One Creative Moment is a daily email for founders, owners, and creators. You'll get insights, irreverence, and inspiration to help you build a better business & live a more creative life.
"Write as if you're the only person doing it"
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This idea came up during Steven Pressfield’s appearance on Rick Rubin’s Tetragrammaton podcast. I know Pressfield best as the author of The War of Art, an excellent book about the creative process. He revealed that when he’s writing a novel, he doesn’t read any fiction because it messes with his head. He knows if he reads a strong narrative voice or point of view, he’ll either feel defeated (I could never be that good). Or (worse) he’ll start to think/write like that, too, taking away from his own voice. He doesn’t want to know who else is out there doing other stuff. And I totally get that. In my early-to-mid twenties, if you asked me what I did or was, I would tell you I was a guitarist, a songwriter; I was in a rock band. Back then, I wouldn’t listen to any recorded music in my genre. Only classical! My biggest fear was being influenced by something and unintentionally copying it. It wasn’t a flawless plan, lol. Though I do think it made what I wrote more personal and less “of the times.” (For better or worse.) But here’s another side to the argument. What about being part of one’s time in history, being part of a scene? Don’t you need to know what others in your field are doing? And this is where it intersects with business. How much “competitive research” is too much? How much is enough? I’m conflicted on this (in case you can’t tell), and I think there’s a lot to be said for both sides. If you have thoughts, I’d love to know. Please send them along. Maybe we can come up with a working theory! In progress, |
One Creative Moment
One Creative Moment is a daily email for founders, owners, and creators. You'll get insights, irreverence, and inspiration to help you build a better business & live a more creative life.
One of the things missing from much of the “get AI to do everything for you” messaging is this fact: writing isn’t just a product, it’s a process. Yes, it’s nice to have “content.” But thinking that having it is the only outcome that matters is shallow and short-sighted. One of the things that has astounded me since I started writing daily(ish) emails back in November 2022 is how much it has changed me. It has vastly improved my ability to think—and to put those thoughts into clear, concise...
If you want to achieve more, do less. That is to say, build time into your day, your week, your year for quiet. In our house, following lunch, there is a period of mandated quiet time. It gives everyone a chance to do something they’d otherwise not do: nothing. It could be napping, reading, working on art, or even listening to something specific on headphones—as long as it’s quiet and done alone. For Kayte and I, it’s almost always napping, lol. During that time, we can recharge. We can...
“…We are ‘persuaded to spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need to make impressions that won’t last on people we don’t care about.’” This is Kate Raworth quoting Economist Tim Jackson in her book Doughnut Economics while discussing the power of aspiration in influencing human behaviour. Reading this, I realized that seeing (or at least feeling) this is what kept me from marketing for so long. (And what keeps me from engaging in much of its mainstream still.) I thought of it only as a...