Concrete Steps For Overcoming Fear Of Failure As A Writer

Key Takeaways

um [Music] hey what's up everyone my name is tim stoddart welcome to the copyblogger podcast as always i'm with my friend and my co-host ethan and before we recorded we were trying to figure some ideas and both of us are just very overworked and have been inundated in like marketing land and so ethan and i were like let's just hit record and talk about what's going on with our work and our projects and and try to stay well i'm going to try to stay away from you know being the uh the the marketing wiz advice column guide today i i want to just step back a little bit and take a reflection so uh what are you working on man what's going on in your life uh good question i'll get into it before i do i wanted i think we want to hear from listeners too because part of that conversation was we were saying tim texted me goes dude what are we talking about today i'm like i have no idea i'm so burnt out on like marketing gurus stuff i don't even wanna i don't even wanna think about it and then we kind of chat about it and i'm like you know if we're feeling this way other people are probably feeling this way too and that's not to say that we do like a lot of guru type stuff here but i think that these trends kind of move like through the community like waves you know and if you're in tune with it maybe i'm wrong but if you're in tune with it you can kind of uh adapt and you end up putting things out that are like in line with the way that your audience feels when they're feeling it and all of a sudden somebody goes oh like you know finally somebody who's in touch so i don't know we're we're doing this because this is how we feel and we want to hear from you if you're feeling the same way what do you got going on are you burnt out on the guru thing or are you excited about something maybe maybe it's something that only infects half the population at a time well i am still in the month of may and in one of the recent podcasts we talked about how i'm taking the month we're all still in the month of may yeah well like emotionally i'm committing to myself not to take on any big projects or any new ideas for this month when i made this deal with copyblogger and next week is like the official rollout to combine the copyblogger academy with with digital commerce and so that's been a little bit of a well it hasn't been strenuous you just you got to really pay attention to detail with those kind of things you know so like it's been a slow very methodical process to make sure the transition is smooth and so all this extra time i've had like i i'm proud of myself for committing because of how much anxiety and like nervous energy i have to want to keep working on something i want to keep working on something you know and so i'm i'm in a weird spot where i've been enjoying writing my blog and looking at my newsletter this is funny because i was gonna say this when we got on here and be like you know how i know your partnership worked you want to know how i know how's that because you text me stuff now that you've never texted me before and i'm like how much goddamn time does jim have on his hands just for everybody talk to me no i'm not for the listeners here's a little like look behind the scenes of what it's like to be tim's friend right now so he texted me i mean we talked we were talking about the show and then he goes um what have you been pondering about send in life send and i'm like i don't know man i'm really busy these days not a ton of pondering and then like 20 minutes later he goes oh [ __ ] the podcast in 18 minutes lol yeah i was like i know this dude yeah this guy's got time right now so congratulations on the new partnership it's definitely working out well it seems like it thank you but you mentioned something which we should probably go over which is this new thing that you just wrote oh you said you're writing more and uh you shared an article today that i think you said you're like more proud of this than anything you've ever written before which is quite the statement you want to dig into this thank you and yeah i think this is a great idea to talk about when you said something earlier how there's these weird invisible trends sometimes where it's like the whole community kind of secretly gets burned out on this thing and we start somehow going into this other like a bend around a river right my father of all people this is really interesting my dad's been a paramedic in philly for like 20 something years and he has seen a lot of [ __ ] basically especially in philadelphia with like the drug overdose epidemic and just young kids dying all the time and it's taken a real toll on him like mentally and emotionally and so over the last couple years he and i have really been talking a lot about him starting with a foundation or a media asset let's call it like you know that's where my head goes about mental health in emergency responders so my family is full of like cops and medics and firemen and my dad has so much experience in this field and he's saved like so many lives and he's just seen everything you know and we've been talking about it for a while so anyway i keep keep take that chunk that information put it in a little side compartment real quick and i published a blog this morning on timstots.com all about becoming a linchpin i had a very very profound moment in my life a couple years ago where everybody knows i reference seth godin a lot and i really buy into like his ideology on creating content and i read one of his books once called linchpin and lynchpin is basically about two things it's about how the westernized workforce has been trained to be mechanized like a factory worker and that's fine like that's the industrial revolution that's how we got to where we are today but it's the reason why our parents say like wake up get a job go to work clock in punch out put in your hours do the same thing it's the reason why our education system has bells that tell you when you can and can't move around the hallways because it's like an old prussian system about using bells to shift workers in and out of their um their shifts excuse me and so when you take that in mind you realize