Hey Reader,

It’s been four weeks since my last newsletter. I want to tell you why, and give you a look behind the scenes at some things I haven’t talked about anywhere else.

Making content sounds easy. Pick an idea, film it, put it out.

If you’ve ever sat down to actually do it and hit a wall, you know it’s not that simple.

Harder than it should be

I have an amazing job. I’m blessed to be able to help people every day, to talk about the thing I love, and to live a creative life with the freedom of being my own boss.

Yet every once in a while, I find myself stuck. Things get harder than they should be.

It’s simple, right? Just make videos. I’ve made hundreds of them. And yet when I sit down, I get stuck in my head. I second-guess things. I try too hard.

Even that phrase I just used, “harder than they should be,” shows you how I think about things. Every time I say the word "should," the guilt grows and compounds making it harder and harder.

Too much on my plate

The short version is that I put too much on my plate.

Behind the scenes, that meant conversations with other creators on the platform, guest speaking, and calls with sponsors. It meant building my Boundless Insight plugin, building new material for my program, and upgrading my hardware.

Some of it took longer than I expected. Some of it was stuff I’d said I would do, and it hung over my head until it was done.

And I kept adding more when I really couldn’t afford to. My bandwidth was capped, and I agreed to things anyway. I have a tendency to imagine the best-case scenario every time. That’s not how things work.

I want to push myself and see how far I can take this. I dread the thought of being stagnant. But it’s a balancing act. Too much and you get overwhelmed, too little and you get complacent.

None of those things are bad to do for a season. When they stick around long enough, they’re the things that lead to burnout.

For me, the first thing to go was my ideation habit. And I didn’t realize how much it was holding up until it was gone.

What ideation actually does

Ideation doesn’t sound like anything super important. But think about what actually makes content hard. Almost all of it comes down to not having clarity.

Here are the things that paralyze me:

• Not knowing if this is a good idea
• Not knowing how I want to talk about something
• Not knowing if it will do well
• Not knowing if there’s a better idea

The only real way past those is to spend time thinking about them. That’s what ideation is. You think it through and problem-solve until you’re confident in the thing you’re going to make.

When you do that, you end up with something you actually want to make. And along the way, you find other ideas you’re looking forward to making next.

Motivation, excitement, joy, passion. They’re easy to take for granted when you have them. I did.

When things got busy, I kept pulling myself away from the ideas I was excited about. I’d tell myself, “Now isn’t the right time. There are these other things I need to do first.” By the time I got back to them, the window of excitement had closed.

That’s what made this spell so heavy. For months, I kept telling myself to wait on the stuff I actually wanted to make.

My video tomorrow goes into how I run my own ideation, if you want the nuts and bolts.

One small win at a time

What got me out of the rut was asking myself the hard question. What is it I’m avoiding?

If you’re feeling this way right now, or the next time you do, try asking yourself the same thing. Then start with a quick win. Find one little thing you’ve been avoiding and take care of it. It doesn’t need to be anything big.

Mine were small. I answered emails from people I’d left hanging for a few days. I had a stack of channel reviews to do, so I broke them down to just one and did that one. That made the next one easier, and the one after that.

The video coming out tomorrow is another one. It’s probably not the best video I’ve ever made. But I needed to make something, so I made something. I stopped hunting for the next great idea and made a video about something I wanted to talk about.

Our brains are funny things. You might think there’s a big difference between a big win and a small win. Mostly, your brain just feels it as a win.

I don’t know if this is true for everyone. I have a very all-or-nothing, black-and-white kind of mind, so it sees things as wins or failures.

Break things down into their smallest chunks. Something that logically looks like one big win and several small failures can turn into a lot of wins and very few failures. It doesn’t seem like something that monumental, but it makes all the difference.

That’s what’s going on in “harder than it should be.” It’s me grading the day as pass or fail.

It isn’t “do the right things or don’t.” It’s “what are the steps I need to take now to get there?”

Something I can’t wait to show you

One more piece of behind the scenes.

I found a new method for making videos. It takes the best part of scripting and the best part of unscripted videos and puts them together. I’ve been experimenting with it, and I’ve had great results.

I’m excited about it because it could let me make content a lot more often without giving up the things I enjoy about making it.

I’m going to walk through it live next Thursday, October 1, at 2pm Eastern. It’s a free seminar on Zoom about systems. The things you can build, the things you can do now, and the habits that make content easier for you, so you keep landing on good ideas.

If you’ve signed up for one of my livestreams before, you’re already on the list. If you haven’t, you can grab a seat here:

​Save your seat for October 1st​

Thanks,
Dave

P.S. You’ll notice a change in my videos. I got a new camera, lens, a new light, and I lowered the camera. It’s inspired me to go even further. There are a few more things I want to experiment with, and I’m really looking forward to those. :)