your email list conversion rate. But many newsletters grow to tens of thousands of subscribers without using any of these tactics.
Cold outreach, whether by phone, email, LinkedIn, or Facebook helps many people grow their businesses. But if you, like me can’t stomach the thought of it, you’re probably not going to get results.
Regularly guesting on podcasts is a reliable strategy to grow your own show. But so is doing cross-promotions with other podcasters. Or focusing on the SEO of your website. Or advertising in niche publications. Or any number of other strategies.
Rarely, if ever, is there a single strategy that works equally for everyone.
Recipes Must be Tweaked to Taste
Like recipes, we need to remember that any specific strategy we subscribe to in our work is just one possible interpretation.
Your grandmother’s famous spaghetti sauce is different from the version being served at Olive Garden, which is different again from the sauce being served at Da Vittorio in Sicily. A quick search of Google turns up hundreds more recipes for the sauce, which are, of course, only the recipes that have been documented and posted online.
It would be ridiculous to suggest that any one of these recipes was the one and only sauce that “works”.
At best, any recipe or strategy provides a starting point from which to tweak, according to our own tastes and available ingredients.
Don’t like one of the ingredients the recipe calls for? Get rid of it.
Have an excess of another ingredient on hand? Find a way to incorporate it.
Want more spice? Add to your taste.
The results of our experimentation aren’t always perfect.
But over time, as our tastes, instincts, and understanding of the ingredients improve, we’re able to tweak our way to recipes that work far better for us than the original ever did. What’s more, the process becomes more enjoyable.
Make the Process Enjoyable
As prescribed, many strategies call on us to do things that are outside our existing skillset, comfort zone, or even moral boundaries.
Even if we choose to extend ourselves to accommodate the recipe, pursuing these strategies often feels like we’re pushing a boulder up a hill.
Much like we’re unlikely to stick with a diet that consists entirely of food we have to force ourselves to eat, so too are we unlikely to stick with any strategy in our work consisting of a process we have to force ourselves to implement.
In many cases, however, we can choose to simply substitute these ingredients for our existing skills, knowledge, and superpowers. When we do, the process becomes one we easily maintain long enough to achieve our desired results.
Over time, we often find ourselves returning to the same ingredients again and again.
In doing so, a cuisine of sorts emerges, consisting of all the skills, perspectives, and tastes we’ve found to work for us in the past, remixed to suit a variety of situations and goals.
Develop Your Creative Cuisine
I’m unlikely to develop any sort of personal cuisine around eggs, salsa, and Breton crackers.
But I’m realizing that the ingredients I use to produce and grow this newsletter are already showing up in the rest of the work I do, and slowly my creative cuisine is forming.
Whether you realize it or not, so is yours.
The ingredients you use might be identical to the original recipe, or they may be heavily modified. You might play with the measurements, preparation, cooking time, or any number of other variables. Over time, you may choose to forgo the recipes entirely and simply work with the ingredients you have on hand.
These amendments might be made to accommodate the ingredients at your disposal, your personal tastes, or those of your audience.
Just remember that if you don’t enjoy the finished meal and the process of preparing it, others are unlikely to as well.
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.
The Two Choices When You Find Yourself Speeding Towards a Wall
Sooner or later we all find ourselves approaching the wall.
Whether at a blistering hurtle or a slow creep, as we draw closer we sense more than see its approach.
And in the face of our impending collision we ask ourselves:
Do I pull up?
Or push through?
Driven by deadlines, expectations, and pressure (both internal and external), it often feels impossible to pull up.
And yet, we can feel the inevitable destruction that lies behind the wall, should we choose to test it.
When faced with this decision, a good first step is to simply pause
Maybe for a week.
Maybe for a day
Maybe for just an hour.
Long enough to slow your heart rate, to look beyond your current predicament.
To remember how small you are in the grander scope of things.
Long enough to stop and observe the wonder contained in a leaf or a snowflake.
The power of the sun or the wind or the tide.
Long enough to sit and savour a cup of coffee, or a hearty meal, or a conversation with a friend.
Long enough to decenter and then recenter yourself, bringing a fresh perspective to the challenge at hand.
We might not always have the time and space to pause long enough to bring ourselves back to baseline.
But if we choose, we’re almost always able to slow down just enough to find another route around the wall.
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.
These Unseen Gaps in Your Work Are Why You’re Not Getting the Results You Want (Here’s How to Close Them)
If your goal is to become an Olympic sprinter, it’s easy to measure the gap between your current ability and the level you need to be at in order to make the Olympic team.
In less than 5 minutes, you can pull up not just the qualifying times for the previous Olympics, but the results of all international competitions over the past few years.
With that information in hand, you have a benchmark to aim for and judge yourself against as you train. You might be able to sprint 100m in 13 seconds–an impossibly fast time for the average person–but if the threshold to qualify for the Olympics is 12 seconds, you know exactly how much more time you need to shave off in order to close the gap between your ability and your goal.
Gaps like these exist in our work too.
The problem is that unlike sports, which are so easily and regularly analyzed and quantified down to the atomic level, the gaps keeping our work from reaching larger audiences are almost entirely invisible.
I think I’m a pretty decent writer, for example. But how do I judge the gap I need to close if I want to write a book that gets read by hundreds of thousands of people?
Should I improve my grammar? Increase my word count? Compress my word count? Aim to write for a 5th-grade reading level? All of the above? None of the above but something else entirely? Is my writing even the problem or is it something else?
If you don’t know what to look for, it’s hard to find these gaps in the first place, let alone close them.
We can be sure, however, that these gaps exist somewhere for all of us. But our lack of awareness about where exactly they are gets us into trouble.
If We Can’t See a Gap, Does it Even Exist?
When we can’t see our gaps, we come to one of two conclusions.
1. The Gap Exists, But is Near-Invisible
If we’re lucky, we correctly assume that there must **be one or more gaps somewhere that we just can’t see.
This attitude is helpful as it assumes ownership and control of our situation. But it doesn’t help us actually close the gaps in question.
Without being able to see where our gaps exist, we’re left shooting in the dark. We might invest considerable time and energy into improving ourselves and our work, but it’s entirely likely that a large portion of that investment is put toward improving things that don’t really matter.
At best, we guess right a percentage of the time and slowly close the gaps. At worst, we guess wrong and waste our time and energy while leaving the gaps untouched.
When we know exactly where we have a gap, we can use it as a North Star. We can focus our effort on closing the gap and watch our results improve as we do. Without a known gap as our guide, however, we lose forward momentum and begin to drift sideways.
Without a reference point, we also lose any definitive sense of progress. Without a sense of progress, it’s only a matter of time before we lose all motivation to keep moving forward.
2. There is No Gap
The other conclusion we might draw when we can’t see our gaps is that there are no gaps at all.
This conclusion kicks off a vicious downward spiral.
If no gap exists between us and the people at the top of our field, what motivation do we have to keep improving, after all?
Unaware of the hidden gaps separating us and the creators at the top of our field, we might look at their work and naively say, “I could do that.”
In the world of podcasting, Joe Rogan is a classic example.
Listening to his show, it might seem like all Rogan is doing is sitting down, pressing record, and then talking for several hours straight. His episodes aren’t highly produced, and he doesn’t appear to take a particularly rigorous approach to interviewing. There’s almost nothing in the show that appears to demand a particularly high level of skill.
Unaware of the gap, countless podcasters have used Rogan’s show as the inspiration for their own “two dudes chatting” style shows and become frustrated when they find success of any kind (let alone $100M Spotify deals…) hard to come by.
This lack of awareness of the very real (if hard to see) gaps leads to bitterness and entitlement.
If we can’t decipher a difference in skill, knowledge, or experience between us and those at the top, the easiest explanation is to assume that either they got lucky, or the system is rigged against the little guys like us.
Both of these explanations are utterly destructive to our creative aspirations.
They let us off the hook, giving up all agency and control over our situation and all but guarantee that we will neither close the gaps nor achieve our goals for our work.
How to Spot the Gaps in Your Work
Spotting the gaps in our creative work is hard.
Part of this is due to what writer David Perell calls the Paradox of Creativity.
“Your work is done,” Perell shares, “when it looks so simple that the consumer thinks they could’ve done it, which means they won’t appreciate how hard you worked.”
But while the gaps in our work may be difficult to spot, they’re not impossible.
The biggest challenge keeping us from identifying the gaps in our work is limiting the scope through which we look for them.
The first (and often only) place we look when judging the gaps between ourselves and others whose success we’re trying to emulate is skill. It’s true that there is often a considerable skill gap that needs to be closed in order to get to where we want to be. But there are also other more subtle gaps that, while they may be harder to measure, may be essential to close in order to achieve our goals.
I think of these gaps as falling into one of two categories.
Linear Gaps
Linear gaps are those that are closed additively.
We narrow these gaps brick by brick, building on top of our existing foundation until the gap is closed.
Examples of linear gaps worth addressing include:
- Skill
- Network
- Experience
- Mindset
- Knowledge
- Trial & Error
- Quantity & Quality of Ideas
Linear gaps are fairly easily addressed.
The simple solution to closing the gaps related to skill, experience, and trial & error is to do more work. To increase our knowledge, we can study. To broaden our network we can reach out to more people to set up coffee chats.
With linear gaps, a given input of effort results in a tangible–often immediate–result. This makes progress easy to track and motivation easy to maintain.
Other gaps are harder to address directly, however, and the results take longer to materialize.
Compound Gaps
Unlike linear gaps, compound gaps are closed exponentially.
This means that despite a constant input of effort to close these gaps, there is an (often substantial) lag time before we begin to see these gaps shrink in a meaningful way. Once the results catch up to our effort, however, the gaps slam shut quickly.
Examples of compound gaps include:
- Audience size
- Budget
- Time
- Habit
- Instincts
The challenge presented by compound gaps is not that they’re particularly difficult to close. Instead, it’s that we don’t understand their exponential nature.
We get frustrated by compound gaps because we think they should behave linearly, with consistent effort equaling consistent results. When we input effort without seeing results, however, we lose all sense of forward progress, and with it, the motivation to keep working.
Understanding the nature of compound gaps, however, we can recalibrate our expectations.
An extra 10 subscribers, 30 minutes in our week, or $50 in our monthly budget might not feel like much. But these incremental improvements are proof that the gaps are indeed closing. Given time and continued attention, these modest gains will compound into much more significant returns.
The trick is to keep chipping away even when the results are slower than we’d like.
Establishing Your Benchmarks
Once we have an understanding of the types of gaps separating our work from the level it needs to be at, we can study others to establish our benchmarks.
When identifying the gaps we need to close, it’s helpful to study a cross-section of creators.
This will likely include the creators who are at the top of our industry or niche, but it shouldn’t be limited to them.
Study successful creators in a variety of niches, industries, and mediums, always asking, “What do they have that I don’t that allows them to be so successful?”
Some of our observations will be helpful and some won’t.
Many creators are successful because of their unique personalities. One conclusion we might draw is that we should attempt to emulate their personality traits. The better insight, however, that we should lean further into our own personalities.
Some gaps may be hard or impossible to determine with any certainty.
How do we measure the quality of someone’s creative instincts in comparison to our own? And while time and budget are more easily measurable, they’re typically not easily observable from the outside.
The point of this observation isn’t to establish mathematically precise benchmarks, however.
Instead, our goal is simply to become aware of all the contributing factors to creative success so that we can work to close those gaps and improve our odds of achieving our goals around our work.
Simply understanding that these gaps exist provides a logical explanation for why we haven’t experienced the success we might feel our work deserves, and lays out the roadmap for getting there.
Closing Your Gaps
Once we understand where our gaps exist, the final step is to close them.
This is a straightforward process, but not a quick one. And it presents two challenges:
- Deciding which of our many gaps are most immediately pressing to address.
- Knowing how far each gap needs to be closed.
While we might have major gaps in one or two areas, we likely also have dozens of other gaps that will need to be closed–or at least narrowed–in order to reach our potential as creators.
One option is to start with the gaps that are the largest.
Eliminating or reducing our greatest deficiencies is probably the quickest route to raising the overall average of our work. But our largest gaps often aren’t those that are most pivotal to the success of our work. As such, they prevent a convenient place to hide.
If we’re not careful, we can spend the majority of our time narrowing up our supporting gaps around the periphery, while ignoring the smaller, but critical gaps that will have the greatest impact.
Core vs Supporting Gaps
Of all the gaps we each have, there are a small number of critical core attributes that the ultimate success or failure of our work hinges upon.
These core gaps are likely small.
The attributes and skills associated with them form the foundation of our work and we’ve likely invested significant time into developing them. As a result, we’re likely already performing well above the average person in respect to them.
But like the Olympic hopeful who can run a 13 second 100m sprint, when it comes to these core attributes, above-average often isn’t enough.
I’m confident that I’m an above-average writer. Maybe even well above average.
My writing is good enough to have attracted more than 1,000 people like you who subscribe to receive this newsletter every week. But is it good enough to attract 10,000 people? 100,000?
For a long time, I thought it was. Recently, I’ve become convinced that it’s not.
The reason I overlooked the gap in my writing is the same reason we all tend to gloss over the gaps in our core attributes.
Our Core Gaps Hit Close to Home
Our core attributes are closely tied to our identity.
We have pride in these abilities and receive regular praise and validation in response to them. Admitting that these attributes aren’t enough feels like admitting that we’re not enough.
To protect our ego, we ignore them.
We focus our effort on the gaps that don’t hit quite so close to home, but in doing so, resign ourselves to the category of creators who are solid but unspectacular at what we do.
If we’re serious about reaching our potential as creators, we need to have an honest conversation with ourselves about whether the skills and attributes we take so much pride in, the ones that feel as though they’re apart of us are really good enough to take us where we want to go.
For most of us, I would suggest that they’re not.
Fortunately, the hardest part of closing these particular gaps is accepting the fact that they must be further closed in the first place.
It took me more than one year and 300 blog posts to come to terms with the fact that my writing wasn’t where it needed to be to get to the next level. I resisted it for months, and went through the frustration and entitlement, feeling like my writing deserved a larger audience than it had.
But it didn’t.
Once I accepted that, closing this gap has become one of the most fulfilling aspects of my life.
I love thinking about writing, after all. I love studying it, learning about it, practicing it, and improving it. Closing the gap is not a chore, but something I look forward to every day. The reason, I think, is that by closing this gap in particular, I can feel myself finally making meaningful progress toward my larger goals around my work.
Narrowing our supporting gaps is necessary. But it’s hard to overstate the power and leverage that comes with being truly exceptional at our craft.
How Far to Close Each Gap
The final question when it comes to addressing our gaps is how far each gap needs to be closed.
Within ten minutes of studying a cross-section of creators we admire, we’ll have compiled a list of dozens of gaps, many of them significant. Should we try to close all of them? Is that even possible?
Every gap we narrow will help us progress and raise the overall average of our work. But closing all our gaps is impossible.
Instead, it’s worth focusing the majority of your time and energy on closing 3-5 major gaps and more slowly address other gaps as they become relevant or necessary at different phases of your career.
Personally, the gaps I think each of us should spend significant time addressing are the following:
- Idea generation – Good ideas are the basis of all creative work. And having a lot of ideas is the best way to have good ideas.
- Writing – At some point, most creative work involves some form of writing. The better your ability to write, the better your work, marketing, communication, etc.
- Quantity of Work – Every successful creator’s body of work is like an iceberg. The exceptional work we see above the surface is supported and kept afloat by the much larger mass of work below the surface, most of it not that good.
- Network – Growing as a creator is an order of magnitude easier when you have people around you who understand your goals and can support, challenge, and champion your work. Essentially, this means making friends with other creators doing interesting and related work.
- Craft – Whatever your craft, being exceptional at it makes everything else easier.
Addressing these specific gaps is the fastest way to level up as a creator. The bonus is that closing these gaps has a way of spilling over and narrowing other gaps as well.
Always Be Closing
Luck certainly plays a role in creative success.
But it’s not the thing keeping us from joining the upper echelons of our craft. When we’re feeling frustrated, unsure of why our work isn’t getting the attention and recognition we feel it deserves, it’s worth looking for the unseen gaps we haven’t yet addressed and bringing awareness to them.
Awareness of our gaps holds the bitterness and entitlement at bay and provides us a clear, logical path forward.
This process of identifying and closing gaps is straightforward. But it’s no quick fix.
Closing our gaps is the work of a lifetime. As we close our gaps and level up, we enter new circumstances and set new goals that present new gaps to be closed.
On top of the tangible gaps within our power to close is one additional gap over which we have the power neither to resist nor to hasten.
Time.
While we may not have any control over it, this gap, above all others is worth remembering regularly.
Time is the final gap, closing linearly but compounding exponentially all the other gaps we’ve managed to narrow.
When in doubt, it’s hard to go wrong by doing what you can to close the gaps you’re aware of.
Then give it time.
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.
The Unasked Question Keeping You From Achieving Your Potential as a Creator
For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to write a book.
As a kid, I’m told, I was prolific to the point my mom was sure I’d grow up to be a writer. It took some time, but if this newsletter is any indication, she’s been proven right. And while writing blogs, newsletters, and podcasts has always come easily to me, the idea of a book has felt entirely unapproachable.
It’s not the scale of a book-writing project that’s deterred me thus far.