that that system isn't actually in line with what creates success today because what creates success today is actually like individuality the way the internet works and and the fact that like most of our needs are met so a lot of the opportunity isn't creative work and is in like once you know like you pay to feel good a lot more than we were just then was feasible like 100 something years ago right because like you would pay just to eat and to live and to survive so linchpin is basically about that it's about highlighting that framework in our society the problem is we are wired from a very very hardwired evolutionary standpoint not to stand out in a crowd and this is something i've always been very fascinated with this was like the real moment for me when i saw this and i felt like oh that's what it is like steven pressfield calls it the resistance and seth godin calls it the lizard brain and it's your amygdala and your amygdala is a is a very prehistoric part of your brain that sits right on top of your brain stem so it's the thing that is most connected to your like instant reaction you know so the example is when you cross the street we've all done it and all of a sudden you're spacing down you look up and you see a car coming like you just jump out of the way and you don't even think about it well that's your amygdala that's your survival mechanism and that same exact thing is wired for a couple hundred thousand years to be fearful of isolation it's to be fearful of standing out from the tribe is to be fearful of like being alone in the forest and you hear the rustle in the bushes and you instantly think that it's danger because like just evolutionarily we're genetically hardwired to do that because the people that didn't think it were danger got eaten by the bear you know and so the people that survived were the people that were naturally anxious so you combine those two ideas together you realize that our modern society to succeed one of the ways to succeed especially in creative work like you have to put yourself out there you have to stand up on stage you have to publish your work you have to fail in front of other people but in order to do that you have to quite literally force your brain to do the one thing that it has been trained for thousands of years not to do which is like to potentially offend the chief to get kicked out of the tribe you know to say something that might make people squirm or or to to put your art out there and so how do you do that how in this modern age do you fight against that lizard brain and it's a practice right like you just have to continuously do it you have to publish your work you have to miss those free throws in front of your team you have to you know miss the shot at the buzzer and be booed and there's just no other way to do it so i've heard this article i'm very very proud of it it's got a lot of ideas which you can tell and like it took me a long time to figure out how to put them together in a way that flows and isn't like too choppy so i worked very hard on it and then wouldn't you know my father since he works too damn much and he picks people up on stretchers for the last 20 years she's got a torn rotator cuff in his shoulder and my dad finally finally finally after me harpered on him for like three years ha is forced not to work he's he's on pto and he started a podcast my dad like started a podcast no way all about yeah mental health with emergency medicine and so then he read my article this morning because like you know he's my dad he likes to read my stuff and he said like hey i've been secretly doing my podcast i didn't want to tell you because i didn't want to be like the typical start and stopper type guy right but i got two episodes in and and i just want you to know about it and i'm trying to be a linchpin type deal so so that was that was my day and i'm feeling pretty good about it and thanks for listening to my story that's awesome man let's shout him out uh not just because he's your dad but also because this is like probably one of the more important topics that faces every country right now i mean i've seen the stats on burnout among first responders and it's yo yeah it was always high but it's way higher now post pandemic so what's this podcast called well he doesn't have a name for it yet he's got two episodes recorded on anchor they're in draft but they are publishing he told me and i actually let him get away with this he's like i don't want to publish something right before memorial day because then no one's going to listen to it i was like okay that's fine so his official launch date is next sunday which is or next monday which is going to be the sixth so we'll give him we'll give him next week off and then we're gonna hold his ass to the fire so monday may june 6th my dad's podcast about life as a paramedic for the last 25 years in like inner city philadelphia oh my god yeah so if my dad can do it i'm telling you like if my dad can speak on a podcast anybody can do it i promise you wow that is wild congrats to him i feel like we should name it for him i agree he's struggling with the name right write it up first thing that comes to my mind anything related to philly is the fresh prince but i'm not sure that's the way to go these days so it's not bad [Laughter] yeah that probably won't work too well these days yeah do you still remember one of the first times that you actively pushed through that in a way that mattered for your business it didn't matter directly for my business but i think it had secondary effects just because it was one of those first like oh my god i want to throw up moments and i did it anyway on my first ever blog when i was in florida i wrote a story and it was probably really really bad and like i'm actually really happy that it's not on the internet anymore because it it makes me scared of even just thinking about it right but like i was four months sober and i stayed up all night i couldn't sleep i'll never forget it actually i was in this like shitty apartment in south florida with a laptop that i bought at a pawn shop listening to dead mouse strobe was on which is one of my all-time favorite songs it's a song by deadmau5 called strobe and i