Daily Snippets

Getting Out Of The Way

A tight grip is good if you want to stay put but not if you want to grow.


Some days I wonder if it'd be easier to quit the internet and just sell physical products in a local community where I live. Maybe start a coffee shop that doubles as an art studio...

Selling digital transformation is infuriating because the line between effort and outcome gets overlooked. Or, more truthfully, it gets dismissed. Website overhauls, newsletter builds, email list configuration...

People can't see the connection between a clearer understanding of their priorities, an updated website they had time to fix, and the web traffic that had somewhere to go when their web presence gained traction. We want to believe the increasing email subscriber count is because we got lucky with the algorithm. In 15 years of working on this stuff, that's almost never the case. Not by itself, at least.

Digital transformation functions on compounding interest, like contributing to a 401k. But people treat it like a physical product. That sucks for all of us. Think about it—you drive past an empty coffee shop, favoring the one with a stream of people going in and out. Because it's a public stamp of approval. A web presence works the same way, like it or not... contributing consistently is what creates results.

The tipping point happens when there's a visible stamp of approval others can flock to. But if your website doesn't clearly explain the reason someone should visit, or offer a way for folks to find a solution? You're not investing effort, you're just flushing your time, energy, and money down the drain.

For me, this looked like gripping tightly to creating content I'd thought would offer answers to people who were stuck.

But nothing happened.

There wasn't much visible progress to account for the effort I was putting in. Something I picked up from The Artist's Way changed things for me. The author, Julia Cameron, calls it "let it be God’s." That’s not really my language, but I took it to mean "let go of it." That was a profound shift for me.

Detaching—making it theirs, not mine.

Doing "the" work is different than doing "your" work. If it's yours, you make decisions about it for you. If it's "theirs" (your audience), you make decisions about it for them. So, let it be theirs. Don't try to grip it so tightly, but make sure you still do "the" work.

becoming unobstructed leaderboard rising 2Today, while daydreaming about maybe starting that coffee shop/art studio, I was reminded that the J curve of compounding is slow and invisible, until suddenly it's not. Case in point: Becoming Unobstructed just hit #28 on Substack’s leaderboard under the Philosophy category.

It's been a long road. I've been playing a game of compounding interest and it's been incredibly rewarding to see visible examples of the payoff. I used to help people navigate technical terrain in the mountains until a traumatic brain injury forced me to reevaluate what stability meant. Now, writing’s just a different type of guiding for me. At least, that's the way I see it.

I started Becoming Unobstructed to help remove the digital, mental, and emotional obstacles that block creative work. That’s what the weekly newsletter, podcast, daily email series, and monthly creative circle calls are all about.

onward. 

-dmac


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