I wrote more than 100,000 words last year alone across my blogs and newsletter, more than enough for a book.
Instead, it’s the level of experience, knowledge, and vision I felt were required to write a meaningful, useful, coherent book. I felt I couldn’t possibly have enough to share on any one topic. And so I pushed the idea of writing a book to the back of my mind.
“When I’m ready, I’ll know,” I thought.
But then six months ago, in a single moment, my perspective changed.
While listening to a podcast, one tiny comment by the guest shifted my entire perspective of what it meant to “be ready” to take on a big, scary, ambitious creative project of any kind.
In that moment, not only did my perspective around readiness shift, but I realized with stark clarity the common thread among all creative work that really matters. The type of work that fulfills our potential as creators. The type of elusive work we’re all striving to create.
This approach has nothing to do with having all (or any) of the answers, and everything to do with asking the right questions.
Why Write a Book in the First Place?
The shift happened while listening to an episode of Krista Tippett’s On Being podcast.
But despite the impact of the revelation, I’ve completely forgotten who the guest was and what they were talking about.
What I do remember about the guest is that he was impressively (even intimidatingly) credentialed. One of those people who seems to contain within themselves the knowledge of multiple lifetimes. Someone for whom writing a book was surely as simple as sitting down, turning on the tap, and letting it flow out of them onto the page.
Or so I thought.
Because as soon as he was asked about his motivation to write the book in question, he responded with, “I wanted to learn about [whatever the hell the book was about] so I decided to write a book on it.”
Wait. What?
I was so stunned by the comment I replayed the comment to make sure I had heard correctly.
Sure enough, upon second listen, he reiterated that his process for writing a book was not built on knowledge, experience, or a predefined vision for the finished product.
Instead, it was built on a single, nagging question, and the curiosity to explore it.
The conversation on the podcast moved on. If I heard any of it, I didn’t take it in. My mind was off on another plane, ruminating on the repercussions of this new information.
Creative Work Should Explore, Not Explain
In the months since, this quote has haunted me.
It suggests that writing a book is first and foremost an act of exploration and discovery. The sharing, explaining, and educating of the audience are secondary considerations.
This mindset highlights a gap in the way a certain type of creator approaches their work and the way the rest of us do.
Most of us view books (or courses, or podcasts, etc.) as Capstone Projects.
Viewed from the outside, these projects appear to be the culmination of years of research and experience, concisely and compellingly packaged for broader consumption. But when we carry this approach to our own projects, we start down a slippery slope.
The Capstone Project view demands that we spend years, if not decades, gathering information and experience before we ever sit down to put pen to paper and share.
No matter how much knowledge we build up over the years, however, the feeling of impostor syndrome will persist. It may even increase. The longer we put off writing the book, the greater the pressure, after all. If this is to be our magnum opus, it can be nothing short of perfection, we think.
And so the longer we wait, the harder it is to start, and the harder it is to start, the longer we wait. Kicking the can down the road to a “someday” buried safely in the future.
How Fear Creates Generic Content
Our reluctance to commit pen to paper and start before we know where we’re going is based largely on our fear of being wrong in public.
By publishing our work–and with it, our ideas–we’re putting ourselves out on a limb.
When we do, we open ourselves up to being challenged. What if my information is wrong or incomplete, we wonder? What if my perspective is flawed? What if new information comes to light tomorrow that changes the way I think about this topic? What if someone smarter than me reads this and calls me out publicly?
This fear of being found out and exposed causes us to delay publishing anything about which we are anything less than absolutely 100% certain. Most often, that means settling for recycling tried and true ideas that are already in common supply.
While this feels like the safer bet, it categorically precludes us from reaching our potential as creators or ever doing anything really interesting.
We don’t need to look farther than our Twitter feeds full of endlessly repeated advice on how to improve our writing, Instagram feeds with thousands of accounts offering subtle variations on the same fitness tips, and countless business podcasts sharing the exact same marketing, mindset, and entrepreneurship advice to see the result of this fear of going out on a limb.
Generic Work Can Only Take Us So Far
This approach to publishing presents a convenient place to hide.
Much of this endlessly repeated content is, in fact, useful after all. It’s tried, true, proven, verified. We’ve found it helpful ourselves and are confident it will be helpful to our audiences as well.
The problem is that sooner or later, we reach a limit of how far this type of regurgitated content can take us. While it’s hard to be called out for publishing content that fits into the conventional wisdom and worldview of the pack, it’s also hard to stand out from the pack when everything we publish can be found a dozen times over elsewhere.
Just as surely as products and services can easily be commoditized, their value steadily driven down as their ubiquity increases, so too can ideas.
The thing about commodities is this.
While you can be confident about the existence of a market for your product or idea, your ability to capture more than a tiny fraction of that market is severely limited. Competition is fierce, and audience loyalty is low. There’s always someone willing and able to offer more value for less time, money, or in a lower word count. A classic race to the bottom.
As creators, we face a choice.
We can continue to take shelter in the pack, doing work and creating content that is acceptable, if unremarkable.
Or we can make a radical shift in how we approach our work in the first place. An approach that doesn’t start with an answer, but a question.
A question that hasn’t been asked or answered a hundred times over.
A question that might not even have an answer.
And it’s here, once we find, ask, and begin to unravel that question, that we find ourselves in position to do something new, unique, and interesting.
Behind All Work That Matters Is a Question to Be Unraveled
Questions break the status quo, create progress, and seek to understand what we don’t already know.
Questions like “How?” and “Why?” seek to understand more deeply. “Why not?” and “What if?” seek to expand on what’s possible.
Questions form the basis of all interesting work, from innovation in sustainable business models ( “How can we produce better products while also lessening our environmental impact?”) to books-turned-Hollywood-blockbusters (“What would a vampire-human-werewolf love triangle look like?”)
We might think it’s the lack of budget, skill, or experience that keeps us from growing our audiences as creators.
But our biggest lack is in the ambition in our questions.
Innovation Comes From Unraveling Big Questions
James Clear asked and unraveled the question of how to best build habits.
Brené Brown continues to ask and unravel the question of how to negotiate our relationship with shame and vulnerability.
Krista Tippett, and her podcast that kicked off this whole revelation, has been asking and unraveling perhaps the biggest question of all for almost 20 years and over 400 episodes: “What does it mean to be human?”
Big questions inspire, excite, and rouse curiosity. And yet, these aren’t the questions most of us find ourselves addressing through our work.
We more often find ourselves asking “How do I do this right?” than “How might I do this best?”
And “What should I do?” rather than “What could I do?”
These are the questions of implementors rather than innovators, explorers, and creators.
This timid approach to questioning isn’t entirely our fault, however.
Breaking Our Answer-Centric Conditioning
Our education system has conditioned us to believe that it’s having the answer that really matters.
When a question comes to mind for which the answer isn’t immediately available, frustrated though we may be, we move on. Sooner or later, we think, someone else with more skill, experience, and credentials will come along and solve it.
The problem is, when we rely on others to ask and answer the questions, not only do we consign ourselves to always be at least one step behind those willing to go out on a limb and break new ground, we also miss out on the opportunity to discover the best possible solutions to the problems we and our audiences face.
Our greatest opportunity to stand out as creators, then, is to be the ones asking, exploring, and unraveling the questions. To take our existing knowledge and the current best practices and use them as the foundation to push into the unknown.
The first step is to break our reliance on other people to discover the answers for us and realize that the very thing that qualifies us (or anyone) to tackle a big question is our curiosity and willingness to follow where it leads.
Choosing to follow a question instead of the well-worn path takes courage. But if we’re able to muster it, we open ourselves up to significant upside that’s hard to come by on more well-traveled routes.
How Unraveling a Question Makes You a More Confident Creator
Audiences gravitate toward big questions and fresh takes on old problems.
But while unraveling an ambitious question can certainly help to attract an audience, the greatest benefits of unraveling a question yourself, versus relying on the conclusion of others are internal.
Perhaps the most significant is the solid ground it gives you to stand on.
In unraveling a question, your opinions form based on your own research, interviews, and experiments. The information you’re working with comes directly from the source, rather than being co-opted and absorbed second (or third or fourth) hand.
This takes the pressure off.
Because now, your work isn’t about you and your beliefs about the topic at hand. It’s about answering and unraveling the question as fully and truthfully as you can, without bias for where it will lead.
The confidence that comes from this foundation is significant. It destroys impostor syndrome and empowers you to show up bigger in every aspect of your work and life.
While the increase in confidence might be reward enough, the products, content, and opportunities that come from unraveling an interesting question are also significant.
The Best Products Are Not Made but Unraveled
My course, Podcast Marketing Academy, emerged entirely from a question that nagged me for months regarding our clients’ shows: “Why do some shows grow effortlessly while others stall and plateau?”
After reading dozens of blog posts on podcast marketing and growth and being frustrated by the incomplete suggestions they provided, I resigned myself to the fact that if I wanted to answer the question, I was going to have to do so myself.
I took the question to interviews with my clients and dozens of other podcasters, observing, dissecting, and taking notes on many more in an attempt to suss out the ingredients for sustainable podcast growth.
The result was a very different framework than the one I would have created before I asked and unraveled the question.
But it was one that I now had 100% confidence in teaching and selling. I absolutely knew it would work and I absolutely knew it was the very best solution for a podcaster who had found themselves in the plateau that sparked the question in the first place.
What’s more, because the course is based on my firsthand research, there’s nothing else like it. It’s not the result of taking someone else’s podcast marketing course and then replicating it with some subtle tweaks thrown in. It truly is the one and only of its kind.
The unique program, however, is just one product of the unique perspective I’ve gained by unraveling the question.
That perspective has resulted in podcast guesting, speaking, and writing opportunities, new relationships, and a near-endless supply of content.
Developing a unique perspective and creating work that is truly singular should always be our goal as creators. Singular work is the polar opposite of commoditized work, and as such, is inherently more interesting and valuable.
The most reliable way of creating something singular starts with the question you choose to unravel with your work.
Picking Your Question
There are an infinite number of questions each of us could choose to focus on with our work.
Like my experience with Podcast Marketing Academy, or James Clear with Atomic Habits, we can choose to focus on a practical problem facing us, our audience, or our industry and work to figure out the best solution. These questions often start with a “Why?” and over the course of the unraveling turn into a “Why not?”
Unraveling these questions can lead to innovation, new products, services, businesses, business models, and even entire industries (the fast-growing private space industry comes to mind).
These questions are practical, helpful, and worthy of our time and energy.
But for many of us, there’s another, level of deeper, murkier Meta-Questions waiting to be unraveled. Questions that have unknowingly shaped our entire lives, and–once acknowledged–are the gateway to achieving our greatest potential.
The Meta-Questions That Shape Our Lives
In fiction, great characters are driven by one or more unanswered questions they spend their lives exploring.
“Well-drawn characters have a spine,” shares Andrew Stanton, the writer behind Toy Story and WALL-E In his TED talk. “The idea is that the character has an inner motor, a dominant, unconscious goal that they’re striving for, an itch that they can’t scratch.”
These Meta Questions don’t just apply to Pixar characters.
Stanton goes on to share how he became aware of the Meta-Question driving his own work and life.
“When I was four years old, I have a vivid memory of finding two pinpoint scars on my ankle and asking my dad what they were. And he said I had a matching pair like that on my head, but I couldn’t see them because of my hair. And he explained that when I was born, I was born premature, that I came out much too early, and I wasn’t fully baked; I was very, very sick. And when the doctor took a look at this yellow kid with black teeth, he looked straight at my mom and said, ‘He’s not going to live.’ And I was in the hospital for months. And many blood transfusions later, I lived, and that made me special.
“I don’t know if I really believe that. I don’t know if my parents really believe that, but I didn’t want to prove them wrong. Whatever I ended up being good at, I would strive to be worthy of the second chance I was given.”
Though we’re rarely, if ever, aware of them, we each have a series of questions that drive our goals, dreams, and motivations–and with them, our careers, relationships, and lives as a whole.
It’s in bringing awareness to and unraveling these Meta-Questions that our greatest opportunity and potential as creators (and humans) lies.
These are the questions that drive our life’s work. For which we have endless patience and motivation. For which the journey is truly more important than the destination. These are the types of questions that I suspect drive the work of Brené Brown and Krista Tippett.
Marrying Your Meta-Questions with Your Work
After watching Stanton’s TED talk, I started thinking about the Meta-Questions driving me.
Months passed without an answer. But over time, a question around the idea of “potential” started to take form.
Since childhood, I’ve ruminated on the idea of my own potential and the opportunities and burdens that come with it. My greatest fear playing on a loop in the background has always been that I would come up short. That I would waste my privilege, opportunities, and potential on things that didn’t make a difference.
I realized the question of what my potential really was and how I could possibly fulfill it had, in fact been the subtle driver behind all my major life decisions. From bicycling across Europe to starting an online business to the compulsion to create–whether through music, photography, or writing.
All of it, I realize, has been a part of the unraveling of that Meta-Question.
More recently, I’ve become aware that this newsletter has become the purest expression of that question yet.
Now more than a year in, I’m realizing that, at its core, this newsletter explores how each of us can fulfil our potential as creators and perhaps, even humans.
This is the question and the work I have endless patience for. Endless motivation. Endless curiosity. Regardless of any external success or validation. In this question, I see the potential for a book that, through this newsletter has seemingly begun to write itself, regardless of the fact that I have no expertise, no credentials, and no idea where it’s going.
That work exists for you too, buried somewhere inside a question.
It takes reflection to find the question, and courage to ask it, leaving the paved road and the signposts and the company it provides.
But it’s the work that has the greatest potential for impact. The work that will fulfill you unlike anything else. The work that, if you don’t do it, no one else will.
You don’t need more knowledge to pursue it. You don’t need more skill or experience or answers.
You simply need to ask the question, and follow its lead.
Big thanks to June Lin, Sean Stewart and Maxim Bos who gave incredible feedback on the initial draft of this essay and improved it massively.
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.
How to Become a More Resilient Creator by Roughing up Your Creative Practice
Imagine for a moment a smooth glassy sphere (personally, I’m visualizing the palantir from Lord of the Rings, but that’s just me).
The sphere is perfect. Not a scratch or smudge or mote of dust marring its surface, it’s a beautiful sight to behold.
In theory, the orb has some purpose, but you’ve almost forgotten entirely what it is. And while you don’t really put it to use, you spend a good deal of time gazing at it from across the room, fussing over it, polishing it, maintaining its perfect veneer, sharing
This orb is how a lot of us as creators treat our creative practices.
How a “Waggle” Can Help You Create More Consistent Work
As we develop as creators, we tend to develop a series of rituals, habits and superstitions designed (at least in theory) to get us into the zone and allow us to create our best work.
This practice might consist of a specific location at which we always sit down to do the work, a sacred hour when we feel inspiration is most likely to strike, a steaming cup of coffee close at hand, prepared in a specific ritualistic way, or a particular playlist that seems to channel the muse. If we’re particularly zealous, we may even offer up a prayer to the creative gods or make a sacrificial burnt offering.
Jay Acunzo refers to this type of pre-work ritual as your waggle, a phrase borrowed from the unique pre-swing ritual many golfers perform before every shot.
And regardless of how superstitious it may seem, waggles work.
In creating, as in golf, they’re a way to queue muscle memory in order to deliver a consistent outcome. And a consistent outcome is what separates pro creators from amateurs. Most people can stumble their way into making something good once. But making a career as a creator requires creating good work with practiced consistently.
But while our chosen waggles can be helpful if not outright necessary for creating consistent work, they present a problem. Particularly when they become polished to a smooth, glassy perfection.
The Downside of a Defined Waggle
As the last year has shown us, we have less control over our lives and routines than we might think.
Travel, family or friends visiting from out of town, kids activities, events, global pandemics, and more all have the ability to throw sand in the gears of our finely tuned creative machine. These situations are inevitable and unavoidable, and when our ability to do our creative work is dependent on being able to perform our waggle in the same way every time, we have a problem.
The more finely polished our waggle, the easier it is to hide behind.
When we’re unable to satisfy all of the many rituals, circumstances, and environmental requirements we’ve defined as being essential for our creative process, we’re likely to simply skip creating all together and hope for better conditions tomorrow. Repeat this process even a handful of times and before long our buffed-to-perfection creative practice becomes something to simply observe and admire from a distance rather than put to use.
If we’re in this for the long haul, we need a way to be able to maintain our creative productivity regardless of what the external world throws at us.
The best way I know to do this is to introduce some sandpaper to our practice and roughing it up, an idea borrowed from the world of meditation.
Roughing Up Your Creative Practice
A few years ago, I worked on an audio editing project for The Daily Meditation Podcast.
The project consisted of proofing the back catalogue of over a thousand episodes to be uploaded to the new paid app that Mary, the host was creating. By the end of the project, I had received an intensive crash course in meditation, mindfulness, chakras, and the benefits of various herbal teas (one of the unique quirks of the show).
While I’ve since forgotten almost everything I learned, there’s one idea that has stuck with me.
Contrary to what many people think, the real value of meditation and mindfulness is not in the time spent sitting cross-legged breathing deeply, with a blank mind.
Instead, it’s in applying the same mindfulness practices to the rest of your life especially in challenging or stressful situations. If you’re only able to practice mindfulness in a perfectly controlled environment, then, the practice isn’t much good to you.
