BEING CREATIVE WITH A DAY JOB

Simon Lahaie posted this recently, reflecting on one of my Substack Live streams:

“You can’t create being drained” a sentence from a recent Live Seth Werkheiser. What a relief it was for me to acknowledge this.

I’M DRAINED. And I’m still blaming myself for not feeling the energy to create. Ha!

How do you manage to keep enough liquid inside your tank?

Putting my reply here because I don’t want it to just live on Substack, but rather it can live here, too, for everyone to find:

SETH: “For me – OTHER PEOPLE. I can’t help but be stoked from doing calls with people. Setting up time for a weekly Zoom. Texting some folks. I feed off their creative energy and zest, and maybe it’s not ALLL DAY, but it’s enough to get some jolts of good stuff out there (or at least planning good stuff for sometime down the line).”

SIMON: “I’m curious, do you have a specific strategy to manage Drainage generated by the day job (or any recurring situation where we have limited control over)?”

SETH: “Just gotta do SOMETHING that lights you up that’s related to the thing you wanna do.

Scrolling YouTube shorts for 20 minutes while eating cake is nice and all, but then I have to go back to the thing I don’t like.

Whereas 20 minutes replying to emails related to the work I love doing… or writing a quick bit to a newsletter… making a video… updating something on my website… ANYTHING related to the thing I WANT to be doing. Just do that.

Because doing the THING I LOVE all the time would be awesome.. but the next best thing is doing it for 10 minute… 20…. or just 1 minute.”

If we want until we can do “the thing we love” full time, we’ll be waiting a long time. Just like, you can just start. Just take one step, set a timer for five minutes, and just what you can. Give yourself a glimpse of what it could look like, so you can recognize how you want to feel.