Your Creative Work Won’t Always Be Your Best
The work you create won’t always be your best and that’s ok. In fact, it’s probably healthy to not always have the pressure of creating your best work ever each time you sit down to create. It’s an impossible goal and will only lead to mental blocks preventing you from allowing your thoughts to manifest themselves into your creative work.
These Daily Notes have taught me this.
I’ve been writing, recording, and creating for almost eight years now and as I look back over my library of work, I did not create as much as I could and probably should have. My library should be more robust but because I used to try to write the perfect blog post, find the perfect topic for a video, and think of the perfect conversation to have with a guest I have a lot of unfinished work. The pressure I was putting on myself kept me from allowing my natural creativity from doing the work and blocked my connection to The Source, as Rick Rubin refers to the universal source of ideas we all connect with.
The years of struggling to create helped me to become the creator I am today and more importantly learn to identify my creative process and remove the creative blocks I was putting on myself.
When I sit down to write each day’s note I have no pressure to create a note that will go viral. That’s not my goal–I don’t check any analytics (yet–not sure I will). My goal is to, as Seth Godin talks about, “show up” each day and be there for readers with a note for them to read–the only requirement is the subject of each note must be related to Spirit, Mind, Body, Money, and Creativity as a bonus topic.
That’s it.
No word count. No publish time (other than the morning). No measurement of “good”.
I’m confident in my ability to create to allow the reader to determine if each note was good or not. While I don’t have a goal of writing the best note ever, I do believe that each note I publish (or podcast or video) is worthy of being shared–I’m not creating crap and if I really felt it was that bad, I’d delay publishing.
I also have adopted the mindset that it’s not my job to determine what is considered good or bad. Work I feel excited about and think is great may not resonate with some readers and fall into their category of bad. Work I feel is just ok may resonate with some readers and fall into their category of good. Talk to any Creator and they’ll tell you it’s often the work you are less than excited about that gets the most positive feedback and the work you are excited about that receives a response of crickets.
As a Creator, no matter how well you think you know your audience, you’ll never know how the work you are creating that day will be received. Take that pressure of yourself and allow the work to create itself and share it with the world. Your role as the Creator is to share your message in the way only you can and allow the world to digest what you have to say–it’s not to be the judge of good or bad.
Your creative work may not always be your best in your eyes but it could be the work someone else needs to receive that day–don’t allow your criticism of your work keep it from getting to the one person who needs it.
Just create and then keep creating.
See you tomorrow and keep pursuing,
JC
