This week I had a great call with one of my coaches, Barrett, that I wanted to share with you.
For a bit of context: We were discussing our business priorities, and how I could be thinking about balancing (a) growing the online courses side of our business (eg: Part-Time YouTuber Academy, LifeOS), vs (b) growing our small but rapidly expanding software business (eg: VoicePal, ProgressPal, SuperFocus).
After some back and forth, we realised that regardless of which area I focus on, the most important driver of growth for both courses and software is for me to focus on simply making more YouTube videos. That’s also what I enjoy most and what fulfils me creatively (for the most part).
Yet despite knowing this, despite knowing that the Single Most Important Thing that only I can do for our business is to work on YouTube videos, I keep finding ways to avoid it…
Here’s how our conversation played out once we hit on this insight:
Barrett: I think the limiting factor for working on your videos isn’t actually the amount of hours you have available. I think it’s that you haven’t committed to doing this because you see a million other things you could be doing.
Ali: Yeah, I think that’s very true. Because when it comes time to sit down for deep work, if we hadn’t had this conversation, I’d be thinking, “What do I want to do with my time today? I guess I could work on a YouTube video… but maybe it’s a better use of time to work on product designs VoicePal? What about for SuperFocus? Do I want to think more about app growth strategies? What about our new affiliate program? Maybe I should make a start on the next book. Or maybe I could go for a run instead…”
I try to find as many excuses not to work on the video because the video is the Hard Thing.
Barrett: Exactly. Why do you think that is? Why is the video the hard thing?
Ali: Hmm. I think there’s something about the creative work that feels more demanding than other tasks. It requires me to fully engage, to be vulnerable, to potentially fail. The other work feels safer somehow.
Barrett: I see this all the time. As creative people, the hardest thing to do is the very thing we say we want to design our life around. It’s this strange paradox – the work that’s most meaningful to us is also the work we’re most likely to avoid. It’s like our creative energy is precious and we unconsciously protect it, even from ourselves.
Ali: That makes so much sense. It explains why I can easily spend hours on email or strategic planning, but when it comes to sitting down and actually creating a video, I suddenly remember a dozen other “important” tasks. I’ve heard writers have this issue as well – I’ve seen a bunch of interviews with writers where they say that they often find excuses to do literally anything other than sitting down to write.
Barrett: Exactly. Our creative energy wants every excuse not to be sucked out of us. It’s like there’s this built-in resistance mechanism. The more important something is to our growth and our soul, the more our brain tries to protect us from the vulnerability of doing it.
This is the great irony of creative people. You could not survive if you did not express yourself in that way. Your soul would slowly die. And yet your whole being and soul is like, “Not today. We are not doing that today.”
Ali: Yeah, we’re going to do literally anything else other than that one difficult thing that we know we should be doing, and that we say we actually WANT to be doing. What’s up with that?
Barrett: If it’s any reassurance – this balancing act between doing the creative work, and doing everything else, is always going to be a mess because that IS the key battle every creative person faces.
Ali: Man, I should reread The War of Art. Every time I read that, I’m like “yep Steven Pressfield really gets it. This idea of Resistance is so so so true.”
Barrett: Okay so now that we’ve identified that you feel the Resistance every time it comes to sitting down to work on a YouTube video, and we’ve identified that that’s indeed the most important thing you could be doing for your business, what are you going to do to help make it happen?
Ali: You know, I should really take my own advice that I’ve been teaching to students in the LifeOS course lol. It’s the thing that really helped me when I was working through the Resistance in writing my book too: tracking.
With the book, each day I tracked how many words I was writing. I made enormous progress that way. But with videos, it’s not really about “number of words”. It’s not even really about “number of videos”, because different videos take vastly different amounts of time to put together. I think the best thing for me to track is the input metric – simply the time I spend each day focusing on videos. And if I aim for 4h per day (and actually come close to hitting that consistently), it’ll be game-changing.
I found this conversation incredibly clarifying. The insight wasn’t just that making YouTube videos is the most important thing I can do for my business – I already knew that. The real insight was understanding why I resist doing it despite knowing its importance, and coming up with a simple strategy to overcome that resistance:
- Recognise that resistance is normal and part of the creative process, not a sign that I’m doing the Wrong Thing
- Track my time spent working on videos (targeting 4 hours/day), rather than “number of videos produced”. Ie: tracking time spent rather than output.
- Create a “getting started working on videos” ritual that signals “I’m doing the thing now”
As Steven Pressfield talks about in The War of Art, the more important a task is to our growth and fulfilment, the more Resistance we’ll feel toward it.
Resistance isn’t a sign that we’re doing the wrong thing. It’s actually a sign that we’re on the right track.
What about you? What’s the thing you know you should be doing but keep finding excuses to avoid? And how might tracking time spent (rather than results achieved) help you push through?
Have a great week!
Ali xx
