A Cheat Code for New Creators

It took me years to get “ready” for my first month of writing online.

For nearly a decade, I’d gathered research and fragments of essays and posts and newsletters and everything things else in between.

Waiting for the right moment to unleash my heretofore untapped creative genius onto the world, or something like that.

It was that insane expectation, that delusional lack of self-awareness, which was preventing me from putting myself out there in the first place. Which if you’re keeping score at home, not sharing your work makes it hard to gain any sort of reward for it.

Then last May I made the leap and started publishing into the void.

I had a full 30 days’ worth of topics posted to my office wall. The game plan was set. I was ready.

For the first week, I stuck to the plan. I wrote about optimism in played out tropes and aphorisms. I wrote about how our energies influence each other and bullshit like that.

And then it struck me, I had nothing unique to offer on those subjects.

Whatever I had to say had been said, and said much better, already.

So I wrote about how I had been in a really unhealthy spot recently and had clawed my way back to where I needed to be. I wrote about how that period of unhealthiness almost cost me everything that mattered to me. And I started writing about my children, simultaneously the greatest sources of joy and frustration in my life.

Overnight, things changed. My tone shifted. My language became more passionate.

I leaned into what my life unique and special and started talking about that instead.

And it’s made all the difference.

In everything.

Don’t wait a month to open up. That’s when all the good stuff starts.