wrote a story about walking my dog and how all of a sudden my dog could talk to me and my dog could never figure out what the problem was because like that's where we all want to be right like how come my dog is just never stressed like wherever he is he's in the present moment and that's like the magic that dogs have they're just always completely present and i wrote this story about how my dog could all the sudden talk to me and like i was walking him in the story and he was talking to me and then when i got back i tried to explain it to in the story of my girlfriend who like didn't really exist but she was just the other character and she looked at me like i was crazy because i was talking to my dog but couldn't figure out the message in between that and like how in our own heads how many times has that happened to us where we can't see the underlying message just because there's some other thing that like gets in the way right and so i remember publishing that story and putting it out on facebook and just being terrified about it like absolutely terrified and honestly i don't even know if anybody read it or commented on it or anything but i do remember that particular moment being like i didn't die just like you're not gonna die on stage and and just like like i i pushed past the lizard brain for like one of the first times of my life i like that man that's interesting i think we'll have to come back to this whole idea of storytelling too because i feel like it's interesting that you tried to make uh what was effectively like a non-fiction point yeah through a piece of fiction i feel like we're gonna start seeing more of that in the next couple of years in part because of this feeling that we have like we started this talking about how just burnt out people are on advice and i think there's an element of that that will like it will reward people who can take the same ideas and package them up in story form in a way that is really appealing like uh sahil bloom does a great job with that he writes a lot of advice but every once in a while he'll publish kind of like a whimsical story type piece of advice and uh people go nuts for it so i think that's a really interesting approach and it actually doesn't sound like a bad story to begin with i thought it was good yeah yeah have you ever heard of flat land does that ever come across your okay i was on a backpacking trip one time and i ran out of stuff to read i was staying at this uh sort of airbnb back before airbnbs and the host she was like this really intelligent uh veterinarian who had left the like the high pace field of city vets to go be a vet in the middle of the mountains of tennessee and she just her and her husband were just really interesting people she had this huge book case and she told me to read flatland it's a very short book and the whole premise is that like it's this world and uh for any flatland fans out that forgive me for any details i screw up here as years ago now but the idea is like it was this world that exists in one plane so there's there's no depth to it and like men are um what would you call it what's a shape with more than three sides is that a rhombus maybe yeah maybe first thing that came to my head is polygon polygon yep no that's the one it was men are polygons women are lines and you know their houses are just like one-dimensional floor plans and there's like all these it was it was really interesting how they kind of built the world around this concept of like what would it really be like if you lived in a world with only one plane but the interesting sort of wrinkle in the story is that there's a character from this flatland who encounters a 3d character 3d character kind of comes into the world and then picks this one one dimensional character or i guess two-dimensional character up so that for the first time he's able to see all of flat land below him and then when he's dropped back into flat land nobody believes him because they think it's absolutely ridiculous that there could ever be like a third dimension and so it's really it's it's kind of the same it's a commentary on a similar notion to what you're talking about so i don't i don't hate your approach i think i actually kind of think i want to see the tim's dad's talking dog story get back out on the web somewhere but that's an interesting example so you published you hit publish you overrode the lizard brain and you remember why do you remember that version it was like the first first big time or or do you think back on that every time that you're nervous now why is that the one that comes to mind i remember feeling really good that creative terrified buzz that exists somewhere right in between like pleasure and horror you know it's like that feeling right before you jump out of a plane on skydiving it's you you know the data like the the dopamine is highest right before you do the thing and i i think that was just one of those moments where i finally felt that feeling of like oh this must be what being a writer actually feels like and i've been like longing for it for so long and like you know my story chasing that thing in all these different directions and it was just one of the first times i ever thought that but you know who i do okay i think tim urban is a really good example of this because sometimes when i read his stuff i think this should not work you know like this this does not make any sense in the traditional well maybe traditional is not the word in the um he breaks all the rules yeah like in the best practice approach of getting your content and your message out there and his stories are exactly that he he makes high-level conceptualized points in very very simple terms by using stories that like we can all understand and relate to so while while you were saying flatland i don't even know why i was thinking of tim urban and it's going like yeah there's there's something to this where i think people are getting a little bit bored of the same like repeated and regurgitated advice over and over again and it's like don't tell me what to do tell me who you are and tell me what you think and i'm with that there could be something there yeah yeah i think it's partly that it's just played