Category: LifeCategory: Life

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.

I opened Josh Spector’s email recently, and saw this:

“As the artist, as the creative person… I’m the lead magnet.”
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This line from Seth Werkheiser’s Social Media Escape Club newsletter resonated deeply with me.
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He went on to say:
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​“People signed up for me, so they’re getting me. And if people get huffy about it and unsubscribe?
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Bye.
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I don’t want to hold back. I’m not a magazine. I don’t have editors. I want to write what I want to write.”​
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Exactly.

That quote game from this newsletter, which actually came from one of the weekly Zoom calls I host every week.

This is why it’s so important to talk about your work. Like, out loud. With friends. Over dinner. In the mirror. On a podcast. Speak the things you do, refine it.

This isn’t about an elevator pitch (who buys things in elevators?), but about the depth and distance that the words you speak might travel.

If words can make us cry (from a break up), or jump for joy (“we’d like to offer you this position”), then surely our words can do the same.

I love this “extremely non-comprehensive list of ways to increase your surface area for luck and magic and synchronicities and signs,” from Holisticism.

Make something with your hands without multitasking. I like to call these “quiet thought hobbies.” Cook dinner slowly. Write a letter to your international bestie. Arrange flowers. You can’t do magic while you’re multitasking — presence is the prerequisite.

And…

“Lying to yourself about your wants is a great way to sever the inner connection to your intuitive self. Get the pizza. Go with your instinct. Trust yourself, see what happens. Maybe on your walk to the pizza shop you’ll notice a picture in the main window of a gallery; you take a picture to reverse image search and find that the artist is living, and actually resides on the street next to yours, and has an email on their website, and you reach out to do a studio visit and BOOM, they become your creative mentor. You never know which one door will open the next. Maybe your intuition knows something your practical mind doesn’t.”

There is a time and place for email lists and DNS settings and websites, but before all of that is the very human element of existence, and you’d be wise to prioritize that before everything else.

Without the energy of life there’s no art, and therefore no need for landing pages and press kits.

During last week’s call with the amazing Meg Lewis, I retold her story about being true to who you are, and how that brings the right people into your orbit – the people you wanna work with!

Exactly. We don’t give people enough credit. There’s so much advice out there that you need to be a certain way to be successful, to win big, to niche down… advice that goes against who we actually are, which is really complicated, interesting people.

It’s so freeing to realize that I’m constantly very complicated. My career is so strange. It doesn’t make any sense. You can’t put me in a box or even explain me to anybody else. And that goes against all the advice that everyone always gives.

But we really underestimate people’s ability to be comfortable with complexity. People are totally fine with the fact that I’m unusual, and they still somehow get it. That allows me the freedom to keep being unusual and complicated. I don’t feel like I’ve wedged myself into a category I can’t get out of.

Being loudly complicated… people get it, and I’m so amazed that they do. People understand that humans are human, and now more than ever, people really want to see real human beings. That’s how you truly innovate: being somebody and doing something different than anybody else could possibly do.

Any of us could play the game and follow the formulas for success. But we’re not going to be fulfilled. We’re going to feel terrible, because we’re still performing as this other version of ourselves.

The pressure to niche down is big – we see it everywhere, pushed especially from the social media platforms. As Jaime Derringer says, “the algorithm. The feed, the platform, the notification. These are all literally designed to sort us, to puts us into categories, so it can feeds us content that confirms and deepens those categories.”

But as Meg says, “we really underestimate people’s ability to be comfortable with complexity.” We are expansive, and deep, and there are people out there that will resonate with your depth!

If you’re done performing as the bland, algorithmic-friendly version of yourself, you belong here.

Meg Lewis recently posted “The Grown-Up’s Guide to Growing Down,” a permission slip to skip acting our age:

“The way out is to tap into humanity, love, joy, curiosity, and play. Just like we were all born to do. The adults want us to think doing this is nonsensical and ‘childish’. But ‘childish’ is a term created to keep us alienated from what we were all supposed to be this whole time.”

Grown ups say we need to be on every social media platform, save 10% using the code BORING for our lame Square Space site, sand off all the corners of our personality, and definitely listen to what everyone says on YouTube.

Instead, we can just never log into LinkedIn again.
We can stop playing venues that serve alcohol.
Stop chasing book publishers or record labels.

We can make the things we want, the way we wanna make ’em.

So hey, sign up to hang out with Meg and I on Thursday’s Escape Pod Zoom call, and hear how Meg is navigating her own Candy Land world and soak up the inspiration from her and others living how they wanna live!

ESCAPE POD #118 W/ SPECIAL GUEST MEG LEWIS
Thursday, May 7th at 2:00pm EST
Replay available if you sign up.
Register for the Zoom call here: https://luma.com/jzdkvpp2