To combat this reliance on perfect conditions, Mary frequently counselled listeners to take their meditation practice and rough it up around the edges.
Essentially, this meant challenging the notion that any of the various individual elements of the practice were necessary to meditate effectively.
Always meditate sitting straight-backed with your eyes closed? Once a week, try a walking meditation instead.
Always meditate at 7 am every morning? Try meditating in the evening.
Always meditate on your bedroom floor? Try the living room. Or the basement. Or somewhere intentionally difficult to focus, a mall food court perhaps.
Perhaps the most readily available, yet underrated method of roughing up the practice, shared Mary, was to simply push through unplanned distractions and annoyances outside of your control. Reframed this way, a neighbour mowing their lawn outside your window or kids running around the house cease to be maddening distractions and impediments to your meditation, but opportunities to persist and rough up your practice.
While an individual meditation might not be as effective as when the conditions are perfect, the practice as a whole grows more resilient.
The resiliency that comes with Rough-Edged Practice should be one of our primary goals as creators as well.
How To Create A Rough-Edged Creative Practice
As with meditation, roughing up our creative practice is essentially about putting ourselves in less than ideal environments and circumstances and training ourselves to create anyway.
Much like Marathon Projects increase our belief in our capabilities at a macro level, roughing up our creative practice increases our belief in our ability to create at the daily micro level, regardless of the external events outside of our control.
Opportunities to rough up your practice aren’t hard to find.
If you normally write every morning at 8 am at your kitchen table, try writing at 3 pm in a coffee shop. Switch up your drink, your process, or your playlist. Better yet, leave your headphones at home and ditch the playlist altogether. Find ways to intentionally introduce discomfort and friction into your process and rough up its perfect shiny exterior.
Keep in mind that the point isn’t to switch up your process every single time you sit down to create. A solid, consistent process is your foundation for reliably creating solid work, after all.
Instead, aim to switch things up once every couple of weeks.
Spend the rest of the time making use of the process that you know gets you results. Besides, even under ideal circumstances, opportunities to rough up your practice are unavoidable. When the inevitable annoyances, distractions, and frustrations arise, recognize the opportunity to further rough up (and thus strengthen) your practice and commit to pushing through.
When roughing up your practice, remember that the point isn’t to create your very best work every time you sit down.
The point is to slowly raise the overall average of your body of work over time. Building up your ability (and belief in your ability) to create solid work regardless of the conditions is a key component of raising that level.
You can start raising that level immediately.
Commit to introducing some grit into your process this week. Either by intentionally changing up your waggle, or by keeping an eye out for resistance and pushing through when you feel it urging you to wait for more ideal conditions to appear.
Take that perfect, shiny, delicate glass sphere that is your process and turn it into something that more closely resembles a dull, well-used bowling ball.
It might not be much to look at, you certainly won’t display it on a pedestal in your living room, but it’s capable of knocking down anything that comes across its path.
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.
How “Marathon Projects” Level up Your Creative Skills (and Grow Your Audience)
Ira Glass, creator of This American Life has an oft-repeated quote about “The Gap” that exists between the quality of work we want to be creating and the quality of work we’re currently capable of.
“All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there is this gap. For the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not that good.”
Our primary goal as creators then, is to close this gap.
To do so, Glass advises that especially when starting out, the most important thing you can do is to produce a large volume of work. To put yourself on a deadline and ship something every week. And this is what many of us do.
We produce weekly podcasts, blogs, newsletters, or videos… and it works! Our skills improve and the gap shrinks. Sooner or later, however, we reach a point of diminishing returns where no matter how much content we produce, the gap persists.
It’s possible at this point that if we simply keep producing content at our current pace, the gap will eventually shrink. But this is a years-long process of slow improvement. If we want to accelerate our growth as creators and more quickly narrow the gap, then, we need to shake things up.
As it turns out, it’s at this point that we can learn a lot from the world of running. Specifically, marathon running.
Why Run A Marathon?
Before we begin, let’s get one thing straight: Running a marathon is an entirely unreasonable pursuit.
While a daily running practice will certainly help you lose weight and improve your health, it’s hard to argue that the act of running one marathon has many lasting health benefits in itself.
It’s equally hard to argue that people sign up for a marathon for the external validation of winning.
Sure, a marathon is a race, but for most people in most marathons, the race is not to beat the competition and reach the podium, but–in one way or another–against themselves. They could just as easily compete against themselves by running a series of 5Ks, however.
So why go to the unreasonable lengths of running 42.2km, dealing with the pain, discomfort, and months of training for so small a tangible reward?
In fact, the unreasonableness is the whole point.
At its core, running a marathon is about going beyond what’s reasonable in order to find and stretch your limits.
When we’re feeling stuck and our growth has stalled, this exploration and expansion of our personal and creative limits is exactly what we need to reach the next level. Not by running a physical marathon, but by applying the same principles to our creative work.
I refer to these endeavors as Marathon Projects, and they should be a regular part of every creator’s process.
An Overview Of Marathon Projects
Like physical marathons, Marathon Projects are infrequent, somewhat unreasonable projects that may not have a tangible, outward-facing upside. Instead, the primary purpose is to push ourselves beyond our usual boundaries in order to find (and push outward on) our current limits.
Much like a runner will rarely run more than half the distance of a marathon during their training, Marathon Projects are an exaggeration of our typical daily or weekly creative practice.
As a YouTuber, a Marathon Project might be producing a short film.
As a writer, a Marathon Project might consist of writing an in-depth 5,000-word guide on a subject when you typically write 1,000-word blog posts. Eventually, you might feel the call to take on the ultimate Marathon Project for any writer, a book.
On top of his weekly The Fashion Geek Podcast production, Podcast Marketing Academy member Reginald Ferguson is working on a short run video & audio series documenting the process of working with a sneaker artist to get a custom pair of kicks designed.
Regardless of the medium, Marathon Projects test both our vision and endurance, requiring pre-planning as well as follow-through. The difficulty of these projects is amplified by the fact that they often happen in the background, an extra task on top of our regular content creation.
The challenge Marathon Projects present, is not without its rewards, however.
Marathon Projects Raise The Bar For Everything Else We Create
While they can be difficult to see through to completion, the difficulty is the whole point.
Marathon Projects expand our scope of what we’re capable of achieving, both on a big-picture level as well as in our day-to-day creating.
To a new runner who struggles to run a couple of kilometers a couple times a week, a marathon might seem like an impossible task. Having completed just one marathon, however, the formerly challenging 2km running practice becomes easy to the point of absurdity. At this point, the bar demands to be raised for even the basic maintenance running when not training for a race.
Marathon Projects have the same result on our day-to-day creative work.
These projects force us to explore, experiment with, and develop techniques, tools, and skills we wouldn’t otherwise employ. Like Pandora’s Box, once we’ve used them once, they have a way of working their way into our typical workflows, even if in a diminished capacity.
Producing even one Radiolab-style podcast can’t help but improve your production and editing skills.
Creating even one short film can’t help but improve your storytelling ability.
Writing even one short book can’t help but improve the way you structure your ideas and writing.
As with the runner who completes her first half-marathon, once we complete our first marathon project, we begin thinking about our next one, and how we can raise the bar a little higher.
Once this shift happens, our entire view of our regular creative work shifts.
Marathon Projects Provide Purpose And Motivation
While running a marathon might not in itself provide many lasting health benefits, the training required to run one certainly does.
For many people looking to improve their health, the training–not the race itself–is the reason they decide to run a marathon in the first place. The race is simply the capstone project that puts the training in context and gives them the structure, purpose, motivation, and deadline to follow through.
Marathon Projects do the same for our weekly content creation, providing context, purpose, and focus.
When I was first drawing up the outline for Podcast Marketing Academy, I applied my existing daily writing habit to blog my way through my course outline. The Marathon Project of the course provided a pointed focus for my content creation, which resulted in better blog content while also fleshing out the course material. When the time came to record the course videos a month later, most of the content had already been written and simply needed to be put to slides and recorded.
Tim Ferriss has famously used his podcast in a similar way, using his podcast interviews to build out the content for two books, Tools of Titans and Tribe of Mentors.
Marathon Projects force us to stretch ourselves, to explore new depths of ourselves, our topic, and our craft. By contextualizing our regular content production as part of a Marathon Project, that content is stretched as well, improving in both quality and originality.
While the primary benefits of this stretching are internal, Marathon Projects have the potential of attracting significant external opportunities as well.
Marathon Projects Put Your Full Talent On Display
While producing a weekly podcast, blog post, or video might be an important part of your content marketing plan, it’s safe to say that no single piece of content requires or displays the full depth and potential of your thought and creativity.
One of the purposes of Marathon Projects, then, is to discover and display the full extent of those capabilities.
When published publicly, these projects have a way of attracting attention from new potential audience members, collaborators, clients, customers, and even employers beyond what your typical content does. There are a few reasons for this.
Marathon Projects Are (Often) Evergreen
Marathon Projects typically have a longer shelf-life than typical weekly content and can become fantastic showcases for the work you do. They’re a way to grab people’s attention and provide a compelling on-ramp to the rest of your work.
How many people discovered James Clear by reading his best-selling book Atomic Habits and then stuck around for his weekly 3-2-1 Newsletter?
It took him 6 years to reach his first 440k subscribers (which in itself is an incredible feat) before writing Atomic Habits. Since the book was published in October 2018, he’s nearly tripled (he passed 1M subscribers in Jan 2021) his subscribers in less than half the time.
I’d be willing to bet that the majority of those new subscribers came either directly from reading the book, or from the extensive, years-long publicity campaign around it, including the dozens (if not hundreds) of podcast guest appearances, TV interviews, guest columns, and more.
This impressive publicity campaign around Atomic Habits perfectly illustrates another feature of how Marathon Projects help attract external opportunities: They give us something to really promote.
Marathon Projects Demand Promotion
While we might not go over the top to promote our latest podcast episode or blog post, Marathon Projects encourage us to pull out all the stops to get them in front of as many people as people.
It’s unlikely that any of us would write a guest post or do a podcast guest appearance with the sole purpose of raising awareness about a single blog post or podcast episode of our own. With a project we’ve spent weeks, months, or years working on, however, it’s only natural that we would want to do everything possible to get the work in front of as many people as possible.
By nature of their unreasonableness, Marathon Projects often end up being easier to promote than our weekly content. Think about the difference between a friend telling you they just completed a 10km fun run versus a hundred-mile race through Death Valley. The more unreasonable the project, the more attention it’s likely to attract.
Absurdity demands attention.
While there are certainly a number of possible external rewards that Marathon Projects may present, remember that the driving purpose behind them should be internal. Externally, Marathon Projects are gambles, some of which will lead to new opportunities and many of which won’t. This is one of the reasons why it’s helpful to do them regularly.
Scheduling Your Marathon Projects
Much like you wouldn’t run a marathon every week, or even every month, Marathon Projects should be pursued infrequently but on at least a semi-consistent schedule.
I recommend either a bi-annual or quarterly basis, depending on the scope of the projects. This schedule gives you enough time to do them well while not overwhelming your week-to-week workload.
It’s worth mentioning that Marathon Projects often act as a ratchet. The process of developing and launching my Podcast Marketing Academy, the Creative Wayfinding Newsletter, and the Build A Better Wellness Biz podcast were all Marathon Projects for me. But once they were up and running, the ongoing creation and management of them became the new baseline.
This is the case for many types of marathon projects, just as it is for physical races.
A runner who completes their first 5K often feels empowered and perhaps even compelled to run a 10K. After running the 10K, they may set their sights on a half-marathon, followed by a full marathon, and perhaps (if they’re a certain type of crazy) an ultra marathon.
In the same way, as we expand the scope of our skills, knowledge, and belief in ourselves, the ratchet cranks ever-upward, and our subsequent Marathon Projects increase in ambition and scale.
How To Pick Your Next Marathon Project
When planning a Marathon Project, there are a few factors to keep in mind.
1. Personal Interest
The first and most important consideration is your personal interest in the project itself.
While the point is for the project to be difficult enough to challenge and stretch yourself, it also needs to be something you’re motivated to keep chipping away at over the weeks or months it will take to complete it.
2. Level Of Difficulty
The difficulty of your Marathon Project has a huge effect on its ultimate effectiveness.
The purpose is to push yourself, but choosing a project that is too hard will likely lead to a project that either drags on for years or gets abandoned entirely. Set the bar too low, however, and you won’t see any meaningful benefits.
Aim for a project that’s juuuust outside your comfort zone. Something that calls on your existing skills but requires you to either take them further than you have before or apply them in a new way.
One of the best ways to determine whether or not you’re aiming for the right range of difficulty is whether or not your project makes you a little bit nervous when you think about completing it within your given timeline.
3. Skill-Specific Growth
Any effective Marathon Project will help improve your endurance, confidence, and self-belief. But they also present an opportunity to hone and develop specific skills.
One of my primary goals this year is leveling up as a writer, which was one of the reasons behind the 30 Days of Podcasting evergreen email series I’ve been working on.
Think about any skills you currently want to develop and choose a project that will require you to put those skills to use.
4. Public Appeal
While the core purpose of a Marathon Project should be to find and stretch your personal and creative limits, it’s worth thinking about the potential public appeal of the project.
Remember, these projects can serve as entry points to your larger body of work. Think about the themes of your existing work as well as what you want to be known for, and choose a project that showcases that.
Start Running
It’s never too early to start planning your first (or next) Marathon Project.
Remember, the point of a marathon isn’t to win. It’s to stretch yourself beyond what you currently see yourself as capable of achieving. To develop the depth and breadth of your skills. To give the rest of your work context and purpose.
As with any marathon, you don’t need to be exceptionally fast or exceptionally skilled. “The Marathon,” as running company New Balance says, is “how an average runner becomes more than average.”
Marathons are about determination, grit, and a willingness to continue beyond the limits of reason. These are traits available to all of us should we choose to call on them.
If you’re feeling stuck, like the gap between the work you’re currently making and the work you know you have the potential to create isn’t closing as fast as you’d like, a marathon is the best way to take the next step.
All you need to do is pick your destination, lace up your sneakers, and start running.
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.
The Surest Way To Find Clarity As A Creator (And Why You Probably Already Have It)
Years ago, on a road trip with friends, I was driving along a winding mountain road through the Ouachita National Forest in Arkansas when we hit fog.
It was late afternoon, but the fog was so thick it felt like dusk. In the daylight, the road had been a dream, twisting its way through the vibrant autumn foliage and we gleefully chased it like a slalom skier on a gold medal run.
Now, however, with visibility limited to just 30 feet or so in front of the car, the mood had changed. The carefree vibe had evaporated into the mist and been replaced by a dull, throbbing tension.
For five minutes, then ten, then fifteen, no one spoke. At some point, the CD in the stereo reached its end and we simply drove on in taut silence.
Headlights materialized out of the fog with little warning before being immediately swallowed up again as they passed. While the cars were alarming, I was more concerned about the deer or elk I was sure would appear in the middle of the road at any moment with no headlights to signal its presence.
We slowed down, and thought about stopping to try to wait for the fog to lift. But with the fog already having its way with the late afternoon sunlight, we didn’t want to see what it would do with the night.
And so on we drove through the fog.
• • •
Looking back years later, I realize we made the right decision that day.
There are certain locations that are predisposed to fog. In these places, if you decide to try and wait the fog out, you need to be prepared to wait a long time.
These fog-inclined locations are often found in valleys, around mountains… and seemingly everywhere on our creative expeditions.
We often hit fog when we begin to climb in elevation. From the base of the mountain we can see the peak in the distance and eyeball the route we’ll take to get there. As we ascend, however, we quickly become engulfed in confusion and uncertainty.
We know our destination is somewhere above us, but can see nothing more of the route leading there than the 30 feet in front of us. Unable to see where we’re going and what obstacles are waiting to materialize out of the mist, we often choose to stop and wait for greater clarity.
This is a mistake.
Without any change in the external conditions, the fog will continue to sit low and heavy indefinitely. This means our only option to escape it is to move either up, toward our destination, or down the way we came.
The thing about moving through fog, however, is that while we might only be able to see 30 feet in front of us, if we travel that 30 feet, we can count on being able to see another 30 feet ahead of our new position.
Shaan Puri has an approach to project navigation he calls the ABZ Framework which illustrates perfectly how to move through the creative fog. In the framework, A is where you are, Z is where you want to go, and B is the next step in front of you.
We often think of clarity as being able to see every step of the journey ahead in crystal clear detail, from A through Z. But to move forward at any point in time, we only really need to be able to see B, or the next 30 feet in front of us.
With this in mind, we can choose to view our creative expedition as nothing more than a series of 30-foot segments, each one coming into view as we move through the previous.
In the end, what’s more important than vision when navigating the fog is trust. Trust that by moving forward 30 feet, the subsequent 30 foot stretch of road will come into view ahead.
We all face regular patches of fog on our creative expeditions. Sometimes we get stuck in what feels like a sea of fog. When we do, we might be tempted to hold tight and wait for the sun to burn through.
But in the end, the only way to move through the fog is to move through the fog.
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.
The Album-Tour Creative Career Model
As multi-skilled, multi-passionate, multi-interested creators, we often get stuck in our careers because we feel we need to commit to just one thing and become an expert in it. We’re told that niching is the only way to gain traction with our work and if we don’t we’ll remain forever anonymous.
