Yesterday was the first time in 105 days in which I didn't publish an atomic essay. After watching the Twitter threads masterclass with Dickie & Cole I decided I wanted to execute on a Twitter thread I'd been thinking about. Two hours later I hit publish. I could have shipped, I had plenty of essays in my up next pile to work on. But I didn't. I had more than shown up for myself as a creator. So why did I feel so guilty, so worried? It felt weird and wrong and I wondered if I'd even made the right decision.

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Writing every day can be tough. Some days it can feel like groundhog day. Ideation, draft, write, publish. Every day. But what if an idea requires a little more deep thinking? How do you give each idea the time and thought it deserves while still shipping daily?

How do you continue to be creative over long periods and at speed? As well as having a full-time job that keeps me pretty busy, I've recently become a creator, a maker of products, and a co-founder of a SAAS company.

I've been glued to my phone for weeks. Sometimes I even trick myself into thinking I'm not addicted. I turned off my Twitter notifications from showing up on my screen a long time ago. But sneakily, left them on in the notification center, just so I could swipe down anytime in case something 'important' was happening.

In 10 years of being a wannabe creator, I produced a grand total of 100 pieces of content on the internet. It was always the same pattern. Super excited about an idea I dreamed about it, planned everything creating a cool name and beautiful design before I even had any content. When I did put content out, it was hard to get anyone to read it except my beautiful supportive IRL friends.

I've been shipping for 99 days and 3 cohorts. Here are some mistakes I see early shippers making.

Traditional schooling needs a major overhaul. Throughout my last 2 years of high school, I sat in Maths class boycotting the fact that it wasn't a required subject, but our school had made it required for us. Day after day I argued with my teacher about how utterly worthless it was for me to be learning any of these concepts that I would NEVER need to know in real life.

That shiny new tool, or template or system is not going to save you from the perceived disorganised mess that you are. We've all been there. Being blinded by that shiny new toy that promises ULTIMATE PRODUCTIVITY. Only to find it months or weeks later laying dormant on our computers, untouched, in the graveyard of other good ideas we've abandoned. And then beating ourselves up, wondering why we just can't contort ourselves into this perfect system?

We are not living in our parents world. Today you have to deal with more information coming at us than any other person in history. Every day, as humans collectively we create roughly 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. Even if you tried to consume it all, you couldn't.

I'm naturally a sharer. I love to share what I'm doing and what I'm learning. I'll easily take a screenshot, record a quick loom video or write out a process if I think it is interesting. I love taking a peek 'behind the scenes' of others processes too.

The beauty of the creator economy is that there are so many ways you can make money. And you don't have to create your own 20+ module CBC transformational online course to do it. And you probably shouldn't (at first). A course is a big endeavor, it takes a lot of time and energy to build and there is no guarantee that anyone will buy it.

Creators who master showing up daily are winning against 95% of everyone else. Except showing up daily is hard. There are a million other things that want our attention. And when we’re starting out it’s hard to see where all this ‘creating’ is going. Plenty of people in my real life asked me that question.

As a creator you can't afford to wait for inspiration, you have to manufacture it. Daniel Vassallo calls this 'bumping into inspiration.' It's not random, it's highly intentional places or inspiration generators that guarantee to serve you up ideas on a daily basis.

Being a creator and having a day job is tough. Your process will never look the same as a full-time creator. Deep work? Forget it. Cabin in the woods? Nope. Instead, you have to deal with limited time, kids, jobs, partners, and you know… a life.

If you didn't know by now I'm a huge fan of the atomic essay format. I started writing atomic essays way back in March 2021. Before that, I thought I was going to go the traditional route of starting a blog and writing one to two blog posts every week.

Notion, Roam, Obsidian, Craft. What do all these apps have in common? They all start from a blank page. Which can at once be the most exciting and the most daunting part. They are infinitely customisable and yet if you don't have any pre-conceived frameworks or problems you need to solve it can be hard to know what to do with them.

I'm addicted to constraints. OK, that sounded weird. Let me clarify. I'm addicted to imposing constraints on my creativity. It's why I challenge myself to write an essay under 300 words every day.

Every creator should be writing atomic essays in 2022. I started writing these yellow essays in March 2021 & have clocked up over 250 of them now. They have become the basis for articles, courses, products and an outline for a book. But I see many people struggle with the format.

Sometimes it's not what you say, but what you do that counts. Scrap that. It's always about what you do that counts more than what you say. I often get messages from people saying they were inspired to start shipping because of my example. And mostly they are people I had no idea were even reading any of my essays.

I'm convinced that I failed at being a creator for 10 years because I was too impatient. Sometimes it feels like Twitter is just full of people who just suddenly go viral, blow up and grow their audiences massively. So as a new creator naturally we get all excited when we put our one blog, one video, one essay out thinking this is going to be it. But then we wait.

Unless Twitter is your full-time job you don’t need to spend hours every week writing tweets to fill up a schedule. But, if you want to grow on Twitter you are going to need to show up with some value.

Every morning I sit down at my desk to write. Not an essay or a thread or a tweet. But just for myself. Writing helps me think, formulate ideas, & understand the world. And my writing inbox is the first place I start each day.

What if I told you prolific creators don't spend hours in deep work? My parents loved to garden. I remember long summer evenings where they wandered around our front yard pottering about the garden. Watering plants, pulling out weeds. It was never a back-breaking session. Just joyfully enjoying the work of tending the garden.