🔑 The 1 Thing Every Creator Needs to Know
The Sunday Night Review
Hey everyone,
On Friday this week, I went out for lunch with my boss Ali.
We’d been working hard all week filming lots of videos, so it was nice to have a minute to chat about something else.
As we sat down, I asked Ali for some life coaching. I’ve had a few things on my mind recently about my creative side hustles and I wanted his advice, and conveniently, when prompted, Ali loves life coaching.
I laid out my problem to him.
I have some amount of free time away from my job that I like to give to side hustle stuff. I love my job, but I like to experiment with things on the side and have some of my own projects. This newsletter being one. My YouTube channel being another. Ali knows this and encourages everyone in the team to experiment with side hustles.
Along with YouTube consulting (where I help YouTubers grow their channels/businesses), those are the main things I’ve been focused on for the past year or so. But increasingly I’ve felt this tension between two competing opportunities.
One opportunity is to continue trying to grow my current youtube channel where I talk about careers, work, and general life advice. It’s been a bit all over the place as I’ve been experimenting with stuff, but I’ve felt more and more optimistic about it as I’ve been journalling and planning after a bit of a Summer break.
The other opportunity is to double down on being “a YouTube guy” and make my Twitter, YouTube and newsletter all align to one value proposition of sharing YouTube advice. Sharing all the things I’ve learned making almost 100 of my own videos, but mainly what I’ve learned working as Ali’s YouTube producer.
It would help to have grown my own channel to a slightly bigger size first, but actually people don’t care that much.
So I laid all this out to Ali, and annoyingly I knew the first question he was going to ask.
“So, what’s the goal?”
Shit.
I know intellectually I need to have a goal, but it’s actually really hard to have a clear one. I’m happy and healthy, so having a clear goal about the future feels a bit like setting me up for feeling dissatisfied until I achieve it. But goals are useful for direction.
It’s essentially just being honest with yourself about what you really want, and helping you aim in the right area.
I replied “I don’t really know, what’s your goal with your business?”
He said “I don’t really know.”
We often talk about this kind of stuff, but it’s always nice to know that Ali didn’t have a clear goal either. So we kept talking about what my goal could be, and which opportunity would offer what.
He tried his best from offering too much actual advice, because often the best way to help someone figure something out is just to ask them loads of questions.
But there were a few pieces of useful things/reminders that came out of it:
It’s ok for goals to change. My goal previously was to make money doing consulting. Then my goal was to use that money to pay for editing to grow my channel. Now, things have changed and I also know more things, and I’m trying to figure out the new goal. That’s ok.
Be playful and treat things as an experiment.
Reduce the importance of stuff. Ali likes this idea. I pretty much have everything I need in my life. This “problem” is an incredibly good and privileged problem to have.
Keep going. As long as you keep moving, things will keep happening and unfolding.
Asking questions is actually the best way to help someone. Also, once you’ve asked a whole bunch of questions, you’re in a position to give more informed advice.
I’m super lucky to have a boss who a) wants to life coach me and b) is good at it.
So, I’m not totally sure what my goal is, but I’ll figure it out. If there’s one thing every creator needs to know to make success more likely, it’s to have a clear goal, or you end up like this guy.
Have an epic week!
Tintin 👨💻
🧑🎨 Creatorworthy
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