We have no problem coming up with ideas that could work. But we have just enough uncertainty that we’ll stay excited in them that we hold back from committing. And so we sit and wait for greater clarity and greater certainty to come along.
They rarely do.
We need a new model for approaching creative careers. One that gives us the confidence to commit to our short-term interests and create projects around them, while knowing that we don’t need to (and maybe even shouldn’t) stick with that pursuit forever.
It turns out this model already exists.
It’s the Album-Tour Cycle followed by musicians, consisting of an ever-repeating loop of writing → workshopping → recording → touring. Let’s have a look at how this model applies to our creative careers.
Developing Your Craft
Before the cycle can begin, the first step is developing the tools of the trade, learning your instrument, refining your craft. Your start out as playing covers, riffing on what others have created and starting to add your own flair to it.
Studying what’s already worked is an invaluable form of practice. It helps us learn how to piece together the structure of a song and helps us understand what already resonates with people who are already interested in our genre.
At this stage, the goal is less about generating new ideas of our own than it is learning to use the tools well enough to say something with them, whether it’s original or not.
Somewhere in the process of building and riffing on the work of others, however, we start experimenting with work of our own. And here, once we start writing our own songs, the Album-Tour Cycle begins.
Playing Local Gigs
To musicians, playing live is not the culmination of the writing process, but an integral part of it. Much like a comedian testing new material, playing live allows a band to get real-time feedback on their songs. At this point, these are small local shows, and the purpose is two-fold: To workshop their ideas, and to start building and engaging a fan base.
At this point, the ideas are fluid. There might be a core idea in each song, but it’s not committed, it’s still free to be tinkered with and played with. During any given show, they might experiment with the structure and tempo of each of the songs they’ve written.
Leonard Cohen, for example, wrote 80 draft verses for the song Hallelujah. Even after recording the song for his album Various Positions, Cohen spent years performing different combinations of the song live, continually seeking to find the single best version of the song.
For us, the local live show stage of the process is publishing content online. We can think of our short-form content on social media like a collection of licks and riffs that then get combined and expanded on in longer form blog posts, podcasts, or videos.
Much like a band playing live local shows, the point of this content is to both test and play with different versions of raw ideas, while also building and engaging an audience. We try a lot of ideas, express them in different ways, and see what gets the kids in the first row nodding their heads along.
Over time with repetition and feedback, the work begins to settle into it’s final form. As the songs take shape, it then becomes time to enter the studio and commit them to an album.
Producing Your First Album
A band might have a solid collection of songs they’ve honed over months or even years of playing live, but the first step of the recording process is running those ideas through the creative gauntlet.
A producer is brought it to provide an experienced set of outside ears and a fresh perspective to determine what’s working and where the songs could be improved. A good producer will help take the raw materials of the collection of songs and help turn them into a cohesive finished album.
In addition to honing the individual songs themselves, the band and producer will whittle down the selection of songs that make it onto the finished album. A 10-song album might have started out as a collection of 20 or 30 songs that had been written. Many of the songs are cut because they’re simply not that good while others are fantastic songs that don’t fit with the larger vibe of this album. Part of crafting a good album is maintaining a consistent theme or tone.
For us, the album recording phase of the process is about distilling a core theme of the collection of ideas we’ve been working into a cohesive, consumable offer or series of offers.
Your album might be a course, a workshop, a book, or even an entire business with a suite of related offerings. The important thing is that the thread that runs through everything you offer is consistent.
As with producing an album, our job during this phase is to narrow down the ideas we’ve been workshopping and then pressure test them, refining them into the best possible version of themselves. This will almost certainly require outside feedback and perspective.
This outside perspective might come from a coach or consultant, mentor, mastermind group, or our customers themselves. If we’ve been workshopping our ideas in public already, chances are we’ve already been able to get a sense of what’s most interesting and valuable to our audience and can double down on that.
At the end of the production process, we leave the studio with a finished album, load into the tour bus, and hit the road to promote it.
Going On Tour
By playing local gigs, a band will have already built up a small, loyal fanbase who is primed and ready to buy the album as soon as it’s released. A national tour, however, gives the band a chance to introduce their music to new audiences, and sell more copies of the album to casual fans.
When a band has only a small audience, the best way to grow is to team up with one or more bands with similar audiences and go on tour together. This allows each band on tour to cross-pollinate audiences with the others. As a result, everyone’s fan base grows. This same strategy works perfectly for us.
There are likely dozens of creators and business owners who offer complementary products, services, and content to you, and thus have similar audiences. Find ways to team up with them that serve each of you as well as each of your audiences.
This might mean offering a joint workshop, guesting on podcasts, finding referral partners, or cross-promoting through your newsletters, social media, and elsewhere.
Much like everyone likes discovering new music in the same vein as what they already listen to, people are also eager to find new content and creators in a similar vein.
This stage of the album-tour cycle is about capitalizing on the work you’ve done, getting it in front of new people, and converting them into customers. But it also marks the point at which the Album-Tour Cycle begins to repeat. Only this time on a bigger stage.
Repeating The Cycle
On a given night at the beginning of a tour, a band might play almost every song off the album they’re supporting. As they near the end of the touring cycle, however, they begin to inject more and more new, unrecorded material.
In this way, they return back to workshopping phase of the cycle, seeing what resonates and what doesn’t with a new batch of songs. Only now, while on tour, they have a larger and more varied audience to gain feedback from.
Often, by the time one tour ends. A band will have already written and workshopped enough songs to head immediately back into the studio for the production phase of the next album. In this way, each phase of the album-tour cycle blends seamlessly into the next.
In our own creative work, we can achieve this by dedicating a small percentage of our creative output to experimenting with new ideas, topics and interests. While 90% of our content might remain consistent to serve our existing audience and push people to our existing paid offers work, the remaining 10% might explore new territory.
Over time, if we find something through that exploration that resonates both with us and others, we might choose to allocate more and more focus to it. Then, when the time comes, we record the album around that idea or topic and then kick off a new tour in support of it.
Don’t Be Afraid To Change Lanes
The album-tour model provides a much better way of approaching our careers as creators than the view many of us grew up with. While we might not stick with a single industry, job role, topic, or niche, our work still has a throughline. That throughline is the unique voice and perspective we bring to any work we choose to do.
How we apply our voice and perspective is always changing. Sometimes our next album is a subtle refinement of the last. Sometimes it’s Bob Dylan going electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
Despite the criticism Dylan faced from long-time fans at that point, with hindsight, we can see clearly that Bob Dylan was still Bob Dylan after shifting from folk music to rock. In fact, you could make the argument that that’s when he really became Bob Dylan.
To me, Dylan’s story shows clearly that the danger is not in switching career lanes, but in failing to switch when we feel the urge. Bob Dylan was already famous in 1965. But his decision to shift lanes and everything that ensued has made him legendary.
Sometimes the lane we’re in–no matter how secure–simply doesn’t lead in a direction that will allow us to fulfill our potential. And so we, like Dylan have to change lanes when we feel called to do so.
Remember, no one wants to hear the same album recorded six times, anyway. We already own that album and can listen whenever we want. What we want from our favourite bands is their voice, their perspective, their particular sensibility presented in a new and refreshing way.
So commit, not for the long haul, but to the next album. Make the best album that only you can make at this point in your life.
And then start working on the next one.
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.
How To Follow Your Creative Compass To The Work Only You Can Create
I always wanted to be a rock star.
As far as creative dreams go, this is my oldest and purest.
In High School, my best friends and I had a band that played Weezer, Blink-182, and Metallica covers. Once I graduated, I started a hardcore band that wrote our own stuff and played shows around town.
Most shows we played were to small audiences of 30 people or so, the biggest had an audience of maybe 100.
We were about as far from famous as we could get, but that didn’t matter.
The feeling of creative expression that came from playing my guitar and singing my heart out in front an audience is the purest expression of myself I’ve yet to experience.
It’s been a long time since I’ve fully lived in that feeling.
The last live show I played was in 2009 and I gave up on making it as a musician a few years later.
But while I’ve long since given up on that dream, I recently realized, that all the work I’ve done since then (and maybe all the work I’ll ever do) has been chasing that feeling of standing on stage with my guitar around my neck.
I don’t think I’m the only one driven by this type of experience.
I think we all have some feeling we’re chasing that informs the work we do. This feeling, I think, is what we imagine to be the most fully realized version of ourselves. Our potential fulfilled.
I call this feeling your Creative Compass.
The feeling that guides our Creative Compass is different for each of us.
For you, it might be the feeling of catching the perfect wave while surfing, watching your guests take the first bite of the meal you’ve spent hours preparing, or the subtle joy of watching the first shoots poke above the topsoil of your garden.
It might be a feeling you’ve previously lived and embodied or an imagined amplification of a past experience.
Whichever feeling it is that has a hold on us, we don’t choose it.
It’s something deeper than conscious choice, more intimately woven into our body, mind, and soul. Our past, present, and future. Though we likely aren’t aware of it, our work and our lives are driven in search of attaining (or reattaining) this feeling. And that’s not a bad thing.
Work that taps into this feeling is tapping into the purest and truest part of ourselves, resulting in the work that is most uniquely ours.
The work that no one else can replicate.
When we are aware of this feeling, then, we can follow the compass needle and intentionally lean into it.
This allows us to bring the purest version of ourselves to everything we do, regardless of medium, topic, or niche. It creates a through-line that ties together a distinct body of work.
Of course, to follow this feeling, however, we first have to identify it.
How To Find The Feeling Behind Your Creative Compass
I first became aware of the feeling guiding my Creative Compass while listening to music.
Not just any music, however.
Specifically, the feeling arises while listening to the songs that resonate most deeply with the core of my being. The songs where I feel the kick drum in my chest rather than hear it. Where it’s all I can do to simply sing under my breath instead of screaming along til my lungs hurt.
When I’m listening to these songs, it doesn’t take much to imagine that I wrote them. That it’s me standing on a stage sharing this purest expression of myself.
Music is one of the best ways to tap into your Compass.
Think about the songs that make you most come alive. What’s the feeling associated with them? Where in your life do they take you back to? What forgotten dreams do they evoke?
While music has a special power to evoke memory and cut through to our souls, it’s not the only way to get to the core feeling that pulls at you.
Think back to the dreams you had from your youth and the feelings associated with them. Think back to the people, places, and experiences that have made you feel most alive.
The most you.
Sift through your past to find the feeling that strikes the bell at the center of your soul.
Remember that the purest form of this feeling might not live solely in your past, but be an imagined amplification of that feeling, a mix of what has been and been lost, and what could be.
Identifying the feeling is a necessary and important first step. But to use it to create the work that only we can create, we need to find a way to tap into it on command.
Follow Your Compass To Your Best Work
In order to follow your Creative Compass, you first need to get a clear reading on the direction it’s pointing.
This means tapping into and embodying the feeling that guides the needle.
Seeing as my Compass needle is so tied to music, it’s no surprise that the best way I’ve found to tap into it has been to create a playlist of all the songs that bring it to life.
Music is one of the best methods of evoking memories and uncovering forgotten feelings.
If you have a strong emotional connection to music, creating a similar playlist that helps you embody the feeling you’re chasing is a great place to start. But it’s not the only option.
Another option is to create a short visualization exercise that helps you embody the feeling you want to carry into your creating.
A therapist friend of mine once walked me through a visualization exercise like this.
She instructed me to visualize a feeling I wanted to capture and then imagine myself putting it into a bottle and then corking it to carry with me.
Years later, I still think back to this visualization every so often. As soon as I think of uncorking that bottle, the feeling floods my body. Visualization can be a powerful tool.
Other options include creating a vision board, hanging art or photos, using candles or scented oils. Anything that helps remind you of the direction of your Compass and gets you to that feeling of the purest expression of yourself.
The easier you’re able to tap into and embody this feeling, the more easily it will flow into your work.
Since discovering this phenomenon and leaning into it, I’ve felt a surge of clarity and purpose. I can rely on the Compass pointing me in the right direction when I feel lost.
I’m more confident in the work I’m creating and am certain that if I’m able to keep following the needle and chasing this feeling it will lead to the work that only I can create, removing all worry of competition.
This Creative Compass exists for you as well, although it points in another direction.
It takes some reflection, some quiet, and some courage. But finding your direction and following it is the surest way of tapping into your best and purest work.
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.
Adolescence Is a B*tch…
I mean, let’s not beat around the bush.
It’s an awkward, uncomfortable, turbulent time of growth and exploration where we experiment, rebel, and push the boundaries as we decide who we’ll become. We make our share of mistakes and execute horrendously poor judgment along the way. With each mistake, our view of the world and our place within it becomes a little more nuanced and self-aware, but it’s a slow, painful, often embarrassing process that most of us are glad to have put behind us.
Except… We haven’t.
Sure, our bodies may have developed past the gangly, acned teenagers we once were. We’ve gained experience, worked jobs other than the McDonald’s drive-through window, and maybe even married and had kids. While we might be surrounded by the trappings of adulthood, however, adolescence exists in many areas beyond simply the social and biological.
Of particular importance to us as creators is navigating the adolescence of our work. Most of us don’t even realize it exists or that we might be in it, but until we move through it and reach maturity, we’re not going get the results we’re chasing.
The Traits Of Adolescence
In many ways, our work’s adolescence mirrors our own. When we first start creating, we’re well aware that the work we’re doing isn’t all that good. Like toddlers, we’re finding our feet, playing with the basic building blocks of our craft, and doing our best to piece them together. With some dedicated practice, our work quickly improves in both quality and originality, and before long, we may even develop the confidence to start sharing it with the world.
But while we might have outgrown childhood, there is still a significant gap to cross before we reach maturity. This gap is adolescence, and it’s where many creators get stuck, unaware that they’re suspended in a state of arrested development.
In adolescence, we can write grammatically correct essays, produce tightly edited podcasts and film videos that rival the technical quality of the biggest YouTubers. But while we’re slowly adopting the accouterments of creative adulthood, our immaturity still shines through in ways we might not realize, but others certainly do.
While our work may be technically sufficient for our medium of choice, the ideas behind the work lag behind. They’re awkward, gangly, poorly thought out, and inarticulate, if not outright incoherent. Frustrated by these gangly ideas, we spend a good deal of time remixing and repurposing what we’ve learned from others, keeping our own insights in the background, and adding little to the conversation ourselves.
As if transported back to high school, we’re hyper-aware of what everyone else is doing, measuring our work against theirs and avoiding going too far out on a limb from the norm. Though we might have new and interesting ideas, we spend most of our time creating work similar to what’s already proven to be successful for others.
We jump from fad to fad, chasing every shiny new tool and growth hack the way we might have chased the latest clothing trend. But much like the right brand of jeans didn’t instantly grant us membership into the cool clique, these hacks never deliver us the results we seek.
If we want to fulfill the potential of our work, it’s essential that we move past this stage. Luckily for us, we’ve successfully navigated adolescence once and can apply the same process to find our way through the adolescence of our work, hopefully with less awkwardness, embarrassment, and acne.
Getting Past The Growing Pains
The defining attribute of adolescence is a lack of experience. This means the surest antidote is to gain as much and as varied experience as you can.
Much like it would be ridiculous to expect a 14-year-old to commit to a university major or future career path, it’s ridiculous for us to commit to any niche, medium, format, or even topic while working through the adolescence of our work.
A productive adolescence is about experimenting broadly, keeping our options open, gathering and synthesizing information about where we have the greatest opportunity to contribute in a meaningful way. While we might be clear on the topic or niche we want to operate in, the mediums we use and the formats within those mediums should be experimented with liberally in order to find our fit.
The time will come to commit and double down, but not until we’ve thoroughly explored and experimented with the available options.
While the defining outward attribute of adolescence might be lack of experience, the internal driver of this phase is a yearning to discover who we are as individuals and find our place in the world.
In our teenage years, this meant leaving the nest and establishing our identities as separate from our parents, often rebelling outright against them. With our work, our adolescence is about moving past our teachers and mentors, developing our own unique perspectives, approaches, and styles, and building on what we’ve learned.
As we mature, we find our voice, expand our vocabularies, and develop defendable opinions. We move from passive absorbers of information to offering valuable additions to the conversation happening in our field. Yes, we’ll make various gaffes, missteps, and blunders as we start speaking up, but these are not the mistakes.
The only real mistake we can make in adolescence is not speaking up, not asserting our views, not experimenting, and exploring the world that is open to us. This process, while uncomfortable, confusing, and at times even embarrassing is the only way through to maturity.
But here’s the thing about adolescence. No matter how awkward, gangly, or uncomfortable in the moment, if we keep moving forward, it ends.
In fact, there comes a point where the growth can simply no longer be contained and the butterfly that’s slowly been developing under wraps bursts from its cocoon.
We emerge more confident, more centred, more sure of the place we and our work occupy in the world.
Adolescence might be frustrating, but it’s a natural and unavoidable phase of life, one we must all travel through. What’s more, it’s when we truly become ourselves. I think that’s something to be cherished.
Adulthood will come soon enough. But until it does, live. Explore, experiment, break the rules and rebel. Create with abandon and above all else, don’t forget to have fun with it. That’s what being young is for, after all.
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.
Creative Wayfinding For Ambitious Optimists.
Downtime: Bad for Software, Essential for Creativity
When it comes to software or a service we provide, downtime is something to be avoided at all costs.
