Nothing restores my creative energy quite like stepping away from the screen.
My wife and I recently took a long weekend trip to Montana where we visited Yellowstone National Park and went fly fishing in the mountain tributaries.
And it completely filled my tank.
But something else happened out there in the wild.
For the first time in a long time, I felt a deep, undeniable craving to make music and videos again. It was as though something reawakened within me, and I could finally see a clear path forward.
It reminded me that sustainable creativity isn’t about endlessly grinding inside a digital ecosystem until you die.
It’s just as much about logging off, touching grass, and rediscovering the reason you’re making things in the first place.
The melody of the offline
Like most of the modern world, I spend roughly eight hours of my day indoors. Whether I’m in my home studio or a downtown co-working space, my job keeps me glued to a screen.
But I’ve been an outdoorsman my entire life, it’s just never been something I’ve highlighted online.
Hiking, fishing, hunting, camping—these are the things that refill my tank, so, in many ways, Montana was like pouring a pitcher of water into an empty cup.
But more importantly, it reminded me that creativity starts with what is naturally occurring outside of “the algorithm”.
The birds chirping, bugs landing on the water, the cool mountain breeze whispering through the trees, the bubbling of the water over the rocks—this is music, and it inspires.
There is a rich world outside of the internet, and we should all take part in it.
You are (not) the niche
Social media thrives on singularity of focus—the riches are in the niches, as they say.
But I am not a niche. And neither are you.
Kind of.
We are all multivariate individuals with a complex stack of interests, and it is the intersection of these interests and aptitudes that gives us our distinct value, not our ability to do one single thing well.
And that makes you the niche, not the thing you talk about.
Building a business or a body of work requires focus, yes, but tight, narrow conformity inevitably leads to burnout (ask me how I know).
Your audience doesn’t just want to see what you can do, they want to see who you are.
Yes, people care about what you can do for them, but there is a natural limit to that—no one enjoys a snake oil salesman.
By stacking your interests, you stop competing. You showcase your true self and naturally become a category of one.
And categories of one are unstoppable.
Putting it all together
I’m working on new video content, and I’m coming back to YouTube.
Soon.
I’m working on new music, and I’m returning to Spotify.
Soon.
But it’s going to look different than it has in the past, because I am a different person than who I was when I started this journey.
For several years, I built my entire content strategy around one thing—Facebook ads for Spotify.
But making art, music, videos—creating—isn’t about finding one thing and hammering on it until you die.
It’s about consistently rediscovering your craft and honing your work (and yourself), forever.
It isn’t about the end result, it’s about who we are becoming in the process.
So if I could leave you with one thought, it’s this: get outside, pay attention to what the world around you has to say, and use that to create better art, a better business, and a better you in the process.
That’s what I’m doing, and I’m excited to see where it leads.