One of the best things about writing everyday (or doing your creative thing everyday) is that you teach yourself the ability to do it in the face of all the emotional and situational highs and lows of day to day life.
You teach yourself to be able to fire up creativity regardless of the circumstances.
And that way when you’re in a creative pinch and you need something…you’ve come up with something when you’ve felt like this before.
New Hum Love on Spotify and Apple
Coloring books are sold for the binding.
I can search and print off any coloring picture my kids want. But it’s a pain because I have to print them one at a time and then they get left around the house one at a time.
I’d rather pay five bucks so that all the desired coloring pictures are bound (and found) in one place. Put together. Ready to go.
And that’s what any of us can do by making a playlist. We are the binding and the glue.
It’s easy enough for someone to go out and find a song they like…but putting a bunch of good ones all together in one place and sharing it is so much better.
A coloring book is more fun than a coloring page.
We think ‘if we could just get the people to listen’.
But listening isn’t enough.
We need them to listen and like it.
No. We need them listen and love it.
Love it so much that they share it with a hundred people.
And then we desperately need the same thing from all of those people.
But eventually the cycle has to stop.
Eventually you’re left with…
A small group of people who love it and tell everyone.
A bigger group of people who love it.
An even bigger group who like it.
An even bigger group who has listened.
An even bigger group who has heard of you.
And the biggest group will always be the group of people who have no idea who you are.
Telling about your new project is fun…And the person listening gets to be genuinely excited because the way your describing it sounds incredible.
But showing your project is different. Now the telling doesn’t matter so much. Now you and the person you’re with have to deal with the real quality of your project. No hiding behind excitement and tactics.
But when you have the opportunity to show your project and it connects, there’s no denying it. You did it.
When should you work especially hard?
Before you need to.
»» A little inside baseball here…
It took about thirty minutes to come up with this post. I thought the title was interesting and I wrote out a much longer post to go with it…but the longer post seemed like it was hiding and insulating and padding and wanting to be perfectly filled out and understood. And that’s not the point. So I chopped it back to the main idea…and that way we can each fill it in with our own details. That’s the point.
I do this sort of exercise a lot with blog posts. Less is usually more. But less also feels more scary.
Is it worth giving encouragement when you don’t know if the other person is going to take it to heart?
Yes
Is it worth accepting encouragement when you don’t know if the person giving it really means it?
Yes
That’s the beauty of it. Encouragement is inherently good. It doesn’t need to be taken to heart in order to make a difference…and it doesn’t need to come from the heart in order to make a difference.
»» Two sidebars worth noting…
We might hesitate giving encouragement because we believe our encouraging words are very important and superior…and if we think the receiver might not see them that way, we don’t want to ‘waste’ our valuable words.
We might hesitate accepting encouragement not because we second guess the motives of the giver…but because we second guess our own worthiness of the encouragement...thinking to ourselves, ‘Even if they really mean it, if they knew what an imposter I am, they wouldn’t bother’.