I first saw Kareem Rahma doing Keep the Meter Runnin on Instagram. Then Subway Takes a bit later. Absolutely fascinating talk about his journey, and just how much work and effort goes into putting these sorts of projects together.

I love this part so much:

I had bet on myself so many times that I accumulated so much junk that was useful. Junk knowledge, junk information, junk intangibles. Like, that’s a lot of stuff too—the intangibles. Like, saying “100% agree” or “100% disagree” was not a part of the plan. It’s just what came out of me.

The biggest hook in the show wasn’t planned, it just happened. But it “just happened” because of the many years of accumulated “junk.” It’s easy to think of things that didn’t quiet make it as failures, but maybe it’s best to reframe those as “junk knowledge!”

And so when I talk to other creators, or aspiring creators, or people who want to be media entrepreneurs, I encourage them to stop overthinking, to develop the idea 80% of the way, and to let the actual magic happen in the shoot. Because you’re gonna discover a lot of new things while you’re shooting.

Whether you’re writing a newsletter or a song or making art… allow room for magic. Make some wild edits, try a new technique, let go and let God – I don’t know! This is art, people! We are not robots or AI machines, we are bringing things to life!

And that’s, like, Keep the Meter Running. Same thing with the food—I didn’t think it was gonna be a food show. All of a sudden it became a food show because the drivers let it be a food show, you know?

And that is something that I think a lot of people struggle with: not taking the first step. And I’m like, you don’t have to have a 100% baked idea. You have to have a good premise and maybe 80% of an idea to make it great.

You can have an idea, but once it meets actual people in the real world, it can go different ways.

If you’ve been on my Escape Pod Zoom calls you’ve heard me say how this all started as a newsletter called Heavy Metal Email, and I was going to sell “how to make landing pages” ebooks to bands.

That didn’t happen. Most bands don’t have an email list, let alone why they should have a landing page!

But along the way people started sharing my writing, saying “this is written for metal bands, but it applies to photographers and other artists, as well.”

I didn’t plan that, but a new path was being built not by me, but by other people. The energy of other people – that’s the key. I was 80% of the way there, not quite fully formed, but with the help of generous people who appreciated my work Social Media Escape Club was formed.

You don’t need to have a plan for everything, but doing the work is how you’re going to figure out the next steps.