LEARN BY DOING

Bradley Spitzer got me thinking about doughnuts.

The two of us have been on wild paths over the last 25+ years, and we seem to always be making things like websites and/or random projects.

He mentioned a documentary on Netflix about psychologist Phil Stutz, about how someone can plan all you want for opening a doughnut shop.

“They could spend all their time researching—figuring out the business model, how many glazed versus chocolate sprinkle donuts to make, all of that. And that’s valuable! But the real learning begins the first 15 minutes that shop is open. That’s when it gets real.”

When we get the ideas out of our head and into the world, they become tangible. They breathe the air of the real world and become alive.

We learn if the song we wrote resonates.
If the photos we took made a friend gasp.
If our essay gets picked for publication.

When I launched the Noisecreep metal blog for AOL Music back in 2008, I made a big editorial calendar of regular features that’d be published on certain days of the week.

But once we published on our first post – when our thing was out there in the real world – record labels, publicists, and other industry folk saw what we just launched (AOL Music was the #1 music site on the internet in 2008), and suddenly my inbox was filling up with pitches. I was getting phone calls.

The energy shifted when the thing became real.

I later found this quote from Stutz, “the world of doughnut eaters will give us the information we need” (from his book ‘Lessons for Living: What Only Adversity Can Teach You’).

Make the work you want to make, then look for the flicker of a green light, a signal to keep moving. The people you’re trying to reach will let you know if it resonates. If it’s “working.”

I’m not saying to let the masses guide our creative output, but if we’re looking to make an impact, or maybe just pay the rent, it helps if people actually care enough to share it, buy it, and/or talk about it.