out the other thing is i think there's an aspect of it that's like cultural bordering on political so we live in a time when it is like the stakes are very high for saying something that's true but controversial and that's existed before in the past i mean there have been points in this country's history when it was not possible to truth as a writer and keep your job or keep your reputation and so what you see happen in those times is like the sort of blossoming of fiction because you can say truths in fiction that you can't say in non-fiction and other things like you know the the the use of pen names and all this kind of stuff becomes more more of the de facto approach and you know we've been kind of lucky to live in an age where that hasn't necessarily been the case but i tend to think that it's kind of a cycle and it feels like for a lot of reasons uh the the cycle's changing and people who can tell good stories and like invoke that sense of whimsy in order to make a point about something that's very real i think are going to have a lot of advantages in the coming years just from a storytelling and business perspective all right without the hero's journey which is just like the the typical framework and we can all follow that you're actually you're more of a fiction reader than i am i read a lot of fiction but i read a lot of comics you know like alan moore and like neil gaiman are the people that i read you know with comics but you i mean i think you said like huck finn or something and like the call of the wild were really impactful to you so like what makes a good story right like if it's not the hero's journey then how the hell do you actually tell a story in a way that impacts people but also like changes them like invokes a cause that's what you want right like you're writing to try to get a reaction out of somebody whether that's the positive or negative or buy something or click this or maybe even just think about it you know like how do you tell a story well that's a it's just an interesting question i would i would just caveat by saying you probably actually read more fiction than i is different but i don't consider myself to be a big fiction reader but i do like some of the older stuff for for some of these reasons because it surprised me by how i don't know like prescient it still is yeah our world and i do think it's i think it's all the same journey i think it's all the hero's journey which i'm by no means an expert in but let me i have one opinion on this which is i think the best stories are true stories and what i mean by that is not that it's something that actually happened but that it is something that reflects it has to reflect the way the world really is as the reader knows it so i was thinking about this recently like what makes what makes good writing yeah right it's it's actually not the writer and you know that because there are like artificial intelligence computers that that can create something that sounds like good writing so it has nothing to do with the mind of the writer good writing is recognized and effectively created by the reader the reader decides what good writing is and i think readers think something is good this is how they do it a piece of writing is good if it shows them a version of the world that matches their perspective of it so like if you can speak to somebody else's truth they will consider that to be a good piece of writing and that's why writing's so controversial right because there is no one objective version of reality no one objective version of good writing but there is bad writing and bad writing is anything that doesn't match like i don't know how to say it truth and you can see it in in in different things like when characters develop too fast or when characters do things that they really wouldn't do which i you know i'm again by no means an expert on this but but these are the things that i think about when i'm trying to write from a storytelling perspective um there's one other thing too that like this is something sam taught me which i try to think about a lot i asked him one time i'm like what do you think like why do you think most people struggle to grow and get recognized like and he goes well everyone's lost their sense of showmanship and i said you know what do you mean by that he's like you know like showmanship like like get people excited about the story use words that actually evoke emotions i think a lot of people and this is one of the reasons like guru twitter is so exhausting is like it's all just buzzwords and people figure out one format that works and everybody latches on to it so i think the ones who really win there sure there's a lot of people who come in and they clean up because they are able to recognize those patterns and leverage them and that's a good skill to have but i think the ones who kind of get like the most spiritual sort of satisfaction from playing in those realms are not just doing what they know works they're also trying new things that they're not sure are gonna work so i don't know i've said a lot of things there but i think it boils down to like you gotta be able to say something that's true and i don't know if i don't know i don't know what the like how to get more specific on that but it's got to be true in the eyes of whoever it is that's reading what you're writing and uh and i think you got to be like bold and try stuff that's new even if it sucks which i guess comes directly back to your point of you know sometimes you're going to eat [ __ ] for a while or like i love uh stephen king's saying on that he goes you gotta like keep showing up even though some days it feels like all you can achieve is to shovel [ __ ] from a sitting position okay ethan you say so many like simple things that are so profound when we talk there are so much that i want to say right now because it made me the idea that the the the message is in the reader it's the observer who gets to decide what is good and what is not and there's three things really i'm gonna say three so i remember to go through all three of them so that my my vernacular doesn't wander too much one of them is you know how that new ai what's it called dolly or something like that that can