How to Be a Content Creator While Maintaining Your Sanity

Photo by cottonbro from PexelsPhoto by cottonbro from Pexels

We’re all creators. Some of us put our creations online and make a good living. Others create for the sheer joy of it. There are millions of people on the internet looking to consume thought-provoking content making there a no better time to work for yourself, be the principal player in your life, set your own schedule, determine your income, and decide what you have of value to offer up to the world.

But it can also take a lot out of you.

You may get tired. You may lack energy. You may want to quit. Don’t. Success in anything often comes one step beyondthe point where we want to give up.

Before you enter the creator economy, here are some lessons that may help by knowing them in advance.

People will steal from you.

That is OK. Let them. It means you’re on to something. Keep doing more of that. Don’t take it personally when other creators steal from you, even those more successful with more prominent name recognition. It means you’re on your way. If it wasn’t good, they wouldn’t “borrow” it.

Let it go and keep creating. Clearly, you are one to watch.

Just keep reaching.

No one is you.

When you put your creations — products, websites, courses, subscription- based content, ideas — on the internet, someone may take all of your ideas and try to pawn them off as their own. It won’t matter because most people will not put in the work required to make themselves a success, even with your content.

Readers crave authenticity, and no one can be you.

I write often about how to create a successful writing business which starts with developing the habit. Most people will read that advice, get inspired, but won’t follow through on the work part. A lot of time, energy, blood, sweat, and tears go into creating content and making it digestible and relatable for your tribe.

Success requires consistent effort.

You may make it look easy, but it’s not.

Creating content on a reliable schedule is never easy. Many don’t see what’s behind the curtain. No one will stick to content creation if they don’t both love it and love the work involved in creating.

Your best ideas will come during downtime.

Create empty space in your workweek. This is when your best ideas will flood in. Have one or two days a week where you just think. It’s only after we are bored that our best ideas hit us, like lighting.

My best ideas hit me when I’m doing anything but writing. Usually, when there isn’t a pen handy, like when I’m in the shower or exercising. Because I’m relaxed and nowhere near a pen, my iPhone, or a computer, I’m not in work mode, and sure enough, my best ideas flood my brain.

When you’re a content creator, you are the principal, not the agent.

The principal-agent problem is a straightforward concept and can be found in most intro microeconomics texts.

Julius Caesar famously said,

If you want it done, then do. And if not, then send.

Basically, if you want something done right, then you need to do it yourself. Content creators wear many hats. We are writers, entrepreneurs, marketers, networkers, tech support all rolled into one.

When you are the principal, you are the owner. You care and will put out quality work. Naval Ravikant explains it this way, “When you are the agent, and you are doing it on somebody else’s behalf, you can do a bad job. You just don’t care. You optimize for yourself rather than the principal’s assets.”

The smaller the organization, the more people feel like a principal. The less you feel like an agent, the better job you’re going to do for the principal.

That being said, you can’t do everything yourself…

Hire people to help you do things that you can’t do.

Sometimes you have to hire people for a job that takes you too much time to complete because you lack the skill to complete the task efficiently.

The more closely you can tie someone’s compensation to the exact value they’re creating for you (the principal), the more you turn them into a principal, and the less you turn them into an agent, the better a job they’ll do.

Compound interest applies everywhere.

You can apply compound interest to anything in life, not just in the financial context.

Put time into writing, and that effort will compound over time thanks to the internet, SEO, and algorithms. Write a killer blog post that gains traction on one site, use it somewhere else or many places, and it gains compound interest over time.

Take the path more painful in the short term.

Most of the gains in life come from suffering in the short term, so you get paid in the long term.

The best example of this is investing in your 20s. If you’re compounding at 30% for thirty years, you end up with thousands of times your money over time. Yes, you have to give 20% of your paycheck to a retirement account and forgo expensive meals out with friends and the $200 shoes you’re dying for, causing suffering in the short term, but you reap long-term rewards.

When I first started a daily writing habit from nothing, it was not fun. I suffered in the short term.

I gave up nights out, ignored my partner, stopped scrolling on social media, went out less with my friends. I was emotionally drained, tired from writing long hours because the writing muscle had atrophied. I had nightmares about what I would write the following day worried about getting my daily post written.

Nearly two years later, my writing habit is well established, and I can bang out a post in no time flat with less friction and energy. Less is required of me to hit that target. Now, I’m making a good side-hustle income from writing — reaping rewards in the long-term from sacrificing short-term happiness.

Keep building new mental models.

A mental model is simply someone’s thought process around how something works in the real world.

What is the best way to build better ways of thinking?

From reading! Just read — a lot.

Be discerning about what you read. The words you read are thoughts, value in, value out. If you want to build better mental models, read philosophy, science, math, engineering.

If you don’t like to read, read what you love until you do. Once the skill is cultivated, it is a superpower, and you will never run out of ideas again.

Naval Ravikant said it best:

Reading science, math, and philosophy just one hour a day will likely put you at the upper echelon of human success within seven years.

If you do not like a book you’re reading, put it down for the love of Dog. Don’t feel like you have to read it because it’s Tim Ferriss’ favorite book of the week. It might not be yours.

Find a book you want to read.

There is no such thing as writer’s block.

Writer’s block is the equivalent of,

I don’t want to write today.

That’s it.

Writer’s block comes from resistance. Resistance is tricky and persistent. It presents us from creating in many sneaky ways. It overtakes us in the form of boredom, fear, anxiety, thinking we are not enough, social media scrolling, believing we’re imposters, self-doubt.

Successful content creators know resistance well and have developed a way to combat it by creating a system, a schedule, and rituals to get around resistance. They stare down resistance and create anyway.

Resistance dies when we conquer fear.

There’s a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don’t. And the secret is this: It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write. What keeps us from sitting down is resistance. — Steven Pressfield.

Haters gonna hate, hate, hate — shake it off.

Haters are people sitting on the sidelines who don’t do but criticize. Ignore them. Especially if they come at you with negative comments. If it is clearly a comment for the sole purpose of being nasty, don’t give it any attention. Remind yourself that energy flows where attention goes. The world is waiting for your creations. You don’t have time to give output to mean comments — don’t allow them space in your brain either.

If a reader makes a respectful comment but disagrees with your premise, then it’s reasonable to take time out and respond.

People have different opinions. That’s the beauty of life.

It is how we communicate those differences that matter.

Smart people are weird. We contain multitudes. You have the right to change your mind, even on the internet.

Very Smart people tend to be weird since they insist on thinking everything through themselves.— Naval Ravikant

We change our minds when new information comes to us. We reevaluate, leaving our egos out of the equation. When someone calls you out on Twitter as a “Gotcha” moment — like so many do (I think that is the purpose of Twitter) with things like, but you said such and such last year…

Respond by quoting Walt Whitman,

I contradict myself; very well then, I contradict myself. I am vast. I contain multitudes.

Follow me to see more articles like this.

...

Follow