We don’t need to look further than the Fastly and Akamai internet service outages that occurred within the past few months to see the negative effects. These unrelated internet hosting issues combined to take down the websites and mobile apps from many of the world’s largest brands including Hulu, New York Times, CNN, Twitch, Reddit, Spotify, Vimeo, Amazon, Chase, and many more.
Despite being only 49 minutes long, the downtime caused by the Fastly outage alone has been estimated at $32 million in lost revenue.
Downtime causes the gears of every system built using our platform to grind to a halt, costing us (and our customers) money, and inviting a flurry of angry support emails.
When necessary, we can schedule downtime in advance in order to mitigate its negative effects, but this type of downtime is certainly not something we want to invite more of into our lives than is absolutely necessary.
And so we do everything within our power to maintain peak productivity.
When it comes to our creativity, however, downtime is essential.
Rather than grinding to a halt, downtime greases the gears of our creative system, allowing us time and space to process the seeds of ideas that have been planted but haven’t yet started to grow.
Downtime is when unexpected connections are made, sparking new ideas and spotting opportunities.
Downtime feels unproductive, as though it’s not helping us move forward towards completing our projects and achieving our goals. And yet, without regular downtime, we burn out… of ideas, energy, motivation, inspiration, and everything else that is essential to being “productive.”
Much like a software product, creative downtime is best scheduled in.
Unlike software, however, it should be scheduled more often than we think is necessary, even daily, if possible.
How we spend that downtime is up to each of us to decide. Walking, reading, journaling, drawing, exercising, or puttering around are all good options. If it works for you, simply stare at a blank wall and let boredom (or your creative mind) take over.
What matters is that we regularly and intentionally create the time and space to refuel, recharge, and let our best ideas rise to the surface, unsuppressed by the never-ending busyness that otherwise occupies our attention.
The important entries in our calendars and items on our to-do list will take care of themselves, whether or not we make space for them. The seeds of ideas in the back of our minds, and undiscovered connections waiting to happen, however, won’t.
Creativity thrives on downtime. Schedule it more often.
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.
Why Most Marketing Strategies Won’t Work for You (And How to Tweak Them So They Do)
How many strategies have you subscribed to help you achieve one goal or another, only to quickly discard them in favour of something else?
If you’re anything like me, the list is both long and wide.
These strategies promise to help us grow our audiences, email lists, or businesses, hit New & Noteworthy with our podcasts, and improve our productivity. Regardless of the goal, the pattern plays out the same way every time.
We approach each new strategy with a sense of optimism, and in some cases, even certainty, that this new strategy is the one that will take us where we’re seeking to go. Soon enough, however, that strategy is lying crumpled, and discarded on the floor, having been tossed aside for a new tactic promising a quick win.
The problem isn’t that these strategies don’t work as described.
It’s that we approach these recipes to success without considering the ingredients required or whether or not they suit our individual tastes.
If we want to be successful in any pursuit, we need to understand that all recipes are merely starting points from which to adapt and experiment.
Working With What You Have
I recently spent 5 days at an Airbnb while in town for a friend’s wedding.
By dinner time on day 4, I had reached the end of my limited supply of groceries. The most substantial ingredient in the near-empty fridge was the carton of eggs which had already formed the foundation of lunch and breakfast.
I cracked two eggs and began frying them before returning to the now even emptier fridge.
Two jars stocked the shelf. One salsa, one pesto. After a moment’s consideration, I reached for the salsa having already had pesto on my lunchtime bagel-egg sandwich.
Having depleted the fridge of its meager resources I turned to the similarly sparse pantry. Nothing to go with eggs, except…
My eyes landed on the box of Breton multigrain crackers.
“Multigrain crackers aren’t that far off from tortilla chips…” I thought to myself, an idea taking shape as I removed the eggs from the stove and assembled my very DIY chilaquiles.
It wasn’t fancy, but given the limited ingredients, the meal wasn’t bad.
To be honest, this surprised me.
My typical style of cooking (if you can call it that) is far from experimental.
I can’t confidently take stock of the ingredients on-hand and whip up something delicious at a moment’s notice. When I cook, it requires a careful following of the recipe, reading and re-reading each line to ensure the finished dish comes out correctly.
When I get lucky it does.
To me, the idea of experimenting in the kitchen is intimidating.
Cooking has always felt like a sacred art form, best left to people who actually understand the relationships between different flavours and ingredients, the tools and techniques of the trade, and generally understand what the hell they’re doing.
ie. Not me.
And so I’ve stuck to the recipes as printed, and left the customizing and experimenting to the experts.
We often approach our work with the same mentality.
Each Result Has Many Potential Recipes
We tend to imagine that there are a finite number of “recipes” for growing an audience, launching a course, building a business, or achieving any other goal we have in mind.
And recipes do exist.
For almost any pursuit imaginable, there are one or more tried and true paths to achieve the desired result. Many people use these recipes to great effect, and it’s easy to get swept up in the hype when a new strategy takes off.
The problem is when we think that any one strategy is the only way to achieve a certain desired result.
Website pop-ups, welcome mats, and lead magnets are proven to improve your email list conversion rate. But many newsletters grow to tens of thousands of subscribers without using any of these tactics.
Cold outreach, whether by phone, email, LinkedIn, or Facebook helps many people grow their businesses. But if you, like me can’t stomach the thought of it, you’re probably not going to get results.
Regularly guesting on podcasts is a reliable strategy to grow your own show. But so is doing cross-promotions with other podcasters. Or focusing on the SEO of your website. Or advertising in niche publications. Or any number of other strategies.
Rarely, if ever, is there a single strategy that works equally for everyone.
Recipes Must be Tweaked to Taste
Like recipes, we need to remember that any specific strategy we subscribe to in our work is just one possible interpretation.
Your grandmother’s famous spaghetti sauce is different from the version being served at Olive Garden, which is different again from the sauce being served at Da Vittorio in Sicily. A quick search of Google turns up hundreds more recipes for the sauce, which are, of course, only the recipes that have been documented and posted online.
It would be ridiculous to suggest that any one of these recipes was the one and only sauce that “works”.
At best, any recipe or strategy provides a starting point from which to tweak, according to our own tastes and available ingredients.
Don’t like one of the ingredients the recipe calls for? Get rid of it.
Have an excess of another ingredient on hand? Find a way to incorporate it.
Want more spice? Add to your taste.
The results of our experimentation aren’t always perfect.
But over time, as our tastes, instincts, and understanding of the ingredients improve, we’re able to tweak our way to recipes that work far better for us than the original ever did. What’s more, the process becomes more enjoyable.
Make the Process Enjoyable
As prescribed, many strategies call on us to do things that are outside our existing skillset, comfort zone, or even moral boundaries.
Even if we choose to extend ourselves to accommodate the recipe, pursuing these strategies often feels like we’re pushing a boulder up a hill.
Much like we’re unlikely to stick with a diet that consists entirely of food we have to force ourselves to eat, so too are we unlikely to stick with any strategy in our work consisting of a process we have to force ourselves to implement.
In many cases, however, we can choose to simply substitute these ingredients for our existing skills, knowledge, and superpowers. When we do, the process becomes one we easily maintain long enough to achieve our desired results.
Over time, we often find ourselves returning to the same ingredients again and again.
In doing so, a cuisine of sorts emerges, consisting of all the skills, perspectives, and tastes we’ve found to work for us in the past, remixed to suit a variety of situations and goals.
Develop Your Creative Cuisine
I’m unlikely to develop any sort of personal cuisine around eggs, salsa, and Breton crackers.
But I’m realizing that the ingredients I use to produce and grow this newsletter are already showing up in the rest of the work I do, and slowly my creative cuisine is forming.
Whether you realize it or not, so is yours.
The ingredients you use might be identical to the original recipe, or they may be heavily modified. You might play with the measurements, preparation, cooking time, or any number of other variables. Over time, you may choose to forgo the recipes entirely and simply work with the ingredients you have on hand.
These amendments might be made to accommodate the ingredients at your disposal, your personal tastes, or those of your audience.
Just remember that if you don’t enjoy the finished meal and the process of preparing it, others are unlikely to as well.
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.
The Two Choices When You Find Yourself Speeding Towards a Wall
Sooner or later we all find ourselves approaching the wall.
Whether at a blistering hurtle or a slow creep, as we draw closer we sense more than see its approach.
And in the face of our impending collision we ask ourselves:
Do I pull up?
Or push through?
Driven by deadlines, expectations, and pressure (both internal and external), it often feels impossible to pull up.
And yet, we can feel the inevitable destruction that lies behind the wall, should we choose to test it.
When faced with this decision, a good first step is to simply pause
Maybe for a week.
Maybe for a day
Maybe for just an hour.
Long enough to slow your heart rate, to look beyond your current predicament.
To remember how small you are in the grander scope of things.
Long enough to stop and observe the wonder contained in a leaf or a snowflake.
The power of the sun or the wind or the tide.
Long enough to sit and savour a cup of coffee, or a hearty meal, or a conversation with a friend.
Long enough to decenter and then recenter yourself, bringing a fresh perspective to the challenge at hand.
We might not always have the time and space to pause long enough to bring ourselves back to baseline.
But if we choose, we’re almost always able to slow down just enough to find another route around the wall.
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.
These Unseen Gaps in Your Work Are Why You’re Not Getting the Results You Want (Here’s How to Close Them)
If your goal is to become an Olympic sprinter, it’s easy to measure the gap between your current ability and the level you need to be at in order to make the Olympic team.
In less than 5 minutes, you can pull up not just the qualifying times for the previous Olympics, but the results of all international competitions over the past few years.
With that information in hand, you have a benchmark to aim for and judge yourself against as you train. You might be able to sprint 100m in 13 seconds–an impossibly fast time for the average person–but if the threshold to qualify for the Olympics is 12 seconds, you know exactly how much more time you need to shave off in order to close the gap between your ability and your goal.
Gaps like these exist in our work too.
The problem is that unlike sports, which are so easily and regularly analyzed and quantified down to the atomic level, the gaps keeping our work from reaching larger audiences are almost entirely invisible.
I think I’m a pretty decent writer, for example. But how do I judge the gap I need to close if I want to write a book that gets read by hundreds of thousands of people?
Should I improve my grammar? Increase my word count? Compress my word count? Aim to write for a 5th-grade reading level? All of the above? None of the above but something else entirely? Is my writing even the problem or is it something else?
If you don’t know what to look for, it’s hard to find these gaps in the first place, let alone close them.
We can be sure, however, that these gaps exist somewhere for all of us. But our lack of awareness about where exactly they are gets us into trouble.
If We Can’t See a Gap, Does it Even Exist?
When we can’t see our gaps, we come to one of two conclusions.
1. The Gap Exists, But is Near-Invisible
If we’re lucky, we correctly assume that there must **be one or more gaps somewhere that we just can’t see.
This attitude is helpful as it assumes ownership and control of our situation. But it doesn’t help us actually close the gaps in question.
Without being able to see where our gaps exist, we’re left shooting in the dark. We might invest considerable time and energy into improving ourselves and our work, but it’s entirely likely that a large portion of that investment is put toward improving things that don’t really matter.
At best, we guess right a percentage of the time and slowly close the gaps. At worst, we guess wrong and waste our time and energy while leaving the gaps untouched.
When we know exactly where we have a gap, we can use it as a North Star. We can focus our effort on closing the gap and watch our results improve as we do. Without a known gap as our guide, however, we lose forward momentum and begin to drift sideways.
Without a reference point, we also lose any definitive sense of progress. Without a sense of progress, it’s only a matter of time before we lose all motivation to keep moving forward.
2. There is No Gap
The other conclusion we might draw when we can’t see our gaps is that there are no gaps at all.
This conclusion kicks off a vicious downward spiral.
If no gap exists between us and the people at the top of our field, what motivation do we have to keep improving, after all?
Unaware of the hidden gaps separating us and the creators at the top of our field, we might look at their work and naively say, “I could do that.”
In the world of podcasting, Joe Rogan is a classic example.
Listening to his show, it might seem like all Rogan is doing is sitting down, pressing record, and then talking for several hours straight. His episodes aren’t highly produced, and he doesn’t appear to take a particularly rigorous approach to interviewing. There’s almost nothing in the show that appears to demand a particularly high level of skill.
Unaware of the gap, countless podcasters have used Rogan’s show as the inspiration for their own “two dudes chatting” style shows and become frustrated when they find success of any kind (let alone $100M Spotify deals…) hard to come by.
This lack of awareness of the very real (if hard to see) gaps leads to bitterness and entitlement.
If we can’t decipher a difference in skill, knowledge, or experience between us and those at the top, the easiest explanation is to assume that either they got lucky, or the system is rigged against the little guys like us.
Both of these explanations are utterly destructive to our creative aspirations.
They let us off the hook, giving up all agency and control over our situation and all but guarantee that we will neither close the gaps nor achieve our goals for our work.
How to Spot the Gaps in Your Work
Spotting the gaps in our creative work is hard.
Part of this is due to what writer David Perell calls the Paradox of Creativity.
“Your work is done,” Perell shares, “when it looks so simple that the consumer thinks they could’ve done it, which means they won’t appreciate how hard you worked.”
But while the gaps in our work may be difficult to spot, they’re not impossible.
The biggest challenge keeping us from identifying the gaps in our work is limiting the scope through which we look for them.
The first (and often only) place we look when judging the gaps between ourselves and others whose success we’re trying to emulate is skill. It’s true that there is often a considerable skill gap that needs to be closed in order to get to where we want to be. But there are also other more subtle gaps that, while they may be harder to measure, may be essential to close in order to achieve our goals.
I think of these gaps as falling into one of two categories.
Linear Gaps
Linear gaps are those that are closed additively.
We narrow these gaps brick by brick, building on top of our existing foundation until the gap is closed.
Examples of linear gaps worth addressing include:
- Skill
- Network
- Experience
- Mindset
- Knowledge
- Trial & Error
- Quantity & Quality of Ideas
Linear gaps are fairly easily addressed.
The simple solution to closing the gaps related to skill, experience, and trial & error is to do more work. To increase our knowledge, we can study. To broaden our network we can reach out to more people to set up coffee chats.
With linear gaps, a given input of effort results in a tangible–often immediate–result. This makes progress easy to track and motivation easy to maintain.
Other gaps are harder to address directly, however, and the results take longer to materialize.
Compound Gaps
Unlike linear gaps, compound gaps are closed exponentially.
This means that despite a constant input of effort to close these gaps, there is an (often substantial) lag time before we begin to see these gaps shrink in a meaningful way. Once the results catch up to our effort, however, the gaps slam shut quickly.
Examples of compound gaps include:
- Audience size
- Budget
- Time
- Habit
- Instincts
The challenge presented by compound gaps is not that they’re particularly difficult to close. Instead, it’s that we don’t understand their exponential nature.
We get frustrated by compound gaps because we think they should behave linearly, with consistent effort equaling consistent results. When we input effort without seeing results, however, we lose all sense of forward progress, and with it, the motivation to keep working.
Understanding the nature of compound gaps, however, we can recalibrate our expectations.
An extra 10 subscribers, 30 minutes in our week, or $50 in our monthly budget might not feel like much. But these incremental improvements are proof that the gaps are indeed closing. Given time and continued attention, these modest gains will compound into much more significant returns.
The trick is to keep chipping away even when the results are slower than we’d like.
Establishing Your Benchmarks
Once we have an understanding of the types of gaps separating our work from the level it needs to be at, we can study others to establish our benchmarks.
When identifying the gaps we need to close, it’s helpful to study a cross-section of creators.
This will likely include the creators who are at the top of our industry or niche, but it shouldn’t be limited to them.
Study successful creators in a variety of niches, industries, and mediums, always asking, “What do they have that I don’t that allows them to be so successful?”
Some of our observations will be helpful and some won’t.
Many creators are successful because of their unique personalities. One conclusion we might draw is that we should attempt to emulate their personality traits. The better insight, however, that we should lean further into our own personalities.
Some gaps may be hard or impossible to determine with any certainty.
How do we measure the quality of someone’s creative instincts in comparison to our own? And while time and budget are more easily measurable, they’re typically not easily observable from the outside.
The point of this observation isn’t to establish mathematically precise benchmarks, however.
Instead, our goal is simply to become aware of all the contributing factors to creative success so that we can work to close those gaps and improve our odds of achieving our goals around our work.
Simply understanding that these gaps exist provides a logical explanation for why we haven’t experienced the success we might feel our work deserves, and lays out the roadmap for getting there.
Closing Your Gaps
Once we understand where our gaps exist, the final step is to close them.
This is a straightforward process, but not a quick one. And it presents two challenges:
- Deciding which of our many gaps are most immediately pressing to address.
- Knowing how far each gap needs to be closed.
While we might have major gaps in one or two areas, we likely also have dozens of other gaps that will need to be closed–or at least narrowed–in order to reach our potential as creators.
One option is to start with the gaps that are the largest.
Eliminating or reducing our greatest deficiencies is probably the quickest route to raising the overall average of our work. But our largest gaps often aren’t those that are most pivotal to the success of our work. As such, they prevent a convenient place to hide.
If we’re not careful, we can spend the majority of our time narrowing up our supporting gaps around the periphery, while ignoring the smaller, but critical gaps that will have the greatest impact.