create art well that's the first thing i thought of where if machines can create art then the person that gets recognized from that is still going to be the person that says i have an idea and this idea can be like the labor can be done by a machine but the interaction between like my idea and observation of the idea still is authentic you know like that's still human and i think that's a rule in writing and painting or whatever your art is that it's gonna be very difficult to break like maybe one day it'll it'll be broken who knows i i don't personally think that's gonna be in my lifetime so i think that is so cool but then the other one i mentioned neil gaiman and i mentioned alan moore and maybe just because they're in the top of my mind that's what came together so in alan moore he's a famous graphic novelist he wrote watchmen which is not only one of the best graphic novels of all time it's one of the best novels of all time like when i read this book for the first time i the thing that i kept thinking is history played out in a certain way specifically so he could write this book it just weaves so many things together and i remember when you said showmanship i thought of him because you know of course i looked him up and alan moore is uh he's from like the highlands of britain he created his own god he worships some kind of snake god he's got a like a 10 foot beard he's got more rings than you can even fit on your hand he's just the most wild guy but he does it all from a sense of like he changes his god he's trying to see the world from different people's perspective and like almost create like a caricature of his authorship so that he can try to bring that into his writing so i thought of that when you said showmanship and then finally when you said understanding the truth there's a book by neil gaiman called the ocean at the end of the lane and it's one of his shorter books and it's a really really vivid story about this family called the hemp stocks um it's basically like a demon comes and it's a little boy and you know the little boy meets lily himself have stock to save him but in the undertone of this book is there's a pond it's a duck pond and lily keeps calling it the ocean and the little boy couldn't figure out why and then finally towards like the climax he grabs a bucket and he picks up um just a bucket order from from this pond and he's able to jump in it and it's at that point that he realized that a pond is an ocean and a bucket is a pond because there's these things in life that are able to be like itemized but in its totality are always endless and i've always thought about that way about like physics and space and uh you know stare up at the sky going like what is this why we are here and one of that moment when all of a sudden i realized what he was trying to tell on the story where he was like saying that a drop and a bucket is an ocean because to somebody looking down an ocean might be a drop and to somebody who's like a millionth of the size a drop might be an ocean and when that moment clicked for me i like really really got the truth and so those truth moments that you referenced i think are much more meaningful than we give them credit for because they really really can change like human behavior i love that as an example uh this this concept that like perspective can get closer or further but but the the but there's some kind of constant that like it revolves around and depending on how close you are or far from it that that depend that that is what dictates what you see but in this case like that pond would be kind of the constant and i think that's almost what we're using as a stand in here like calling it truth it's like there is something that exists out there that is real even though we all argue over it every single day and we all have our own perspectives of it and it's the job of the writer to be able to kind of slice off a piece of that and bring it into the story the way that the reader would recognize it as you were as you were talking there you helped me actually clarify one of my thoughts about what truth is or like how could you categorize it because i i think that's the hardest part the pond is the truth in the story i get totally what you're saying yeah yeah it's this thing that like it's it almost can't be fully described but it's like it is it is kind of a constant i think one important trait and i do think this actually ties in also with what your article's about in terms of overcoming the fear of publishing one really important trait is to be able to divorce yourself from the fear of judgment for what you're going to say and i think this is actually a line that i heard neil gaiman share in a podcast at one point but he basically said he was giving advice to somebody or somebody was giving him advice he was writing something very tricky and somebody said or maybe it was him said give no quarter to your ego and the point that's always stuck with me as like one of the hardest and most important things to do in storytelling of any kind because you know most of our stories are come from experiences of ours and i think there's a temptation to see ourselves kind of as the hero sometimes for sure if not the hero then certainly to like protect ourselves from any like backlash that would come from somebody else and the way they perceive the story but you can't write truth if you are overwhelmed with concern for how people are gonna perceive things yeah and i think that's that's easily recognized in bad stories and i don't know if people necessarily would think this you know it's just not believable right because because it's too good or it's or or this character is too evil or whatever it is i don't know if they can always put their finger on it but the reality is what you're trying to do is you're actually trying to maintain control over what the reader thinks too much and there's a there's there's kind of a balance that has to be struck there and i think it can only really come from practicing this discipline of removing yourself from the outcome not not necessarily caring so much about it so yeah it's funny how all these roads kept leading back to this initial topic of overcoming that kind of amygdala