A lot of you have a guilty secret.
You’re literally dying to build something.
You’ve had an idea for years. You’ve done a few experiments. But to date you still haven’t started building. Creators get all the rewards. A creator is simply a person who builds something online. All of us have it inside of us to do it.
Don’t let ideas die inside of you
My business partner Todd Brison has an interesting way to explain it.
He says every creator leaves behind two graves when they die.
One grave contains the skin, bone, organs, and hair leftover from your body that will slowly decompose in the ground to eventually become at one with the soil. The second grave holds all of the ideas you never got to release.
Some of the smartest people are in the cemetery. They were geniuses but we never got to know because their ideas were buried in their second grave. It’s why I’m so crazy about writing online.
I want my second grave to be empty when I leave this earth.
Many people will go to their graves early without your ideas. Your ideas have enormous power. They contain life lessons, moments of enormous creativity, strategies, and helpful inspiration that can get someone out of a dark place.
When your ideas die so do the people who they could have helped. That scares the crap out of me. It should scare you too.
When you build something it changes your life
The trouble is I can’t tell you how.
Creative endeavors don’t reveal their awesomeness until long after they’re released into the world.
I spent years building a portfolio of writing. I didn’t really know where it would lead or what it had the power to do.
Even after 7 years, I still find out that some of my writing helped people start a business. For others it helped them rethink their life or get out of a bad relationship. And for at least one person, that I’m aware of, a single article stopped them from taking their own life.
I didn’t know this at the start. Helping other people with their problems changed my life, although it wasn’t obvious.
The act of creation rewires your thinking. It shifts your mind into creation rather than the default mode of consumption.
A good life needs meaning.
Creation gives meaning to your life. It takes everything you consume and all the ideas bubbling around in your head, and makes them all worthwhile.
I started my YouTube channel 1.5 yrs ago.
Changed my life.
I started my Twitter account 9 months ago.
Changed my life.
I started my crypto journey 4 yrs ago.
Completely changed my life.
It’s time to build something that will change your life.
— OhHaiAndy
Why we don’t build our dreams right now
You’re not stupid. Some of this is obvious. Let’s explore the hidden problems.
1. You think you need more information
The desire to collect information in your favorite note-taking app until the end of time is huge. You’re never ready. It feels like there is always more to know.
“No point building now. The quality of my work will be too low,” you say to yourself each time you sit down to start.
You learn by doing.
The best learning is when you do trial and error. When it’s your mistakes and lessons you learn, the education sticks around — it has context. There’s only so long you can consume everybody else’s learning. Eventually it will feel empty.
You can live through someone else’s eyes, or let your eyes witness the gorgeous miracle of having deeply personal experiences.
2. The secret feeling none of us wants to admit
I shouldn’t admit this.
Here goes: I wanted to quit my job for years and build things. Fear held me back. I’d have nightmares of everything *not* working out. I’d do role plays in my head of having to beg my boss to take me back, and them saying, “yes, but we can’t pay you the same anymore.”
We all experience fear, even though we pretend to the outside world that we’re flawless and nothing scares us.
The trick is to, first, admit your fear to yourself. Then admit your fear to another person. It helps put a voice to those destructive thoughts. Then all you do is act in spite of your fear. Feel the fear and do it anyway, as the cliche goes.
Once you know you’re not alone with the feeling of fear it normalizes it.
What’s obscure feels like an erotic fantasy you should never share. What’s normal is easy to talk about. That’s how it can be overcome.
3. The past does not equal the future
You may have been a creator before. Things may have gone bad.
I feel for you. Ask anyone who knew me during my startup days. The mistakes I made were beyond idiotic.
For example, witnessing employees commit sexual harassment and saying nothing is something I’m not proud of. Even worse, when I found out the extent of the problem and our company organized training to make it stop, I was the only person not to attend. I thought I was too good to be there. That sent the message to staff that the problem wasn’t real. So it continued until we took it seriously.
Those mistakes haunt me.
But the past can be corrected in the future. You can learn from your mistakes. If all you do is reflect on what you screwed up, you can never move forward. Acknowledge your errors and then omit them in the future.
Take mistakes and use them as opportunities to build better next time.
The time is right now. Today.
The internet contains infinite leverage. You can literally build anything you can imagine without too many constraints. The only limit to what you can build is your mind.
The sooner you start to build, the sooner you can start to get results. We’re on the cusp of Web 3.0. This will give creators even more tools and lower the costs and barriers to entry.
If you’re not excited, then get excited. This is the best time in history to be a creator. Stop wasting your time on Netflix. Stop engaging in toxic conversations and being a serial social media commenter. Stop speculating. Stop with the excuses. Stop with waiting for the perfect time.
The trouble is, you think you have time.
— Jack Kornfield
You don’t have time. This is your wake-up call.
Life is short. Start to build something today that will soon change your life in bizarre ways you could never predict.
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