Core vs Supporting Gaps
Of all the gaps we each have, there are a small number of critical core attributes that the ultimate success or failure of our work hinges upon.
These core gaps are likely small.
The attributes and skills associated with them form the foundation of our work and we’ve likely invested significant time into developing them. As a result, we’re likely already performing well above the average person in respect to them.
But like the Olympic hopeful who can run a 13 second 100m sprint, when it comes to these core attributes, above-average often isn’t enough.
I’m confident that I’m an above-average writer. Maybe even well above average.
My writing is good enough to have attracted more than 1,000 people like you who subscribe to receive this newsletter every week. But is it good enough to attract 10,000 people? 100,000?
For a long time, I thought it was. Recently, I’ve become convinced that it’s not.
The reason I overlooked the gap in my writing is the same reason we all tend to gloss over the gaps in our core attributes.
Our Core Gaps Hit Close to Home
Our core attributes are closely tied to our identity.
We have pride in these abilities and receive regular praise and validation in response to them. Admitting that these attributes aren’t enough feels like admitting that we’re not enough.
To protect our ego, we ignore them.
We focus our effort on the gaps that don’t hit quite so close to home, but in doing so, resign ourselves to the category of creators who are solid but unspectacular at what we do.
If we’re serious about reaching our potential as creators, we need to have an honest conversation with ourselves about whether the skills and attributes we take so much pride in, the ones that feel as though they’re apart of us are really good enough to take us where we want to go.
For most of us, I would suggest that they’re not.
Fortunately, the hardest part of closing these particular gaps is accepting the fact that they must be further closed in the first place.
It took me more than one year and 300 blog posts to come to terms with the fact that my writing wasn’t where it needed to be to get to the next level. I resisted it for months, and went through the frustration and entitlement, feeling like my writing deserved a larger audience than it had.
But it didn’t.
Once I accepted that, closing this gap has become one of the most fulfilling aspects of my life.
I love thinking about writing, after all. I love studying it, learning about it, practicing it, and improving it. Closing the gap is not a chore, but something I look forward to every day. The reason, I think, is that by closing this gap in particular, I can feel myself finally making meaningful progress toward my larger goals around my work.
Narrowing our supporting gaps is necessary. But it’s hard to overstate the power and leverage that comes with being truly exceptional at our craft.
How Far to Close Each Gap
The final question when it comes to addressing our gaps is how far each gap needs to be closed.
Within ten minutes of studying a cross-section of creators we admire, we’ll have compiled a list of dozens of gaps, many of them significant. Should we try to close all of them? Is that even possible?
Every gap we narrow will help us progress and raise the overall average of our work. But closing all our gaps is impossible.
Instead, it’s worth focusing the majority of your time and energy on closing 3-5 major gaps and more slowly address other gaps as they become relevant or necessary at different phases of your career.
Personally, the gaps I think each of us should spend significant time addressing are the following:
- Idea generation – Good ideas are the basis of all creative work. And having a lot of ideas is the best way to have good ideas.
- Writing – At some point, most creative work involves some form of writing. The better your ability to write, the better your work, marketing, communication, etc.
- Quantity of Work – Every successful creator’s body of work is like an iceberg. The exceptional work we see above the surface is supported and kept afloat by the much larger mass of work below the surface, most of it not that good.
- Network – Growing as a creator is an order of magnitude easier when you have people around you who understand your goals and can support, challenge, and champion your work. Essentially, this means making friends with other creators doing interesting and related work.
- Craft – Whatever your craft, being exceptional at it makes everything else easier.
Addressing these specific gaps is the fastest way to level up as a creator. The bonus is that closing these gaps has a way of spilling over and narrowing other gaps as well.
Always Be Closing
Luck certainly plays a role in creative success.
But it’s not the thing keeping us from joining the upper echelons of our craft. When we’re feeling frustrated, unsure of why our work isn’t getting the attention and recognition we feel it deserves, it’s worth looking for the unseen gaps we haven’t yet addressed and bringing awareness to them.
Awareness of our gaps holds the bitterness and entitlement at bay and provides us a clear, logical path forward.
This process of identifying and closing gaps is straightforward. But it’s no quick fix.
Closing our gaps is the work of a lifetime. As we close our gaps and level up, we enter new circumstances and set new goals that present new gaps to be closed.
On top of the tangible gaps within our power to close is one additional gap over which we have the power neither to resist nor to hasten.
Time.
While we may not have any control over it, this gap, above all others is worth remembering regularly.
Time is the final gap, closing linearly but compounding exponentially all the other gaps we’ve managed to narrow.
When in doubt, it’s hard to go wrong by doing what you can to close the gaps you’re aware of.
Then give it time.
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.
The Unasked Question Keeping You From Achieving Your Potential as a Creator
For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to write a book.
As a kid, I’m told, I was prolific to the point my mom was sure I’d grow up to be a writer. It took some time, but if this newsletter is any indication, she’s been proven right. And while writing blogs, newsletters, and podcasts has always come easily to me, the idea of a book has felt entirely unapproachable.
It’s not the scale of a book-writing project that’s deterred me thus far.
I wrote more than 100,000 words last year alone across my blogs and newsletter, more than enough for a book.
Instead, it’s the level of experience, knowledge, and vision I felt were required to write a meaningful, useful, coherent book. I felt I couldn’t possibly have enough to share on any one topic. And so I pushed the idea of writing a book to the back of my mind.
“When I’m ready, I’ll know,” I thought.
But then six months ago, in a single moment, my perspective changed.
While listening to a podcast, one tiny comment by the guest shifted my entire perspective of what it meant to “be ready” to take on a big, scary, ambitious creative project of any kind.
In that moment, not only did my perspective around readiness shift, but I realized with stark clarity the common thread among all creative work that really matters. The type of work that fulfills our potential as creators. The type of elusive work we’re all striving to create.
This approach has nothing to do with having all (or any) of the answers, and everything to do with asking the right questions.
Why Write a Book in the First Place?
The shift happened while listening to an episode of Krista Tippett’s On Being podcast.
But despite the impact of the revelation, I’ve completely forgotten who the guest was and what they were talking about.
What I do remember about the guest is that he was impressively (even intimidatingly) credentialed. One of those people who seems to contain within themselves the knowledge of multiple lifetimes. Someone for whom writing a book was surely as simple as sitting down, turning on the tap, and letting it flow out of them onto the page.
Or so I thought.
Because as soon as he was asked about his motivation to write the book in question, he responded with, “I wanted to learn about [whatever the hell the book was about] so I decided to write a book on it.”
Wait. What?
I was so stunned by the comment I replayed the comment to make sure I had heard correctly.
Sure enough, upon second listen, he reiterated that his process for writing a book was not built on knowledge, experience, or a predefined vision for the finished product.
Instead, it was built on a single, nagging question, and the curiosity to explore it.
The conversation on the podcast moved on. If I heard any of it, I didn’t take it in. My mind was off on another plane, ruminating on the repercussions of this new information.
Creative Work Should Explore, Not Explain
In the months since, this quote has haunted me.
It suggests that writing a book is first and foremost an act of exploration and discovery. The sharing, explaining, and educating of the audience are secondary considerations.
This mindset highlights a gap in the way a certain type of creator approaches their work and the way the rest of us do.
Most of us view books (or courses, or podcasts, etc.) as Capstone Projects.
Viewed from the outside, these projects appear to be the culmination of years of research and experience, concisely and compellingly packaged for broader consumption. But when we carry this approach to our own projects, we start down a slippery slope.
The Capstone Project view demands that we spend years, if not decades, gathering information and experience before we ever sit down to put pen to paper and share.
No matter how much knowledge we build up over the years, however, the feeling of impostor syndrome will persist. It may even increase. The longer we put off writing the book, the greater the pressure, after all. If this is to be our magnum opus, it can be nothing short of perfection, we think.
And so the longer we wait, the harder it is to start, and the harder it is to start, the longer we wait. Kicking the can down the road to a “someday” buried safely in the future.
How Fear Creates Generic Content
Our reluctance to commit pen to paper and start before we know where we’re going is based largely on our fear of being wrong in public.
By publishing our work–and with it, our ideas–we’re putting ourselves out on a limb.
When we do, we open ourselves up to being challenged. What if my information is wrong or incomplete, we wonder? What if my perspective is flawed? What if new information comes to light tomorrow that changes the way I think about this topic? What if someone smarter than me reads this and calls me out publicly?
This fear of being found out and exposed causes us to delay publishing anything about which we are anything less than absolutely 100% certain. Most often, that means settling for recycling tried and true ideas that are already in common supply.
While this feels like the safer bet, it categorically precludes us from reaching our potential as creators or ever doing anything really interesting.
We don’t need to look farther than our Twitter feeds full of endlessly repeated advice on how to improve our writing, Instagram feeds with thousands of accounts offering subtle variations on the same fitness tips, and countless business podcasts sharing the exact same marketing, mindset, and entrepreneurship advice to see the result of this fear of going out on a limb.
Generic Work Can Only Take Us So Far
This approach to publishing presents a convenient place to hide.
Much of this endlessly repeated content is, in fact, useful after all. It’s tried, true, proven, verified. We’ve found it helpful ourselves and are confident it will be helpful to our audiences as well.
The problem is that sooner or later, we reach a limit of how far this type of regurgitated content can take us. While it’s hard to be called out for publishing content that fits into the conventional wisdom and worldview of the pack, it’s also hard to stand out from the pack when everything we publish can be found a dozen times over elsewhere.
Just as surely as products and services can easily be commoditized, their value steadily driven down as their ubiquity increases, so too can ideas.
The thing about commodities is this.
While you can be confident about the existence of a market for your product or idea, your ability to capture more than a tiny fraction of that market is severely limited. Competition is fierce, and audience loyalty is low. There’s always someone willing and able to offer more value for less time, money, or in a lower word count. A classic race to the bottom.
As creators, we face a choice.
We can continue to take shelter in the pack, doing work and creating content that is acceptable, if unremarkable.
Or we can make a radical shift in how we approach our work in the first place. An approach that doesn’t start with an answer, but a question.
A question that hasn’t been asked or answered a hundred times over.
A question that might not even have an answer.
And it’s here, once we find, ask, and begin to unravel that question, that we find ourselves in position to do something new, unique, and interesting.
Behind All Work That Matters Is a Question to Be Unraveled
Questions break the status quo, create progress, and seek to understand what we don’t already know.
Questions like “How?” and “Why?” seek to understand more deeply. “Why not?” and “What if?” seek to expand on what’s possible.
Questions form the basis of all interesting work, from innovation in sustainable business models ( “How can we produce better products while also lessening our environmental impact?”) to books-turned-Hollywood-blockbusters (“What would a vampire-human-werewolf love triangle look like?”)
We might think it’s the lack of budget, skill, or experience that keeps us from growing our audiences as creators.
But our biggest lack is in the ambition in our questions.
Innovation Comes From Unraveling Big Questions
James Clear asked and unraveled the question of how to best build habits.
Brené Brown continues to ask and unravel the question of how to negotiate our relationship with shame and vulnerability.
Krista Tippett, and her podcast that kicked off this whole revelation, has been asking and unraveling perhaps the biggest question of all for almost 20 years and over 400 episodes: “What does it mean to be human?”
Big questions inspire, excite, and rouse curiosity. And yet, these aren’t the questions most of us find ourselves addressing through our work.
We more often find ourselves asking “How do I do this right?” than “How might I do this best?”
And “What should I do?” rather than “What could I do?”
These are the questions of implementors rather than innovators, explorers, and creators.
This timid approach to questioning isn’t entirely our fault, however.
Breaking Our Answer-Centric Conditioning
Our education system has conditioned us to believe that it’s having the answer that really matters.
When a question comes to mind for which the answer isn’t immediately available, frustrated though we may be, we move on. Sooner or later, we think, someone else with more skill, experience, and credentials will come along and solve it.
The problem is, when we rely on others to ask and answer the questions, not only do we consign ourselves to always be at least one step behind those willing to go out on a limb and break new ground, we also miss out on the opportunity to discover the best possible solutions to the problems we and our audiences face.
Our greatest opportunity to stand out as creators, then, is to be the ones asking, exploring, and unraveling the questions. To take our existing knowledge and the current best practices and use them as the foundation to push into the unknown.
The first step is to break our reliance on other people to discover the answers for us and realize that the very thing that qualifies us (or anyone) to tackle a big question is our curiosity and willingness to follow where it leads.
Choosing to follow a question instead of the well-worn path takes courage. But if we’re able to muster it, we open ourselves up to significant upside that’s hard to come by on more well-traveled routes.
How Unraveling a Question Makes You a More Confident Creator
Audiences gravitate toward big questions and fresh takes on old problems.
But while unraveling an ambitious question can certainly help to attract an audience, the greatest benefits of unraveling a question yourself, versus relying on the conclusion of others are internal.
Perhaps the most significant is the solid ground it gives you to stand on.
In unraveling a question, your opinions form based on your own research, interviews, and experiments. The information you’re working with comes directly from the source, rather than being co-opted and absorbed second (or third or fourth) hand.
This takes the pressure off.
Because now, your work isn’t about you and your beliefs about the topic at hand. It’s about answering and unraveling the question as fully and truthfully as you can, without bias for where it will lead.
The confidence that comes from this foundation is significant. It destroys impostor syndrome and empowers you to show up bigger in every aspect of your work and life.
While the increase in confidence might be reward enough, the products, content, and opportunities that come from unraveling an interesting question are also significant.
The Best Products Are Not Made but Unraveled
My course, Podcast Marketing Academy, emerged entirely from a question that nagged me for months regarding our clients’ shows: “Why do some shows grow effortlessly while others stall and plateau?”
After reading dozens of blog posts on podcast marketing and growth and being frustrated by the incomplete suggestions they provided, I resigned myself to the fact that if I wanted to answer the question, I was going to have to do so myself.
I took the question to interviews with my clients and dozens of other podcasters, observing, dissecting, and taking notes on many more in an attempt to suss out the ingredients for sustainable podcast growth.
The result was a very different framework than the one I would have created before I asked and unraveled the question.
But it was one that I now had 100% confidence in teaching and selling. I absolutely knew it would work and I absolutely knew it was the very best solution for a podcaster who had found themselves in the plateau that sparked the question in the first place.
What’s more, because the course is based on my firsthand research, there’s nothing else like it. It’s not the result of taking someone else’s podcast marketing course and then replicating it with some subtle tweaks thrown in. It truly is the one and only of its kind.
The unique program, however, is just one product of the unique perspective I’ve gained by unraveling the question.
That perspective has resulted in podcast guesting, speaking, and writing opportunities, new relationships, and a near-endless supply of content.
Developing a unique perspective and creating work that is truly singular should always be our goal as creators. Singular work is the polar opposite of commoditized work, and as such, is inherently more interesting and valuable.
The most reliable way of creating something singular starts with the question you choose to unravel with your work.
Picking Your Question
There are an infinite number of questions each of us could choose to focus on with our work.
Like my experience with Podcast Marketing Academy, or James Clear with Atomic Habits, we can choose to focus on a practical problem facing us, our audience, or our industry and work to figure out the best solution. These questions often start with a “Why?” and over the course of the unraveling turn into a “Why not?”
Unraveling these questions can lead to innovation, new products, services, businesses, business models, and even entire industries (the fast-growing private space industry comes to mind).
These questions are practical, helpful, and worthy of our time and energy.
But for many of us, there’s another, level of deeper, murkier Meta-Questions waiting to be unraveled. Questions that have unknowingly shaped our entire lives, and–once acknowledged–are the gateway to achieving our greatest potential.
The Meta-Questions That Shape Our Lives
In fiction, great characters are driven by one or more unanswered questions they spend their lives exploring.
“Well-drawn characters have a spine,” shares Andrew Stanton, the writer behind Toy Story and WALL-E In his TED talk. “The idea is that the character has an inner motor, a dominant, unconscious goal that they’re striving for, an itch that they can’t scratch.”
These Meta Questions don’t just apply to Pixar characters.
Stanton goes on to share how he became aware of the Meta-Question driving his own work and life.
“When I was four years old, I have a vivid memory of finding two pinpoint scars on my ankle and asking my dad what they were. And he said I had a matching pair like that on my head, but I couldn’t see them because of my hair. And he explained that when I was born, I was born premature, that I came out much too early, and I wasn’t fully baked; I was very, very sick. And when the doctor took a look at this yellow kid with black teeth, he looked straight at my mom and said, ‘He’s not going to live.’ And I was in the hospital for months. And many blood transfusions later, I lived, and that made me special.
“I don’t know if I really believe that. I don’t know if my parents really believe that, but I didn’t want to prove them wrong. Whatever I ended up being good at, I would strive to be worthy of the second chance I was given.”
Though we’re rarely, if ever, aware of them, we each have a series of questions that drive our goals, dreams, and motivations–and with them, our careers, relationships, and lives as a whole.
It’s in bringing awareness to and unraveling these Meta-Questions that our greatest opportunity and potential as creators (and humans) lies.
These are the questions that drive our life’s work. For which we have endless patience and motivation. For which the journey is truly more important than the destination. These are the types of questions that I suspect drive the work of Brené Brown and Krista Tippett.
Marrying Your Meta-Questions with Your Work
After watching Stanton’s TED talk, I started thinking about the Meta-Questions driving me.
