I did something profoundly uncomfortable yesterday. It was the same kind of discomfort I feel whenever I hit “publish” on one of these things. I put my creative work out there where people could, you know, see it.
I’ve mentioned before that I do some leatherwork on the side. It was supposed to be a side hustle to support a side hustle, but I quickly learned that I liked to do it, and it was a creative outlet that, you know, created things. Most of what I’ve done professionally over the last twenty years dealt with the ephemeral. Ideas, mostly. (Grant writing, press releases, feature articles). It didn’t leave much to “show.” The digital marketing work I did while building a moving company has all gone away.
That’s what I love about making leather swag: It’s something I can hold in my hand and say, “I made this.”
Since it’s almost Christmas, (“It’s the most expensive time of the yeeear…”), I decided to level-up my efforts and push some swag into the marketplace. I made dozens of leather bracelets, came up with a basic but elegant (or so I thought) presentation for it, and headed to downtown Oklahoma City to hock the wares. Surely, I thought, I can get a nibble or two.
Shirley disagreed. It was a total bust.
I had thought that outcome would crush me if indeed that’s what happened. Actually, it’s more like the opposite reaction: I’m energized and motivated more than before, which is saying something since, in the production lead-up over the last few weeks, I had to fight through a significant amount of fear and yes, at times, despair. “This isn’t going to work,” I kept telling myself.
I had plenty of time to reflect on why it wasn’t working while I was out there. I mean, between the times I had to fend off the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Homeless Larry… It came down to a few things:
Traffic on a Sunday afternoon during the holiday season just wasn’t great. It was normally a great spot, but it was late afternoon, cold, and nowhere near a shopping area.
It’s entirely possible that I’ve created things that are cool to me, but it’s not what the market wants.
I might have had too much of one thing: not enough variety.
I certainly hadn’t crafted a no-brainer, time-based offer. It was…just a bunch of stuff.
The bottom line: There are a lot of questions to answer and much room for improvement. Expecting to hit that home run at my first public at-bat like that was, well, we’ll call it “optimistic.” A less charitable response might be, “Get over yourself.”
One reason I’m tentatively putting this in the “win” column is that it outlined and clarified something extremely important: This is not my One Thing, and it’s time to quit avoiding it.
Even when I ran the moving company, I fought like hell to get out of it. I hadn’t moved across the country to wind up in DC post-9/11 to move people’s crap from one place to another. As the company grew and I was able to spend more time on marketing it, I learned just about everything there was to learn about promoting a service-based business on a non-existent marketing budget. When I finally sold that company to a larger competitor, I was extremely eager to put into practice what I’d learned in other ways.
And here’s the thing: I tried them all. I hocked LEGO for a LEGO subscription box company, and within that, I had the opportunity to work on other projects for the founder. Things like building out a course for a weight loss plan for one of his other clients. My wife and I started a homeschool consultation masterclass. Eventually, I ended up doing some video editing for a writing curriculum developer. In all of it, I was building workflow automations, email campaigns, writing web and landing page copy, and about a million other “duties as assigned.”
It was all good work. Often a lot of fun. The educational value of this time shouldn’t be discounted. However, what I wasn’t doing was the One Thing. What was that? You know what—it’s not even important for this piece. I just wasn’t doing it.
This realization has come to a head during these, the final months of an extremely turbulent year. Time is short, the pressure is on, and my activity has mimicked what I’ve read is that of a dying neural network: frequent bursts of activity and creativity, sudden intuitive leaps and connections, and finally, flat-out hallucinations as the apparent inexorable reality of expiration looms.
The upside: death isn’t imminent—clarity is.
I often say that I wish we could hear wisdom and simply internalize and apply it. Unfortunately, more often than not, it takes pain. Or, if you’d like, it takes discomfort. Everyone agrees with that, of course. “No pain, no gain,” and what-not. But nobody actually thinks that applies to them. We think that agreeing with lofty principles is the same thing as living them.
I can tell you from vast experience that is not the case.
So, as all of the Other Things finally collapse and implode under their own mass, I’m actually feeling a lot lighter about things. My One Thing is an insane gambit, but I don’t have to stress about whether I’m making the right choice. It just is.
There is probably a time, early on in our lives and careers, when we should be trying out all kinds of different things. We need to learn the fundamentals of XYZ, learn the trends, or even figure out whether our very practical, very sensible plan is actually what we want to to, or should be doing. But if I could get ten seconds to go back in time and tell myself something, it would be to eject every distraction through the airlock and do that One Thing.
The Resurrection didn’t come until *after* the Crucifixion.