Forgive me. I’m waiting on family news today and don’t have much of a brain. Instead, I’d like to leave you with a couple of videos of a gentleman encouraging creative businesspeople. Dorothy Grant introduced me to his work and I’m finding it very useful to listen to him. It’s not so much that I sit, watch, and take notes, as I find it helps me to garner bits, come back, watch again and find different things that catch my attention and give me actions to implement.
He’s not a writer. However, the principles apply to any business.
As a writer, I was a businesswoman before I was ever published. And now, I’m facing a great challenge in trying to make a living – which means I can’t just write. I can’t write only when I feel like it. I can’t waste time.
I must, however, have days where it feels like no progress is made. If I cannot write, because there are too many thoughts in my mind unrelated to story, I can at least read and refill the well. Or I can work on marketing, make art… Sometimes, though, doing nothing is doing something.
Mad Genius Club 
6 responses to “Encouragement”
May the family news be good.
On YouTube:
For Writing and the Business of Writing I like: Successful Indie Author (Craig Martelle)
For Writing, Planning and Business I like: HeartBreathings (Sarra Cannon)
For Planning, Organizing your Business using Notion I like: Productive Setups
For building a YouTube Niche, Nate Black, FilmBooth and Stephen Thompson
For filling the well……Well, let’s just say that according to my YouTube “end of year breakdown” I watched 10x the number of different channels than the average viewer at over 1630+ different channels….Might need to rein that back a bit this coming year..
Okay, since I can’t edit:
Steven is spelled with a “v”, and it’s now CreatorBooth still with Ed.
“Why don’t you just do what you’re passionate about, so you never have to work another day in your life?
That’s a very simplistic and inaccurate view of the world. There’s only one way you will truly be able to only do your passion… It means that you would only do this very narrow thing.
For me at the time that was training more advanced athletes who liked powerlifting and had the same work capacity and schedule as me, who were willing to pay me tons of money to do it.
In order to get those people, you have to do a lot of stuff that is not that in order to get them. The vast majority of your time will not be anything that you’re passionate about.
And if that’s the case, even when you’re pursuing your passion, (and I’m saying this as someone who’s gone full cycle with this – I now have a gym that has no memberships, and it is not for profit), it is okay to make money doing one thing, and be passionate about another.”
-Alex Hormozi
Depending on what you’re passionate about, if you’re rich, you can hire people to do things you are not into.
OTOH, there are things where no amount of money will let you get to the passion without things you don’t like, done by you, personally.
Ahem. I asked you not to take pictures of my office!
I am trying to decide if there is anything I am passionate about. Perhaps telling stories to audiences (in person or through “print”)? It’s not something I’ve ever really worried or thought too much about. *Rumples tail in a shrug* I’m Odd.
I have a passion for paranoia, and a passion for arguing with people.
Thing is, I never know the full list of my interests, and blind optimization for factors I am aware of can easily lead me to paths where I stop moving, because that solution does not give me something that is actually also important to me.
I have a lot of experiences with ‘I made X bet on Y assumptions’ and eventually discover a Z that I had neglected that in broader hindsight was a little important.
An obvious mistake example to the first sentence is where I like talking to people who have interesting things to say, and who play fair.
I’m in the middle of recalibrating and reorienting to the most recent adjustment of things where I have been going about matters very wrongly.
In general I do a lot of overpreparation, and get stalled out part way. On of the more medium scale lessons I am trying to adjust to is accepting that I may already have some good enough prep, and going ahead and doing something, so that I can learn. Because I can show that no amount of preparation from theory and other people’s results can entirely replace experience of my own.
There’s a forewards and a backwords horizon in time. How we summarize and the shorthands we work with in thinking about one or the other shape how we actually do stuff. (History is summary and data reduction of the backwords horizon.)
Pricing or values of past actions, or of future actions or deeds, are a) maybe inside a more general model of economics b) of significant psychological importance.
Life is life.