Are You Pursuing Your Business, Creativity or Project Enough? (FS225)
As an independent, a full time indie-entrepreneur, a maker of things that sell, a creator of my own wealth, a designer of my own creativity over time, I feel a strong call to do more things my way for the results I want.
Which, for many of us, seems to beg this question: can you give more of yourself over to being a creator?
Often times I hear it referred to as âpursuing completelyâ â like, how completely are you pursuing your thing?
I think this plays solidly into that dream of being an artist who abandons herself to her work.
Like, many of us really, if weâre honest, feel like we should have that kind of abandon, conviction, sold-out-ness to the thing weâre pursuing. Right?
BUT, what if pursuing that thing is putting other things in our life in jeopardy?
What if we want to pursue our blogging more completely, BUT our blogging isnât contributing to our financial needs yet. We want to give blogging more time because maybe thatâs whatâs necessary for us to even get to a place where we can generate revenue, BUT, spending more time there may take away from the job that IS earning us revenue, or our family or other relationships that might be good for us to keep in tact as well.
So, today we are going to talk about this: how much are you pursuing your thing AND how much SHOULD ANY OF US pursue our thing?
Should we leap with abandon and trust the universe and the intention of our hearts to construct the solution in real time? Or does being cautious really give us a better chance at success?
Letâs get deep
In case you arenât familiar with what we do here, we make honest, in-depth conversations on topics like these for indie entrepreneurs.
Itâs like hanging out with really experienced entrepreneur friends.
If you havenât yet, you can subscribe to our podcast in your podcast app and get every new episode as it comes out.
Hereâs the podcast conversation where we go deep into the topic for this article:
A Fizzler Shares his Story:
In the episode youâll hear from Paul, who sent us a really nice audio note which sparked this whole conversation.
Hereâs a couple notes from Paulâs audio note:
- I always dreamt of making a living off creating content that i care about. Iâve made content, but Iâm not earning a living yet.
- I once hid from a young creative entrepreneur in the restaurant I worked at. They had pursued it completely, I knew in my heart that I wasnât pursuing it completely.
- I felt shame because I knew in my heart that Iâm not pursuing what i really want with everything I had within me.
- I realize now I need to be open and admit to people I need help pursuing what I want to do.
Paul, thank you so much for being a part of the Fizzle business movement and for sharing your voice with us.
Money is not the point
A little while ago Corbett Barr wrote an article titled Money is not the Point. He brings this up in our response to Paulâs story.
If you talk to Paul just about his art, not about his money or job, I bet Paul could talk all day on it. How did he land those guests? Whatâs it like to talk to someone with so much gravitas!? (Paul has had a long-time radio show and interviewed tons of big guests.)
But when youâre talking to peers, money is used as a measuring stick a lot of the time.
Sometimes this is how we judge ourselves and how completely weâre pursuing our creative work: how much money weâre earning from it.
Do you think thatâs the right stick to measure our conviction and creativity by?
The Influence Error
In stepâs response to Paulâs not she kept thinking of the word âinfluence.â
âI think about how this manifests on social platforms. A lot of us fall into the trap of competing with our peers. What if you just thought more about your customer?â
Who cares if your peers find your stuff? Who cares what peers think of your stuff?
To these questions Steph responds: what if you cared more about your audience and the problem youâre helping them solve?
She continues: âThis kinds of thoughts have helped me around this topic because my whole energy changes when I really connect with my audience.â
Picking a better metric
Both insights from Steph and Corbett are bang-on in my experience and point to the fact that weâve got to be very careful what we measure ourselves by.
If you worry about not being committed enough to your creative work, DONâT judge yourself by either money or peer influence alone.
Money matters, but itâs not the point.
Influence and respect is, for many of us, essential, but might be best treated like salt in a recipe: you can overdo it.
So, be careful how harshly you judge yourself by these two metrics.
The Shame Game
Now, Paul bravely confesses to feeling some shame in his audio note. He effectively hides from seeing someone in a restaurant âbecause this other person is âpursuing it completely.ââ
Paul continues, "I felt shame because I knew in my heart that Iâm not pursuing all that I want with everything I had within me.â
These are just the words he used as a kind of shorthand, but I think itâs something a lot of us have felt.
âI wish I was pursuing this completely.â
âI need to be pursuing this more.â
âThings will work out different for me if I was pursuing it more completely.â
The first step here is to acknowledge that we all have an obstacle that keeps us from going all in. To some degree all of us have some kind of experience with this.
