Generate a lot of bad ideas.

Also, it is raining. It is fun to drive the Jeep in the rain.

I finished up that podcast I started the other day w/ Seth and Tim and that was one of Seth’s points when asked how to foster creativity. Do you want to hear a personal example of that? Good.

I only recently started writing these daily posts. Originally I just thought well I’ll just name them with the sequence number and the date. Fine enough; taking inspiration for back when Casey was doing daily vlogs. Love that guy. So, then comes the problem of, well how would I generate that many thumbnails/ featured pictures… Also, stealing from Casey, I thought, I’ll use my iPad and just hand draw it. It won’t be beautiful but it will be easy and consistent and take 0 brain power. Fine.

It only took me a few days to immediately try to ‘improve’ the quality of these posts by copying another one of my favorite creatives, Austin Kleon. The author of Steal like an Artist, etc. So, yesterday, I did just that… I attempted to take his newspaper/ magazine scrapbook approach to piecing together the date for the featured image. This would be soooo clever. It was clever, I guess, but it did it dramatically improve anything about the post? No. Did it help me grow in some creative way? No. Did it bring me joy? No.

I will not be doing that again. I will leave it how it is just so I remember that was a bad idea. The best part about bad ideas is that some of them won’t be bad… and as long as your bad idea isn’t unrecoverable (pretty sure that is a word), you can change it and course correct.

I went back to hand drawn featured images. Guess what, nobody probably cares. It took me one minute to make that and AirDrop it to my MacBook.

The above story might seem random in consequential but there is a key point here. I have mentioned previously the work by Pressfield regarding the Resistance. That force that wants to sequester our creativity and keep us safe.

I believe that trying to move to a more complicated and ‘better’ version of my featured image was just that. Since after 4 days of posting and no social sharing or self-promotion, the blog hasn’t been picked up by mainstream media… obviously I NEEDED to improve the featured image.

This is insane but makes total sense. If I make it harder to create the image then it will be harder to finish the post and ship my work AND the best part is that it wouldn’t be my fault. It would be because I didn’t have time to ensure a quality product.

This is the resistance. This time, I realized it, albeit after the fact but nonetheless. I course corrected and I am back to posting and using my sloppy handwriting to create a basic image bc that doesn’t matter. What matters is shipping the work.

Ship the work.

-Nate