response i hadn't thought until we had this conversation how deeply tied into good storytelling that really can be yeah but uh fascinating stuff well it's it's difficult because it's almost like the cruel joke of creativity where you sit down to say something and the process of saying something creates a thing that like you probably didn't actually mean to say but like in some ways it's still the act of saying something you know and uh so let me ask you do you start like with your process do you know what you're trying to say before you say it and do you feel like you hit the mark most of the time or is it like a start from a and and figure out where you're going along the way i think there are two different experiences that i have sometimes there's a very clear idea that i know that i hold and i'm trying to figure out how to voice it and and then other times it's the opposite i will sit down and write about something that's bothering me and i'm not even really sure how i feel about it until i've sat down but but the writing is different so in the second case it's usually more of a stream of consciousness and then that's when something comes out that i'm like oh my god you know i didn't even realize that was uh like that's a really good way of of encapsulating this issue or whatever it is but i'll give you an example of the first one that actually i was thinking about this earlier because this happened to me this morning i was out for a walk and one thing that i think has always like frustrated me especially nowadays i know we don't not to get political because we don't get political on this show but it frustrates me to be somebody who sort of i would consider myself somewhere in the middle and i see people on both ends of the spectrum and they s they suffer so much for their beliefs and i think a lot of the suffering is driven by their inability to understand what the other person is saying like on the other end of the spectrum so it's kind of like a self-imposed suffering that doesn't have to be there and as anybody listening to this who's kind of sat in the middle of family dinner at thanksgiving over the last couple of years will know what i'm talking about there's a massive miscommunication that's going on so the belief that i know that i have held for a long time is like man things would be a lot better if we could just get people to realize the common ground that they hold a lot of people hold that belief i've never really known how to voice that opinion or voice it in a way that's constructive or even helpful and then i was walking today and a story occurred to me and you know what it is i'm i haven't written it yet but i want to have you heard the story of the three blind men who are uh feeling like they're inspecting an elephant and they're trying to describe what an elephant is oh it's like the trunk and like the other ones yeah yeah you've heard this yeah i have okay so i want to tell most people have heard this story which is that three blind men find an elephant and each one is describing what an elephant is but they're all standing at different points on the elephant yeah and so all their descriptions are different what most people don't know is that that's only the beginning of the story i want to tell everyone what happened next which is what happened when they tried to decide what to do with the elephant because as everybody knows without necessarily realizing it it doesn't really matter how you describe what an elephant is everyone's got their own opinions of things and the fact somebody has an opinion by itself is completely harmless the real trouble that we run into in the world is when we try to decide what to do about the elephant and everyone's got their own opinion of what it is so i was just out and and that was an example like i this idea for like a little like almost like a written like a children's book kind of story was sort of like short and playful and just uses that allegory to describe some of the ways like the crazy ways in which we fight with each other over things that are so ridiculous to somebody who could see the whole picture the whole elephant yeah that just started kind of occurring to me and and so that was an example of the first one in which like i had an idea that i know i want a voice but i'm not sure how to voice it and every once in a while just an opportunity kind of finally arises to do so what about for you i think that's actually really well said so i wrote a personal thing on the blank page my personal like hidden sub stack today about guns and i know how i feel about that and that's easy to write it's it's going pro like i know i mentioned stephen pressfield but that's sort of how i feel about that like you could be an amateur and just ramble some stuff and and sort of like it's not even necessarily about making an argument it's just about the skill of articulation and so i think the skill of articulation is like one one side of it but for the vast majority of my writing it always reminds me of um dave perrell i think i've never spoken to him i got his name right i think the one thing that he wrote that always stuck with me is the two types of ways it happens when you write something one is that the entire file he was talking about web files the entire file loads all at once and slowly turns into a pixelated piece from high def and then the other one is that it loads from like the top and comes all the way down and i thought wow that's so cool like you can start at the very beginning and as it lows and as it loads it loads like perfectly like there's nuance obviously he was there's exceptions for editing and stuff like that right but like the piece is already done it's just it loads bit by bit in like a perfect format or the entire canvas is black is blank and the entire canvas like loads itself up from a very very pixelated blurry version to eventually uh not shrink but focus into like a high def version i thought wow that's so insightful you know where the first version is is probably something that i wrote this morning we're like i already knew what it was i was writing i just had to articulate it line by line in line so that when the whole thing loaded it loaded from top to bottom you