Content Creation

One of the best things I learned when I was a new online writer was the art of writing ugly words on a page.You might not think there is an art to writing ugly words, but let me tell you there is. Most people are afraid of ugly words.

All the normal indicators would suggest I don't suffer from Imposter Syndrome... I don't have a fear of putting my ideas out there, I'm OK to make mistakes publicly & even change my mind on occasion. And I certainly don't suffer from perfectionism in any way.

Every Sunday after I've done my meal prep for the week, I do my creator prep. Just like a chef might sit down and prepare the menu for the following day or week, I sit down and prepare my menu for the week. Rather than run around each day like a crazy person in my creator kitchen, I take the time to prepare the menu & my ingredients so I can gracefully and effortlessly push out plate after plate of content.

Despite pumping out generous amounts of content everyday I don't work to a content calendar. In the marketing world, content calendars are king. Because you have a product that needs selling. But as a creator, I AM THE PRODUCT. I can afford to be more curious, to follow my interests and the signals that come back on the content I produce.

Can I tell you a secret 🤫 No one cares about your effort. They care about your output. So why do we feel the need to make things hard for ourselves? Like making it harder for ourselves means more. But no one is giving you a gold sticker at the end of the day for your effort.

You might not believe me but I used to be very unsure of myself. Whenever I walked into a room I thought everyone else was better than me, knew more than me, or was wayyy further ahead than me. Writing & creating online changed that. I'm more confident about who I am, what I believe & what I put out into the world. And people have noticed.

I'm fanatical about showing up daily. I wholeheartedly believe the more you show up the better you'll become. Not because you do the same thing over again, but because each time you do it you learn and adjust.

This time last year I thought I would start a blog. Except I wrote 3 blog posts that I think just my dad read. Starting a blog is hard, you end up putting so much effort into content that no one is reading (especially in those early days).

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.

Writing on Twitter ruined me for any other kind of writing. I've been publishing Atomic essays on Twitter for 6 months now and it's completely changed how I think about writing. I used to think that writers hid away for months and years in a cabin in the woods somewhere only to emerge with a finished manuscript.

If you want to be a serious creator, you have to get serious about capturing ideas. My idea library is the single biggest key to my success as a creator and the reason I have been able to create so consistently over all this time.

I love creating order from chaos. In fact it's my main superpower. Give me a pile of unlinked things and I'll find the pattern and be able to give them order AND make them look stunning at the same time. But if you know me, that's no surprise.

What do you do when you're committed to writing daily, but you just don't feel like it? I've come up against a few of those days since committing to the daily pace of writing. As much as I have a library of ideas that are brewing, some days it's just not a hell yes on any of them.

We have come to glorify the cult of 24/7/365 culture. Hustle, productivity, grind, doing, busyness, more, bigger, better. We glorify people who are busy, hustling on the weekends, building their side hustles. Cause after all, if you're not hustling on the weekend then what are you doing with your life?

I can touch type at around 80-90 words per minute. I remember sharing an office with my best friend when we worked together. On my first day, I was banging away on the keys writing out an email. When I finished, I turned around and she was just sitting staring at me with her mouth wide open.

There is no such thing as an 'overnight success.' Just someone who put in the reps daily in the dark. As a creator, we all experience the rollercoaster ride of the highs and lows. Your daily practices are what grounds you & becomes your compass, your north star no matter what is going on around you.

My mum always used to say that curiosity killed the cat. Of course, I had questions. What cat did it kill? And how did it die? When did this happen? Who owned the cat? Oh... and can we get a cat? My mum would ask for quiet time after this

What does it mean to be a prolific creator? If you looked at my output over the last four months, some might call it prolific. After all, I've published something on the internet for the last 130 days straight. But if you look at that output in the context of the last 40 years of my life, it's just a drop in the ocean.

Since I can remember I've been obsessed with notebooks. I remember reading a biography of Leonardo Da Vinci by Charles Nicholl and was captivated by his notebook habit. Da Vinci was a renaissance man, curious about so many things, and used his notebooks to store and discover all that wonder.

I fell headfirst into Austin Kleons books on the weekend. It was wholly by accident. They were just sitting idly in my Kindle library for months. And yet on Saturday afternoon in a random moment, I opened Show Your Work and I couldn't put it down.

I'm tempted to stop my daily creator count. Not because I'm not proud of it. I am. And it gives me fuel every day I can advance the counter. But what I never want it to become is a roadblock for new creators who look at it and think, I could never do that. Because 123 days ago that counter was 0.

Why would people buy this? So many creators I speak to have a level of guilt that plagues them before launch. A niggling feeling that this seemed too easy to build or too obvious. Why would anyone pay money for this? Why isn't everyone creating this? Why would someone want to buy this from me?

Hello dear friend, the dip. We meet again. Not going to lie, this last week has been a bit hard. I'm feeling a bit low energy, struggling to write & finding it hard to engage with people in a meaningful way. I've been asking myself why? Is it because I'm coming off the back of 3 product launches? Maybe it's because we're 3 weeks into what looks like a long lockdown in Sydney?

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.

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.

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.