The First 10 Minutes
Welcome to this week’s edition of The Most Creative. I like to talk about a few different areas related to doing your Most Creative Work, but probably my favourite area involves getting things done and shipping your projects out the door. And that’s what this week’s edition will focus on.
This week at my job, I had to edit a video down into separate chunks so they could be put into a course platform. Well behind schedule, the video producer took many months to get this ready. They had basically given up on it so they did everything but this last step of separating the sections for us. So I thought it was only fair that I turned around my side of the project as quickly as possible and get it off everyone’s chest.
Not So Fast Bucky Boy
And then I opened it up in Adobe Premiere: I’m looking at a 2-hour lecture, and I was just deflated. Because if I watch something 2 hours long with the intention of cutting or making notes, that’s easily a whole day. I wasn’t sure I could find the energy to figure out where the video needed to be cut and what to name the sections.
Yet in the first 10 minutes of sitting with this problem, I realized that they took a break, and the video says “Break”, so I put the first cut into the video. And then in the next ten minutes with it, I noticed that the video cuts to the slidedeck when they reach new sections, so now I have an idea of some more sections to cut. And then I remembered to look at the slidedeck itself, so that removed having to watch much of the video as I could find the areas I needed to cut fairly quickly.
So after just 30 minutes, there is no question that I went from hopeless to in-control and ready to finish this project within a reasonable time frame.
When you put a task on your to-do list, and it comes time to actually do it, notice the stale energy that overtakes you. Because it’s easy to write down a project, such as the one I outlined above, but then when you actually open it up you have to do the damn thing.
That stale energy is the resistance, the voice that tells you that you’re not good enough to finish this task, that someone else is better at it than you are, and that you should give up before you even begin. It tells you to go eat another apple and sit on the couch for a few more minutes.
Working Against Uncertainty
Yet most projects are blocked because there are aspects to the work that you’re unsure of. As you reach these hurdles, it’s like someone inside of an escape room. There are a few clues lying around but overall you feel like you’re never going to get out of this room without the staff unlocking it for you in an hour.
But as you sit with the problem for ten minutes, your brain is going to start to figure things out. The problem is, most of us don’t like sitting with the problem because it represents a form of pain.
What is the Meaning You Assign?
Our projects can fall victim to the human tendency, which is to take one thing and blow it up out of proportion. And more specifically we start to assign meaning and a storyline to the process of being blocked when it’s not necessary.
An example of this would be if you’re having trouble figuring something out, and you happened to have some issues in school as a child, when you’re blocked you might resurface the emotions and memories related to having those learning difficulties as a kid, and you might throw your hands up and say, “I can’t get anything done!”, without you even knowing that you had resurfaced those memories and references.
When the true story, rooted in reality is that the thing just required ten minutes for your first crack at the problem. That’s all it needed.
Or the storyline might be, “I hate this job, no one cares about me and I’m sitting here all alone to edit this video, what’s the point”, when in reality the person can see every task in front of them as a delicious challenge to go after and prove to the resistance that you can tackle anything.
Look for the Weights
A weight in a gym can be perceived as something that will literally weigh you down as the name implies, or something that you can bring you up and take you higher. When you see that weight as an opportunity to not only grow your muscles, but your mind, that is a huge shift in thinking.
That stale energy that I referred to earlier in this letter, is the same thing as the weight in gym. Find the tasks that give you that stale energy and see how fast you can lift them and do them. What used to represent pain for you, can now take on an element of pleasure.
You might tell me that we should always work on tasks that light us up and that we find sexy, but a balanced creative career always involves doing the things that are unpleasant when you look at them with an untrained eye. Think about all the tasks that involve admin with clients, promoting your work, and sending emails about partnerships. The stuff you never see when you look at your creative idols.
Adopting the discipline to grow our skills and learn new things can be unpleasant, but looking through a new lens, they become the most juicy challenges of them all.
Your Turn
Can you tell me about a time when you had trouble starting a project and it sat on your to-do list for what feels like forever, and then when you finally got around to it you realized it took only ten minutes?
Put this up on your fridge:
Stay tuned as I’m working on launching a course that will be devoted to everything involving creating video from a more technical side of things. Because video is one of the best ways of sharing your Most Creative Work with the world.
Some of the topics will be:
Selecting the right cameras and audio equipment
When to use the best camera of them all - your phone
Connecting higher quality cameras to your computer using HDMI capture
Live-streaming and recording using OBS or Zoom
Captioning and transcriptions with Descript
Quick editing in Premiere Pro and Premiere Rush, and rendering options
Finding the right music to use in the background
Making use of Canva for quick titling/motion graphics
Designing a workflow to create and finish videos quickly
Write back if you’re interested in this course and if I get more than 5 people I will schedule a date for it in November.
Thanks for reading today,
Elliott
Inspiration On-Demand
Confident Enough on Camera (Course)
Keeping Your Projects Moving (Course)
This Book Will be a Failure (ebook)
The Most Creative Instagram (Prompts and Ideas in your feed)
Try Focusmate to actually get things done (referral link)
You're on to something here ... sometimes when I am experiencing internal resistance to doing something like tackling a project that seems annoying or working out in the morning is to tell myself that I can try it for 10 minutes and quit after that if it's not working out. I can't recall ever bailing after that first 10 minutes.