Months passed without an answer. But over time, a question around the idea of “potential” started to take form.
Since childhood, I’ve ruminated on the idea of my own potential and the opportunities and burdens that come with it. My greatest fear playing on a loop in the background has always been that I would come up short. That I would waste my privilege, opportunities, and potential on things that didn’t make a difference.
I realized the question of what my potential really was and how I could possibly fulfill it had, in fact been the subtle driver behind all my major life decisions. From bicycling across Europe to starting an online business to the compulsion to create–whether through music, photography, or writing.
All of it, I realize, has been a part of the unraveling of that Meta-Question.
More recently, I’ve become aware that this newsletter has become the purest expression of that question yet.
Now more than a year in, I’m realizing that, at its core, this newsletter explores how each of us can fulfil our potential as creators and perhaps, even humans.
This is the question and the work I have endless patience for. Endless motivation. Endless curiosity. Regardless of any external success or validation. In this question, I see the potential for a book that, through this newsletter has seemingly begun to write itself, regardless of the fact that I have no expertise, no credentials, and no idea where it’s going.
That work exists for you too, buried somewhere inside a question.
It takes reflection to find the question, and courage to ask it, leaving the paved road and the signposts and the company it provides.
But it’s the work that has the greatest potential for impact. The work that will fulfill you unlike anything else. The work that, if you don’t do it, no one else will.
You don’t need more knowledge to pursue it. You don’t need more skill or experience or answers.
You simply need to ask the question, and follow its lead.
Big thanks to June Lin, Sean Stewart and Maxim Bos who gave incredible feedback on the initial draft of this essay and improved it massively.
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.
How to Become a More Resilient Creator by Roughing up Your Creative Practice
Imagine for a moment a smooth glassy sphere (personally, I’m visualizing the palantir from Lord of the Rings, but that’s just me).
The sphere is perfect. Not a scratch or smudge or mote of dust marring its surface, it’s a beautiful sight to behold.
In theory, the orb has some purpose, but you’ve almost forgotten entirely what it is. And while you don’t really put it to use, you spend a good deal of time gazing at it from across the room, fussing over it, polishing it, maintaining its perfect veneer, sharing
This orb is how a lot of us as creators treat our creative practices.
How a “Waggle” Can Help You Create More Consistent Work
As we develop as creators, we tend to develop a series of rituals, habits and superstitions designed (at least in theory) to get us into the zone and allow us to create our best work.
This practice might consist of a specific location at which we always sit down to do the work, a sacred hour when we feel inspiration is most likely to strike, a steaming cup of coffee close at hand, prepared in a specific ritualistic way, or a particular playlist that seems to channel the muse. If we’re particularly zealous, we may even offer up a prayer to the creative gods or make a sacrificial burnt offering.
Jay Acunzo refers to this type of pre-work ritual as your waggle, a phrase borrowed from the unique pre-swing ritual many golfers perform before every shot.
And regardless of how superstitious it may seem, waggles work.
In creating, as in golf, they’re a way to queue muscle memory in order to deliver a consistent outcome. And a consistent outcome is what separates pro creators from amateurs. Most people can stumble their way into making something good once. But making a career as a creator requires creating good work with practiced consistently.
But while our chosen waggles can be helpful if not outright necessary for creating consistent work, they present a problem. Particularly when they become polished to a smooth, glassy perfection.
The Downside of a Defined Waggle
As the last year has shown us, we have less control over our lives and routines than we might think.
Travel, family or friends visiting from out of town, kids activities, events, global pandemics, and more all have the ability to throw sand in the gears of our finely tuned creative machine. These situations are inevitable and unavoidable, and when our ability to do our creative work is dependent on being able to perform our waggle in the same way every time, we have a problem.
The more finely polished our waggle, the easier it is to hide behind.
When we’re unable to satisfy all of the many rituals, circumstances, and environmental requirements we’ve defined as being essential for our creative process, we’re likely to simply skip creating all together and hope for better conditions tomorrow. Repeat this process even a handful of times and before long our buffed-to-perfection creative practice becomes something to simply observe and admire from a distance rather than put to use.
If we’re in this for the long haul, we need a way to be able to maintain our creative productivity regardless of what the external world throws at us.
The best way I know to do this is to introduce some sandpaper to our practice and roughing it up, an idea borrowed from the world of meditation.
Roughing Up Your Creative Practice
A few years ago, I worked on an audio editing project for The Daily Meditation Podcast.
The project consisted of proofing the back catalogue of over a thousand episodes to be uploaded to the new paid app that Mary, the host was creating. By the end of the project, I had received an intensive crash course in meditation, mindfulness, chakras, and the benefits of various herbal teas (one of the unique quirks of the show).
While I’ve since forgotten almost everything I learned, there’s one idea that has stuck with me.
Contrary to what many people think, the real value of meditation and mindfulness is not in the time spent sitting cross-legged breathing deeply, with a blank mind.
Instead, it’s in applying the same mindfulness practices to the rest of your life especially in challenging or stressful situations. If you’re only able to practice mindfulness in a perfectly controlled environment, then, the practice isn’t much good to you.
To combat this reliance on perfect conditions, Mary frequently counselled listeners to take their meditation practice and rough it up around the edges.
Essentially, this meant challenging the notion that any of the various individual elements of the practice were necessary to meditate effectively.
Always meditate sitting straight-backed with your eyes closed? Once a week, try a walking meditation instead.
Always meditate at 7 am every morning? Try meditating in the evening.
Always meditate on your bedroom floor? Try the living room. Or the basement. Or somewhere intentionally difficult to focus, a mall food court perhaps.
Perhaps the most readily available, yet underrated method of roughing up the practice, shared Mary, was to simply push through unplanned distractions and annoyances outside of your control. Reframed this way, a neighbour mowing their lawn outside your window or kids running around the house cease to be maddening distractions and impediments to your meditation, but opportunities to persist and rough up your practice.
While an individual meditation might not be as effective as when the conditions are perfect, the practice as a whole grows more resilient.
The resiliency that comes with Rough-Edged Practice should be one of our primary goals as creators as well.
How To Create A Rough-Edged Creative Practice
As with meditation, roughing up our creative practice is essentially about putting ourselves in less than ideal environments and circumstances and training ourselves to create anyway.
Much like Marathon Projects increase our belief in our capabilities at a macro level, roughing up our creative practice increases our belief in our ability to create at the daily micro level, regardless of the external events outside of our control.
Opportunities to rough up your practice aren’t hard to find.
If you normally write every morning at 8 am at your kitchen table, try writing at 3 pm in a coffee shop. Switch up your drink, your process, or your playlist. Better yet, leave your headphones at home and ditch the playlist altogether. Find ways to intentionally introduce discomfort and friction into your process and rough up its perfect shiny exterior.
Keep in mind that the point isn’t to switch up your process every single time you sit down to create. A solid, consistent process is your foundation for reliably creating solid work, after all.
Instead, aim to switch things up once every couple of weeks.
Spend the rest of the time making use of the process that you know gets you results. Besides, even under ideal circumstances, opportunities to rough up your practice are unavoidable. When the inevitable annoyances, distractions, and frustrations arise, recognize the opportunity to further rough up (and thus strengthen) your practice and commit to pushing through.
When roughing up your practice, remember that the point isn’t to create your very best work every time you sit down.
The point is to slowly raise the overall average of your body of work over time. Building up your ability (and belief in your ability) to create solid work regardless of the conditions is a key component of raising that level.
You can start raising that level immediately.
Commit to introducing some grit into your process this week. Either by intentionally changing up your waggle, or by keeping an eye out for resistance and pushing through when you feel it urging you to wait for more ideal conditions to appear.
Take that perfect, shiny, delicate glass sphere that is your process and turn it into something that more closely resembles a dull, well-used bowling ball.
It might not be much to look at, you certainly won’t display it on a pedestal in your living room, but it’s capable of knocking down anything that comes across its path.
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.
How “Marathon Projects” Level up Your Creative Skills (and Grow Your Audience)
Ira Glass, creator of This American Life has an oft-repeated quote about “The Gap” that exists between the quality of work we want to be creating and the quality of work we’re currently capable of.
“All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there is this gap. For the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not that good.”
Our primary goal as creators then, is to close this gap.
To do so, Glass advises that especially when starting out, the most important thing you can do is to produce a large volume of work. To put yourself on a deadline and ship something every week. And this is what many of us do.
We produce weekly podcasts, blogs, newsletters, or videos… and it works! Our skills improve and the gap shrinks. Sooner or later, however, we reach a point of diminishing returns where no matter how much content we produce, the gap persists.
It’s possible at this point that if we simply keep producing content at our current pace, the gap will eventually shrink. But this is a years-long process of slow improvement. If we want to accelerate our growth as creators and more quickly narrow the gap, then, we need to shake things up.
As it turns out, it’s at this point that we can learn a lot from the world of running. Specifically, marathon running.
Why Run A Marathon?
Before we begin, let’s get one thing straight: Running a marathon is an entirely unreasonable pursuit.
While a daily running practice will certainly help you lose weight and improve your health, it’s hard to argue that the act of running one marathon has many lasting health benefits in itself.
It’s equally hard to argue that people sign up for a marathon for the external validation of winning.
Sure, a marathon is a race, but for most people in most marathons, the race is not to beat the competition and reach the podium, but–in one way or another–against themselves. They could just as easily compete against themselves by running a series of 5Ks, however.
So why go to the unreasonable lengths of running 42.2km, dealing with the pain, discomfort, and months of training for so small a tangible reward?
In fact, the unreasonableness is the whole point.
At its core, running a marathon is about going beyond what’s reasonable in order to find and stretch your limits.
When we’re feeling stuck and our growth has stalled, this exploration and expansion of our personal and creative limits is exactly what we need to reach the next level. Not by running a physical marathon, but by applying the same principles to our creative work.
I refer to these endeavors as Marathon Projects, and they should be a regular part of every creator’s process.
An Overview Of Marathon Projects
Like physical marathons, Marathon Projects are infrequent, somewhat unreasonable projects that may not have a tangible, outward-facing upside. Instead, the primary purpose is to push ourselves beyond our usual boundaries in order to find (and push outward on) our current limits.
Much like a runner will rarely run more than half the distance of a marathon during their training, Marathon Projects are an exaggeration of our typical daily or weekly creative practice.
As a YouTuber, a Marathon Project might be producing a short film.
As a writer, a Marathon Project might consist of writing an in-depth 5,000-word guide on a subject when you typically write 1,000-word blog posts. Eventually, you might feel the call to take on the ultimate Marathon Project for any writer, a book.
On top of his weekly The Fashion Geek Podcast production, Podcast Marketing Academy member Reginald Ferguson is working on a short run video & audio series documenting the process of working with a sneaker artist to get a custom pair of kicks designed.
Regardless of the medium, Marathon Projects test both our vision and endurance, requiring pre-planning as well as follow-through. The difficulty of these projects is amplified by the fact that they often happen in the background, an extra task on top of our regular content creation.
The challenge Marathon Projects present, is not without its rewards, however.
Marathon Projects Raise The Bar For Everything Else We Create
While they can be difficult to see through to completion, the difficulty is the whole point.
Marathon Projects expand our scope of what we’re capable of achieving, both on a big-picture level as well as in our day-to-day creating.
To a new runner who struggles to run a couple of kilometers a couple times a week, a marathon might seem like an impossible task. Having completed just one marathon, however, the formerly challenging 2km running practice becomes easy to the point of absurdity. At this point, the bar demands to be raised for even the basic maintenance running when not training for a race.
Marathon Projects have the same result on our day-to-day creative work.
These projects force us to explore, experiment with, and develop techniques, tools, and skills we wouldn’t otherwise employ. Like Pandora’s Box, once we’ve used them once, they have a way of working their way into our typical workflows, even if in a diminished capacity.
Producing even one Radiolab-style podcast can’t help but improve your production and editing skills.
Creating even one short film can’t help but improve your storytelling ability.
Writing even one short book can’t help but improve the way you structure your ideas and writing.
As with the runner who completes her first half-marathon, once we complete our first marathon project, we begin thinking about our next one, and how we can raise the bar a little higher.
Once this shift happens, our entire view of our regular creative work shifts.
Marathon Projects Provide Purpose And Motivation
While running a marathon might not in itself provide many lasting health benefits, the training required to run one certainly does.
For many people looking to improve their health, the training–not the race itself–is the reason they decide to run a marathon in the first place. The race is simply the capstone project that puts the training in context and gives them the structure, purpose, motivation, and deadline to follow through.
Marathon Projects do the same for our weekly content creation, providing context, purpose, and focus.
When I was first drawing up the outline for Podcast Marketing Academy, I applied my existing daily writing habit to blog my way through my course outline. The Marathon Project of the course provided a pointed focus for my content creation, which resulted in better blog content while also fleshing out the course material. When the time came to record the course videos a month later, most of the content had already been written and simply needed to be put to slides and recorded.
Tim Ferriss has famously used his podcast in a similar way, using his podcast interviews to build out the content for two books, Tools of Titans and Tribe of Mentors.
Marathon Projects force us to stretch ourselves, to explore new depths of ourselves, our topic, and our craft. By contextualizing our regular content production as part of a Marathon Project, that content is stretched as well, improving in both quality and originality.
While the primary benefits of this stretching are internal, Marathon Projects have the potential of attracting significant external opportunities as well.
Marathon Projects Put Your Full Talent On Display
While producing a weekly podcast, blog post, or video might be an important part of your content marketing plan, it’s safe to say that no single piece of content requires or displays the full depth and potential of your thought and creativity.
One of the purposes of Marathon Projects, then, is to discover and display the full extent of those capabilities.
When published publicly, these projects have a way of attracting attention from new potential audience members, collaborators, clients, customers, and even employers beyond what your typical content does. There are a few reasons for this.
Marathon Projects Are (Often) Evergreen
Marathon Projects typically have a longer shelf-life than typical weekly content and can become fantastic showcases for the work you do. They’re a way to grab people’s attention and provide a compelling on-ramp to the rest of your work.
How many people discovered James Clear by reading his best-selling book Atomic Habits and then stuck around for his weekly 3-2-1 Newsletter?
It took him 6 years to reach his first 440k subscribers (which in itself is an incredible feat) before writing Atomic Habits. Since the book was published in October 2018, he’s nearly tripled (he passed 1M subscribers in Jan 2021) his subscribers in less than half the time.
I’d be willing to bet that the majority of those new subscribers came either directly from reading the book, or from the extensive, years-long publicity campaign around it, including the dozens (if not hundreds) of podcast guest appearances, TV interviews, guest columns, and more.
This impressive publicity campaign around Atomic Habits perfectly illustrates another feature of how Marathon Projects help attract external opportunities: They give us something to really promote.
Marathon Projects Demand Promotion
While we might not go over the top to promote our latest podcast episode or blog post, Marathon Projects encourage us to pull out all the stops to get them in front of as many people as people.
It’s unlikely that any of us would write a guest post or do a podcast guest appearance with the sole purpose of raising awareness about a single blog post or podcast episode of our own. With a project we’ve spent weeks, months, or years working on, however, it’s only natural that we would want to do everything possible to get the work in front of as many people as possible.
By nature of their unreasonableness, Marathon Projects often end up being easier to promote than our weekly content. Think about the difference between a friend telling you they just completed a 10km fun run versus a hundred-mile race through Death Valley. The more unreasonable the project, the more attention it’s likely to attract.
Absurdity demands attention.
While there are certainly a number of possible external rewards that Marathon Projects may present, remember that the driving purpose behind them should be internal. Externally, Marathon Projects are gambles, some of which will lead to new opportunities and many of which won’t. This is one of the reasons why it’s helpful to do them regularly.
Scheduling Your Marathon Projects
Much like you wouldn’t run a marathon every week, or even every month, Marathon Projects should be pursued infrequently but on at least a semi-consistent schedule.
I recommend either a bi-annual or quarterly basis, depending on the scope of the projects. This schedule gives you enough time to do them well while not overwhelming your week-to-week workload.
It’s worth mentioning that Marathon Projects often act as a ratchet. The process of developing and launching my Podcast Marketing Academy, the Creative Wayfinding Newsletter, and the Build A Better Wellness Biz podcast were all Marathon Projects for me. But once they were up and running, the ongoing creation and management of them became the new baseline.
This is the case for many types of marathon projects, just as it is for physical races.
A runner who completes their first 5K often feels empowered and perhaps even compelled to run a 10K. After running the 10K, they may set their sights on a half-marathon, followed by a full marathon, and perhaps (if they’re a certain type of crazy) an ultra marathon.
In the same way, as we expand the scope of our skills, knowledge, and belief in ourselves, the ratchet cranks ever-upward, and our subsequent Marathon Projects increase in ambition and scale.
How To Pick Your Next Marathon Project
When planning a Marathon Project, there are a few factors to keep in mind.
1. Personal Interest
The first and most important consideration is your personal interest in the project itself.
While the point is for the project to be difficult enough to challenge and stretch yourself, it also needs to be something you’re motivated to keep chipping away at over the weeks or months it will take to complete it.
2. Level Of Difficulty
The difficulty of your Marathon Project has a huge effect on its ultimate effectiveness.
The purpose is to push yourself, but choosing a project that is too hard will likely lead to a project that either drags on for years or gets abandoned entirely. Set the bar too low, however, and you won’t see any meaningful benefits.
