Who is creative work really for: the creator or the consumer?
I've been creating things on the internet since 2005. That's when, as a college student, I launched a blog called All Star Blog as a supplement to my writing for the print edition of my school's paper. Instead of covering our teams, I wrote about the pros.
The writing was so very -- how should I put this?
Bad.
Like, almost pointless? Like, why write it at all?
Here's the very first post from March 2005, which is damnit years ago.
My first post, written using Blogger. Remember Blogger?
(Very sports announcer voice.)
Not a great shot there, Bill. Let's see if he regains his confidence.
(If you're wondering, the five comments on the post weren't impressive: one was my own addendum, one was from a roommate, two from randos who found me through Blogger's nascent directory of sites, and one was a flirty comment from a friend of mine who quoted the movie Anchorman. She called me a "smelly pirate hooker.")
(I never told her how I felt.)
Like I said: Bad. Useless. Pointless. To almost everyone else on earth.
Except me.
Why did this need to exist? Who needed this?
I did.
Without knowing it, I'd just started my very own version of the most vital aspect of any creator's career: a creative practice.
* * *
I wanted to write. So I wrote. End of strategy. And that evolved into a creative career over the long arc of time. Even when I took a job that wasn't content-related (in ad sales at Google), my interviewers still asked me more about my practice than anything else I'd done in college. 4.0 GPA? Senior Editor of the student paper? Summer gigs at multiple newspapers? PR intern at ESPN?
Nope.
"Tell me about this sports blog of yours."
"Oh, you mean the one known purely to my closest friends-slash-unrequited loves? Um ... okay, sure!"
Since the days of that first post, I've created a lot of stuff. Like, a lot. I can't help it. If I’m not writing something, it feels like I’m suffocating. So I schedule moments to "breathe." My writing time is on my calendar, and it's sacred. You can't have it.
I've heard people say "the gym is a meeting." Well, creating is a meeting. You can't wait for it to magically happen in your week. You either make it a priority, or you make nothing. Put time on your calendar, and commit to it. If someone asks to meet during that time (a peer, a boss, a client, a friend), the reply is simple but vital: "Sorry, I can't. I have a meeting I can't move."
A creative practice has a few key traits we need to protect:
You control it. (You don't need permission or approval from any gatekeepers to create it in general or to craft it a specific way.)
It's a ritual. (This means both the motions and the cadence are predictable. They recur. In my case, I repeat similar motions for this newsletter. Every other Wednesday, I make an americano, sit in my office, open ConvertKit, check-in with myself about what I feel like writing -- or use my idea backlog if nothing hits me -- then I write for about two hours until the draft is complete. This is my "be messy and bad" phase, where I try not to self edit too much. Then, I take a break from the writing. I check email/social, eat lunch, maybe work on another project for an hour or so. Finally, I return to finalize the newsletter, which includes editing the essay and scheduling it to ship Friday morning at 7:30am Eastern. Fortnightly is my current cadence. My cadence was actually weekly from 2005 until mid-2022 -- which is goodgrief years of publishing once a week. I switched because weekly began to hold me back from being more ambitious. Ask yourself: "What are my creative motions? What is my publishing cadence?" What is your ritual?)
The metrics don't matter. (The intention -- remember that word -- is merely to persist. The intention is everything. It directs you, and so it directs the work. The intention is to practice, to feel fulfilled, to play and test and tinker and improve.)
Again, I've created a lot of things -- most of which emerged through my own practice, not paid work. From All Star Blog (five years) to a blog about sports blogging (one year being meta, as I tend to be -- creating for creators and marketing to marketers as I do now). Later, I wrote musings on marketing, attacks on best practices, and research into resonance. Short tweets, lengthy essays, keynotes and books, and a deluge of daydreams digressing into doodles, diagrams, dinky little designs.
I once launched a phone line for venting about marketing (which not a single person called) and a one-line article on Medium (which a million people saw).
And of course: Unthinkable, a project that always has me feeling inspired and, at the very same time, SO stressed.
And I tell you about allllllll of this stuff I've done with allllllll that confidence just so you can see how truly unthinkable it is that I still can't answer this simple question:
Who is my work for?
I don’t ask that to mean some kind of generalized marketing persona describing, well ... you. No, I mean something much more existential:
Is my work for me? Or is it for you?
I suppose the answer is ... YES?
YES, I want to serve you. I create my work for you. But also? I create those very same things for myself. I create for a stadium of Jays (hat-tip to Tim Urban from an old episode of my show).
Up, down, and all around these mental threads twist. It gets quite messy.
Is my work for me or for you? YES.
I guess?
But mostly, it’s for me.
At least that’s how I feel right now.
You?
* * *
You and I love to make things, and as a result, we become walking, talking collections of contradictions.
We create for others and ourselves. (Wait...)
We care what others think and don’t care. (Hold on...)
Creating is a means to an end, and also, it is our endgame to create. (Alright, slow down, can we just--?)
We get writer's block, yet we never actually forget how to write. (LOL)
Our content teaches others what we know, yet creating that content is how we try to understand. (I, um...)
We are part of the work but not, ourselves, the work, and yet we want to bring our full selves to the work. (I'm ... gonna need a moment with this one.)
We are walking, talking, debating, always contemplating, in a way that feels liberating and emotionally grating, as we just keep waiting for a rating and review (takes deep breath) that we are in fact innovating, which can be quite deflating, so we just start hating the words we keep stating, but we don't know what else to do (gasps for air) so we just. keep. creating.
(Move over, Lin-Manuel.)
We’re just walking, talking bags of contradictory thoughts and emotions all jumbled together.
So maybe we should wade into that jumble ... together.
Into the Mess We Go
I am beyond thrilled to share with you a new story, arguably years in the making: episode 200 of Unthinkable! It's a special, scary, weird, wonderful, and VERY awkward episode. It's also beautiful, if I do say so myself.
It is, as you and I are, a collection of contradictory ideas.
You'll hear from listeners grappling with crucial questions, talking shop about the craft, and sharing inspiring pieces of their work. (The ending is particularly moving and something I've been wanting to try for awhile.)
But you'll also hear some difficult confessions of mine about making this show, recorded as voice memos as I walked around my neighborhood, struggling with the joy and the burden that is running Unthinkable.
This episode is the embodiment of the jumble of thoughts and emotions, the paid projects we do and the practice we need, all twisted together to create the mess we confront every time we make anything -- especially things that are meaningful to us.
Or are they meaningful to others?
YES.
Whether or not you've listened to my show before, I would really love if you would give this episode a shot.
Without further ado, welcome to episode 200.
Welcome to the jumble.