The Creative Act of Building in Public
The Creative Rebellion • Dispatch #002 • 5 min read
Building something in public can be scary. If you fail, you fail in front of everyone who's watching. It's safer to create in your basement. Or your work shed. A closet maybe. Or best of all, a remote cabin in the woods.
It's safer to work in secret, where only you can see the warts, bruises, and imperfections of the art you're creating.
But in many ways it's also riskier to work in secret.
Working in secret, you're only accountable to yourself. You don't know if the work you're creating will be received well or not. You won't know until you finally ship it and wait for the opinions to start rolling in.
That's where the benefits of building in public come in. Building in public forces you to be accountable. You've made a promise. You waved your hand, got everyone's attention, and said, "hey, I'm doing this thing!"
That gives you motivation to create now instead of putting it off for "a better day," when you might feel more inspired.
You can get feedback and make adjustments as you go.
And you can grow while you create.
Starting a newsletter is a perfect example. (As are a blog, a podcast, building a side hustle, or even writing a book).
Last week I posted on LinkedIn that I had gone from 0 to 10 subscribers as I prepared to send my first dispatch of this newsletter. Those first 10 subscribers came from adding links and CTAs to my LinkedIn profile and adding a brief CTA to the end (and comments) of a few of my posts.
Little actions that created some momentum and gave me some accountability.
Now that I had subscribers, I had to write something.
In the Welcome email that you get when you confirm your subscription to The Creative Rebellion, I talk about how to beat Resistance. It takes action.
And that's what gaining a few subscribers did: it spurred me to take more action.
And that action created even more action. Then I posted about the action I was taking, and that led to 14 more new subscribers before the first dispatch went out on Saturday morning. So Dispatch #001 went out to 24 fellow creative rebels.
Action building upon itself with more action is momentum.
And momentum creates progress.
It gets us from point A to point B.
And as creatives, that's what we all want, right?
We want to create. We want to find the inspiration to start. To make progress. To finish.
So how do we determine points A and B?
Point A is the start. We have to begin. Write the first word, draw the first line, paint the first stroke, play the first note. We have to take the first step.
Finishing looks different for each of us, but there's a quote I've heard said several different ways, that, if the Internet is to be trusted, goes back to Leonardo Da Vinci:
"Art is never finished, only abandoned."
Variations of this quote have been attributed to Paul Valéry, Oscar Wilde, David Fincher, and George Lucas, who said it was the reason he went back and "finished" the original Star Wars films by re-editing and adding new CGI.
So point B, the finish, is often the deadline. Whether self-imposed, or put upon us by someone else, there's a hard date when our work must be finished.
For this newsletter, it's 8am every Saturday morning.
Whether it's my best work or not, whether it feels finished or not, whether I would like to polish it up a bit more or not, it has to ship at 8am Saturday.
Now, if you're like me, you're good friends with Procrastination, one of Resistance's good friends and conspirators.
So I need structures, systems, and deadlines.
I didn't have these when I started this newsletter. But I knew I needed to create momentum, so I started without them.
Part of the reason I picked Saturday is because it gives me the entire work week to write, edit, and polish. That gave me the skeleton of a structure. Because I don't want to be writing this late Friday night or early Saturday morning, my self-imposed deadline is 5pm Friday. That's when I schedule the final version of this email to send the following morning, fully ready or not.
Building the structure out further, I know I'll want time to let the text sit for a bit before I come back to edit and polish it. Before sitting down to write the first draft of this dispatch on Monday, April 10, I built out my complete structure with tasks in Asana. Here's what it looks like:
Monday - choose subject and write first draft
Tuesday - let it sit
Wednesday - proofread and edit content
Thursday - final polish of content
Friday - post final content on my website for the Read Online version and schedule dispatch in ConvertKit for Saturday morning
Simple enough, but it gives me daily signposts to know whether I'm on track to having something to send out Saturday morning. This gives action a path to take. It reduces some of the friction inherent to the process.
So back to the building in public part.
When people see you building in public, if what you're creating is of interest to them, they'll join you for the journey. We like having a front row seat to watching something get built.
Case in point, sharing on LinkedIn that I published my first newsletter last Saturday bumped my subscribers from 24 to 38. Now I'm even more motivated to keep writing.
Action > Momentum > Motivation > Action
And now there's a cycle that will keep building upon itself.
Will every dispatch be easy to write? No. Will there be days I don't feel like writing? Yes. Will there be days that imposter syndrome shows up in a trojan horse? Yup.
But now I have some tools to fight Resistance. I'm not unprepared, sitting in the safety of my basement, where it can whisper, "Just quit. No one will ever know."
Have you built anything in public before? How'd it go? Reply to this dispatch and let me know!
Until next Saturday...
Stay rebellious,
Travis
P.S. If you found this helpful, please share it with a creative friend.
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