And so this is how we disarm the shame like this: we see it, we share it.
âPaying The Billsâ vs Exploration
âThe thing that Iâm constantly concerned about is âpaying the bills.â Sometimes I feel like as a business we have to pay the bills, earn a living, and maybe that keeps us from going ALL IN on something that could be really magical for us. Maybe we need to cruise up to the arctic and take a crazy step to find the magic for us. Maybe thatâs the case for Paul too, and many of us.
I donât know though, itâs really hard to know what you should do. Iâm one to be a little more conscious. Experiment with the new thing a little bit before cutting off all ties, revenue sources, whatever it is, before jumping off because maybe then youâll have a better shot at both fulfillment and achievement.â ~ Corbett Barr
The Bid for Balance
So, to me this seems like a place for a very delicate balance.
Now, I personally have had times in my life where I KNEW I wasnât giving myself over completely to a thing that was kind of calling to me.
I think a better language for that might be: I wasnât totally acting in accordance with my conviction â that I really desired to head a certain direction but I was too afraid in my mind and didnât let myself fully engage in that direction.
This is a repressive posture â kind of like the mind repressing the heart, for lack of better terms at the moment.
So clearly there is a way to live thatâs too imbalanced in favor of fear, leaning too hard towards âwhat will they think!? Who do I think I am!?â
So, we need to balance that with our heart, our desire, being honest with ourselves that, âhey, actually it feels really good to go this way and I really want that.â
But it is also possible to have an imbalance of too much heart, too much desire.
You really love making comics, so fuckit, letâs spend all our time doing that and hope the universe takes care of us. I donât think thatâs serving your desire very lovingly. I think that puts too much pressure on the shoulders of your creativity.
Itâs very dangerous to think, âHey, Iâve repressed my natural creativity so much, and it feels so good to pursue it, so Iâm going to just flow completely towards that feeling even though itâs scary and go super hard after it, pursuing it completely.â
It might be the right direction for you to head more towards the heart (in my life it clearly has been), but you can head gently in that direction. You donât have to drive 100 miles per hour to arrive safely at your destination⊠in fact, maybe going that fast makes you less safe.
Now, in Paulâs situation, I hear something that is absolutely magical: I hear heading towards better balance.
Itâs almost like heâs saying, âIâve been too afraid to pursue harder what I know has been calling me. Iâm ready to lean into the fear a little bit more and surrender a little bit more of myself to this thing.â
I think this thing that Paul is saying is SACRED, you guys. To head towards that calling AT ALL is a kind of sacred path.
And you donât need to head towards it at 100MPH to be in the flow.
So, as you think about your creativity, look for the BALANCE for YOU right NOW.
As you think about whatever thing is the thing that makes you feel the âoh my gosh, this might not workâ feeling, look for the BALANCE⊠for YOU⊠right NOW.
Ok?
Those three words: balance, you, now. What is the balance of courage, for you today⊠thatâs the way to think about this question, about if youâre pursuing it completely or not.
Because we can obviously live with too much fear and not enough passion or desire or feeling. But maybe the other side is true as well: we can live with too much blind passion that weâd actually enjoy a lot more if we allowed ourselves to go a little slower, drive at a more sustainable pace.
Maybe in this sense we can not only live passionately, but also be good stewards of our passion.
Getting to Minimum Viable Income
A specific business element that may help many of us is getting clear about our MVI â âMinimum Viable Income.â
This is a concept we created to answer this question: how much money do you need to make in order to support yourself (and possibly a family) on a monthly basis?
Ok, How about you?
What makes sense do you about this question? How do you feel about how âcompletelyâ youâre pursuing your thing?
Have you learned anything about this on your own journey so far?
Weâd love to hear it in the comments below. Please share!
Thanks for reading. Hope this was helpful. Please share if it was!
Earn a living doing something you love.
Grow an audience and get paid for your work as an independent creator. Fizzle is where creators come to learn, share and make progress toward their online dreams.
Iâve taken a lot of courses and been involved in several paid communities since I started my business, but Iâve never ever felt like anyone CARED as much about seeing my reach my goals as the Fizzle Team. They show up for me as much as I show up for myself. Thank you SO much, you guys!
Claire Pelletreau
ClairePells.com
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