know but something like the seth godin piece i'm bouncing all around you know like the whole entire canvas is coming into shape line by line and comma by comma and um i i really really thought that was such a cool way to think about it especially if you read it because he has visuals and you know i'm talking to the camera like using my hands and stuff like that but uh but the the visuals explained it really well and so i think that's how it happens for me yeah that's interesting i had never thought about it that way but that's a i will probably never be able to think about it any other way because that's a good visual representation how it works and i think one of the big questions for people was like well then how do you practice this skill of whether it's being able to divorce yourself from the outcome or being able to override that amygdala i think you've mentioned one already which is sort of you know full sending it you just you you recognize the fear and then you you do it anyways i think one thing that helped for me was getting around a group of people who were one or two steps ahead of me and seeing them out there doing it and realizing that it wasn't uh there were no like there's no lasting damage from what they did like i still learned this from and i've been lucky to work with some just really effective well-known writers and i think one of the things that i learned from them not only is that publishing is like uh for the most part pretty harmless you can get it in a dust up over it but it's important too and i think i've seen the feedback yeah i've seen the feedback come in and like you see how these pieces and it like it'll always be the thing that you don't think is gonna is gonna have any impact all of a sudden it comes back and somebody just emails you and says you know hey that was really important and i'm glad that you said that um and and you only need a couple of those to overcome the fear of doing it again in the future because you know then in your bones that you know even if this is scary for me it's important and i think you talk about overcoming fear of any kind like one of the ways in which humans are best able to do that is when there's some kind of higher purpose involved and that's not i don't want to get high and mighty about like any particular type of article why does anybody do anything you know yeah yeah yeah well that's the thing if you can find a way to link what you're doing to like helping somebody else or some bigger you know mission rather than just whatever it is that you're trying to achieve with your business getting over that amygdala response i think it's going to be is going to be easier so those are the things yeah those are the things that stand out to me this has been great man this i guess we started off kind of shaky but i'm i'm really happy with where we ended up on this what are the what are the key takeaways you gotta you gotta ship well you gotta ship you actually let me summarize what you said a little bit because you kind of did just have a takeaway right there the way to get over it is to do it in front of other people there's a line which i think is the most important line in the article that i wrote where there's the difference between failure and iteration is that iteration has a feedback response you know and it's like you you can of course in my head i was thinking of muay thai like i can be in a gym by myself and practice and kick the bag completely wrong every single time and there's no feedback response for it but iteration is like you're using data to make a change for the next time but here's the trick that feedback response can be and like probably will be painful but it also doesn't have to be right like you can fail in front of people who will make it like a soft landing you know i read my stuff out loud because reading out loud really helps me editing to my wife before i publish everything and like that's the same thing that's that's the that's the form of iteration so i really think the most important line well the most important line is the one at the end that i highlighted in yellow but i think one of the most important things to understand about conquering this lizard brain is that the trick is other people that's that's what it is like the feedback there has to be some kind of feedback or else you're not actually doing anything like you're practicing and you're quote-unquote getting better but there's no feedback response to it it's like if we're going to end on something i think it's really really important that we end understanding that because you can dance the dance in your head you know like you can practice and like i'm writing every day i'm i'm trying to get better but publishing to one person publishing one thing to one person once a year is better than publishing every day to nothing because like the point is to get to your point to find that truth and without that without the iteration like you're never actually gonna find the truth that you're trying to say and uh and i think it's important like you said like i really do we talked about this a few times like i just don't think there's anything more important to the human condition than narrative and that's always going to be the case so like embrace it and just like dive into it because it'll serve you well absolutely storytelling storytelling always has always will around the world it takes different forms if you are kind of if you devote yourself to it i think there's a lot of there's a lot of power in it um so this was fun man let us know everybody what did you think of this don't unsubscribe this is terrible if this was terrible give us a week we're busy i don't think this is terrible i think this is really really important because before you can get good at any of the other stuff you have to get good at hitting publish yeah that yeah it wasn't it was important and then we could always just play it off be like yeah that was an example of us just hitting publishers you're totally right yeah the camera's rolling layers man that was that was the that was the ocean to our pond you know um all right everybody thanks for coming in we'll see you thanks so much for listening guys we'll talk next week [Music] you