Aim for a project that’s juuuust outside your comfort zone. Something that calls on your existing skills but requires you to either take them further than you have before or apply them in a new way.
One of the best ways to determine whether or not you’re aiming for the right range of difficulty is whether or not your project makes you a little bit nervous when you think about completing it within your given timeline.
3. Skill-Specific Growth
Any effective Marathon Project will help improve your endurance, confidence, and self-belief. But they also present an opportunity to hone and develop specific skills.
One of my primary goals this year is leveling up as a writer, which was one of the reasons behind the 30 Days of Podcasting evergreen email series I’ve been working on.
Think about any skills you currently want to develop and choose a project that will require you to put those skills to use.
4. Public Appeal
While the core purpose of a Marathon Project should be to find and stretch your personal and creative limits, it’s worth thinking about the potential public appeal of the project.
Remember, these projects can serve as entry points to your larger body of work. Think about the themes of your existing work as well as what you want to be known for, and choose a project that showcases that.
Start Running
It’s never too early to start planning your first (or next) Marathon Project.
Remember, the point of a marathon isn’t to win. It’s to stretch yourself beyond what you currently see yourself as capable of achieving. To develop the depth and breadth of your skills. To give the rest of your work context and purpose.
As with any marathon, you don’t need to be exceptionally fast or exceptionally skilled. “The Marathon,” as running company New Balance says, is “how an average runner becomes more than average.”
Marathons are about determination, grit, and a willingness to continue beyond the limits of reason. These are traits available to all of us should we choose to call on them.
If you’re feeling stuck, like the gap between the work you’re currently making and the work you know you have the potential to create isn’t closing as fast as you’d like, a marathon is the best way to take the next step.
All you need to do is pick your destination, lace up your sneakers, and start running.
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.
The Surest Way To Find Clarity As A Creator (And Why You Probably Already Have It)
Years ago, on a road trip with friends, I was driving along a winding mountain road through the Ouachita National Forest in Arkansas when we hit fog.
It was late afternoon, but the fog was so thick it felt like dusk. In the daylight, the road had been a dream, twisting its way through the vibrant autumn foliage and we gleefully chased it like a slalom skier on a gold medal run.
Now, however, with visibility limited to just 30 feet or so in front of the car, the mood had changed. The carefree vibe had evaporated into the mist and been replaced by a dull, throbbing tension.
For five minutes, then ten, then fifteen, no one spoke. At some point, the CD in the stereo reached its end and we simply drove on in taut silence.
Headlights materialized out of the fog with little warning before being immediately swallowed up again as they passed. While the cars were alarming, I was more concerned about the deer or elk I was sure would appear in the middle of the road at any moment with no headlights to signal its presence.
We slowed down, and thought about stopping to try to wait for the fog to lift. But with the fog already having its way with the late afternoon sunlight, we didn’t want to see what it would do with the night.
And so on we drove through the fog.
• • •
Looking back years later, I realize we made the right decision that day.
There are certain locations that are predisposed to fog. In these places, if you decide to try and wait the fog out, you need to be prepared to wait a long time.
These fog-inclined locations are often found in valleys, around mountains… and seemingly everywhere on our creative expeditions.
We often hit fog when we begin to climb in elevation. From the base of the mountain we can see the peak in the distance and eyeball the route we’ll take to get there. As we ascend, however, we quickly become engulfed in confusion and uncertainty.
We know our destination is somewhere above us, but can see nothing more of the route leading there than the 30 feet in front of us. Unable to see where we’re going and what obstacles are waiting to materialize out of the mist, we often choose to stop and wait for greater clarity.
This is a mistake.
Without any change in the external conditions, the fog will continue to sit low and heavy indefinitely. This means our only option to escape it is to move either up, toward our destination, or down the way we came.
The thing about moving through fog, however, is that while we might only be able to see 30 feet in front of us, if we travel that 30 feet, we can count on being able to see another 30 feet ahead of our new position.
Shaan Puri has an approach to project navigation he calls the ABZ Framework which illustrates perfectly how to move through the creative fog. In the framework, A is where you are, Z is where you want to go, and B is the next step in front of you.
We often think of clarity as being able to see every step of the journey ahead in crystal clear detail, from A through Z. But to move forward at any point in time, we only really need to be able to see B, or the next 30 feet in front of us.
With this in mind, we can choose to view our creative expedition as nothing more than a series of 30-foot segments, each one coming into view as we move through the previous.
In the end, what’s more important than vision when navigating the fog is trust. Trust that by moving forward 30 feet, the subsequent 30 foot stretch of road will come into view ahead.
We all face regular patches of fog on our creative expeditions. Sometimes we get stuck in what feels like a sea of fog. When we do, we might be tempted to hold tight and wait for the sun to burn through.
But in the end, the only way to move through the fog is to move through the fog.
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.
The Album-Tour Creative Career Model
As multi-skilled, multi-passionate, multi-interested creators, we often get stuck in our careers because we feel we need to commit to just one thing and become an expert in it. We’re told that niching is the only way to gain traction with our work and if we don’t we’ll remain forever anonymous.
We have no problem coming up with ideas that could work. But we have just enough uncertainty that we’ll stay excited in them that we hold back from committing. And so we sit and wait for greater clarity and greater certainty to come along.
They rarely do.
We need a new model for approaching creative careers. One that gives us the confidence to commit to our short-term interests and create projects around them, while knowing that we don’t need to (and maybe even shouldn’t) stick with that pursuit forever.
It turns out this model already exists.
It’s the Album-Tour Cycle followed by musicians, consisting of an ever-repeating loop of writing → workshopping → recording → touring. Let’s have a look at how this model applies to our creative careers.
Developing Your Craft
Before the cycle can begin, the first step is developing the tools of the trade, learning your instrument, refining your craft. Your start out as playing covers, riffing on what others have created and starting to add your own flair to it.
Studying what’s already worked is an invaluable form of practice. It helps us learn how to piece together the structure of a song and helps us understand what already resonates with people who are already interested in our genre.
At this stage, the goal is less about generating new ideas of our own than it is learning to use the tools well enough to say something with them, whether it’s original or not.
Somewhere in the process of building and riffing on the work of others, however, we start experimenting with work of our own. And here, once we start writing our own songs, the Album-Tour Cycle begins.
Playing Local Gigs
To musicians, playing live is not the culmination of the writing process, but an integral part of it. Much like a comedian testing new material, playing live allows a band to get real-time feedback on their songs. At this point, these are small local shows, and the purpose is two-fold: To workshop their ideas, and to start building and engaging a fan base.
At this point, the ideas are fluid. There might be a core idea in each song, but it’s not committed, it’s still free to be tinkered with and played with. During any given show, they might experiment with the structure and tempo of each of the songs they’ve written.
Leonard Cohen, for example, wrote 80 draft verses for the song Hallelujah. Even after recording the song for his album Various Positions, Cohen spent years performing different combinations of the song live, continually seeking to find the single best version of the song.
For us, the local live show stage of the process is publishing content online. We can think of our short-form content on social media like a collection of licks and riffs that then get combined and expanded on in longer form blog posts, podcasts, or videos.
Much like a band playing live local shows, the point of this content is to both test and play with different versions of raw ideas, while also building and engaging an audience. We try a lot of ideas, express them in different ways, and see what gets the kids in the first row nodding their heads along.
Over time with repetition and feedback, the work begins to settle into it’s final form. As the songs take shape, it then becomes time to enter the studio and commit them to an album.
Producing Your First Album
A band might have a solid collection of songs they’ve honed over months or even years of playing live, but the first step of the recording process is running those ideas through the creative gauntlet.
A producer is brought it to provide an experienced set of outside ears and a fresh perspective to determine what’s working and where the songs could be improved. A good producer will help take the raw materials of the collection of songs and help turn them into a cohesive finished album.
In addition to honing the individual songs themselves, the band and producer will whittle down the selection of songs that make it onto the finished album. A 10-song album might have started out as a collection of 20 or 30 songs that had been written. Many of the songs are cut because they’re simply not that good while others are fantastic songs that don’t fit with the larger vibe of this album. Part of crafting a good album is maintaining a consistent theme or tone.
For us, the album recording phase of the process is about distilling a core theme of the collection of ideas we’ve been working into a cohesive, consumable offer or series of offers.
Your album might be a course, a workshop, a book, or even an entire business with a suite of related offerings. The important thing is that the thread that runs through everything you offer is consistent.
As with producing an album, our job during this phase is to narrow down the ideas we’ve been workshopping and then pressure test them, refining them into the best possible version of themselves. This will almost certainly require outside feedback and perspective.
This outside perspective might come from a coach or consultant, mentor, mastermind group, or our customers themselves. If we’ve been workshopping our ideas in public already, chances are we’ve already been able to get a sense of what’s most interesting and valuable to our audience and can double down on that.
At the end of the production process, we leave the studio with a finished album, load into the tour bus, and hit the road to promote it.
Going On Tour
By playing local gigs, a band will have already built up a small, loyal fanbase who is primed and ready to buy the album as soon as it’s released. A national tour, however, gives the band a chance to introduce their music to new audiences, and sell more copies of the album to casual fans.
When a band has only a small audience, the best way to grow is to team up with one or more bands with similar audiences and go on tour together. This allows each band on tour to cross-pollinate audiences with the others. As a result, everyone’s fan base grows. This same strategy works perfectly for us.
There are likely dozens of creators and business owners who offer complementary products, services, and content to you, and thus have similar audiences. Find ways to team up with them that serve each of you as well as each of your audiences.
This might mean offering a joint workshop, guesting on podcasts, finding referral partners, or cross-promoting through your newsletters, social media, and elsewhere.
Much like everyone likes discovering new music in the same vein as what they already listen to, people are also eager to find new content and creators in a similar vein.
This stage of the album-tour cycle is about capitalizing on the work you’ve done, getting it in front of new people, and converting them into customers. But it also marks the point at which the Album-Tour Cycle begins to repeat. Only this time on a bigger stage.
Repeating The Cycle
On a given night at the beginning of a tour, a band might play almost every song off the album they’re supporting. As they near the end of the touring cycle, however, they begin to inject more and more new, unrecorded material.
In this way, they return back to workshopping phase of the cycle, seeing what resonates and what doesn’t with a new batch of songs. Only now, while on tour, they have a larger and more varied audience to gain feedback from.
Often, by the time one tour ends. A band will have already written and workshopped enough songs to head immediately back into the studio for the production phase of the next album. In this way, each phase of the album-tour cycle blends seamlessly into the next.
In our own creative work, we can achieve this by dedicating a small percentage of our creative output to experimenting with new ideas, topics and interests. While 90% of our content might remain consistent to serve our existing audience and push people to our existing paid offers work, the remaining 10% might explore new territory.
Over time, if we find something through that exploration that resonates both with us and others, we might choose to allocate more and more focus to it. Then, when the time comes, we record the album around that idea or topic and then kick off a new tour in support of it.
Don’t Be Afraid To Change Lanes
The album-tour model provides a much better way of approaching our careers as creators than the view many of us grew up with. While we might not stick with a single industry, job role, topic, or niche, our work still has a throughline. That throughline is the unique voice and perspective we bring to any work we choose to do.
How we apply our voice and perspective is always changing. Sometimes our next album is a subtle refinement of the last. Sometimes it’s Bob Dylan going electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
Despite the criticism Dylan faced from long-time fans at that point, with hindsight, we can see clearly that Bob Dylan was still Bob Dylan after shifting from folk music to rock. In fact, you could make the argument that that’s when he really became Bob Dylan.
To me, Dylan’s story shows clearly that the danger is not in switching career lanes, but in failing to switch when we feel the urge. Bob Dylan was already famous in 1965. But his decision to shift lanes and everything that ensued has made him legendary.
Sometimes the lane we’re in–no matter how secure–simply doesn’t lead in a direction that will allow us to fulfill our potential. And so we, like Dylan have to change lanes when we feel called to do so.
Remember, no one wants to hear the same album recorded six times, anyway. We already own that album and can listen whenever we want. What we want from our favourite bands is their voice, their perspective, their particular sensibility presented in a new and refreshing way.
So commit, not for the long haul, but to the next album. Make the best album that only you can make at this point in your life.
And then start working on the next one.
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.
How To Follow Your Creative Compass To The Work Only You Can Create
I always wanted to be a rock star.
As far as creative dreams go, this is my oldest and purest.
In High School, my best friends and I had a band that played Weezer, Blink-182, and Metallica covers. Once I graduated, I started a hardcore band that wrote our own stuff and played shows around town.
Most shows we played were to small audiences of 30 people or so, the biggest had an audience of maybe 100.
We were about as far from famous as we could get, but that didn’t matter.
The feeling of creative expression that came from playing my guitar and singing my heart out in front an audience is the purest expression of myself I’ve yet to experience.
It’s been a long time since I’ve fully lived in that feeling.
The last live show I played was in 2009 and I gave up on making it as a musician a few years later.
But while I’ve long since given up on that dream, I recently realized, that all the work I’ve done since then (and maybe all the work I’ll ever do) has been chasing that feeling of standing on stage with my guitar around my neck.
I don’t think I’m the only one driven by this type of experience.
I think we all have some feeling we’re chasing that informs the work we do. This feeling, I think, is what we imagine to be the most fully realized version of ourselves. Our potential fulfilled.
I call this feeling your Creative Compass.
The feeling that guides our Creative Compass is different for each of us.
For you, it might be the feeling of catching the perfect wave while surfing, watching your guests take the first bite of the meal you’ve spent hours preparing, or the subtle joy of watching the first shoots poke above the topsoil of your garden.
It might be a feeling you’ve previously lived and embodied or an imagined amplification of a past experience.
Whichever feeling it is that has a hold on us, we don’t choose it.
It’s something deeper than conscious choice, more intimately woven into our body, mind, and soul. Our past, present, and future. Though we likely aren’t aware of it, our work and our lives are driven in search of attaining (or reattaining) this feeling. And that’s not a bad thing.
Work that taps into this feeling is tapping into the purest and truest part of ourselves, resulting in the work that is most uniquely ours.
The work that no one else can replicate.
When we are aware of this feeling, then, we can follow the compass needle and intentionally lean into it.
This allows us to bring the purest version of ourselves to everything we do, regardless of medium, topic, or niche. It creates a through-line that ties together a distinct body of work.
Of course, to follow this feeling, however, we first have to identify it.
How To Find The Feeling Behind Your Creative Compass
I first became aware of the feeling guiding my Creative Compass while listening to music.
Not just any music, however.
Specifically, the feeling arises while listening to the songs that resonate most deeply with the core of my being. The songs where I feel the kick drum in my chest rather than hear it. Where it’s all I can do to simply sing under my breath instead of screaming along til my lungs hurt.
When I’m listening to these songs, it doesn’t take much to imagine that I wrote them. That it’s me standing on a stage sharing this purest expression of myself.
Music is one of the best ways to tap into your Compass.
Think about the songs that make you most come alive. What’s the feeling associated with them? Where in your life do they take you back to? What forgotten dreams do they evoke?
While music has a special power to evoke memory and cut through to our souls, it’s not the only way to get to the core feeling that pulls at you.
Think back to the dreams you had from your youth and the feelings associated with them. Think back to the people, places, and experiences that have made you feel most alive.
The most you.
Sift through your past to find the feeling that strikes the bell at the center of your soul.
Remember that the purest form of this feeling might not live solely in your past, but be an imagined amplification of that feeling, a mix of what has been and been lost, and what could be.
Identifying the feeling is a necessary and important first step. But to use it to create the work that only we can create, we need to find a way to tap into it on command.
Follow Your Compass To Your Best Work
In order to follow your Creative Compass, you first need to get a clear reading on the direction it’s pointing.
This means tapping into and embodying the feeling that guides the needle.
Seeing as my Compass needle is so tied to music, it’s no surprise that the best way I’ve found to tap into it has been to create a playlist of all the songs that bring it to life.
Music is one of the best methods of evoking memories and uncovering forgotten feelings.
If you have a strong emotional connection to music, creating a similar playlist that helps you embody the feeling you’re chasing is a great place to start. But it’s not the only option.
Another option is to create a short visualization exercise that helps you embody the feeling you want to carry into your creating.
A therapist friend of mine once walked me through a visualization exercise like this.
She instructed me to visualize a feeling I wanted to capture and then imagine myself putting it into a bottle and then corking it to carry with me.
Years later, I still think back to this visualization every so often. As soon as I think of uncorking that bottle, the feeling floods my body. Visualization can be a powerful tool.
Other options include creating a vision board, hanging art or photos, using candles or scented oils. Anything that helps remind you of the direction of your Compass and gets you to that feeling of the purest expression of yourself.
The easier you’re able to tap into and embody this feeling, the more easily it will flow into your work.
Since discovering this phenomenon and leaning into it, I’ve felt a surge of clarity and purpose. I can rely on the Compass pointing me in the right direction when I feel lost.
I’m more confident in the work I’m creating and am certain that if I’m able to keep following the needle and chasing this feeling it will lead to the work that only I can create, removing all worry of competition.
This Creative Compass exists for you as well, although it points in another direction.
It takes some reflection, some quiet, and some courage. But finding your direction and following it is the surest way of tapping into your best and purest work.
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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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.