Should I Even Keep Making Content?

Recently I was faced with a conundrum.

For the past year I have been running ads on Meta in order to find clients for my coaching business and that has been going well.

On the other hand I have been making content for over a decade now and that has been going less well. I have never been able to crack the code on what makes content “go viral.”

So this question started to come up for me. Given how well ads are going, should I keep making content?

And I was really struggling with finding an answer. I asked multiple people and got feedback but ultimately still felt torn.

What changed it for me was a conversation I had that reminded me of something. I was talking with someone and they said to me, “You know back in the day, what you do wouldn’t be a job. You would just be in a hut somewhere and people would randomly stop by to talk to you about things.” And that deeply resonated with me.

I know it sounds silly but I deeply identify with the imagery of a hermit in a hut. Living a very simple life where he takes his time thinking on things and sharing them with the occasional weary traveler that stumbles upon his cottage.

And there are a couple of attributes of the hermit in the hut that are important here.

1 He is relatively solitary. I already have an experience of deeply enjoying my solitude.

2 He is not supposed to be well known. If he was, he wouldn’t be a hermit in a hut. He’s supposed to be a hole in the wall somewhere that people occasionally stumble upon.

Those things feel right to me. So then I started thinking “okay how does content fit into this vision of the hermit in the hut” and what immediately came to mind was that he is constantly writing and will occasionally give something he has written to a traveler if he thinks it will help them. Maybe even sit down and discuss it with them over a cup of tea.

I think that’s what my content is. It is my many notebooks and pieces of parchment paper that are piled up in my hut that I will share with travelers.

Ultimately this is the kind of environment I want to cultivate with the people that I connect with. A safe, cozy place where we are free to discuss ideas, feel our feelings, and learn from each other.

What reinforced this even further is I started to think about my experience around content. For instance, I have a short on YouTube that is my best performing piece of content across every platform that I post on. Last I checked it had around 23K views. But I feel no fulfillment or joy from that.

On the other hand, I did a live stream and talked with no more than 3 people about a topic and felt elated! In that stream I had a conversation with one of the people in chat about this topic.

I told them that Amanda Palmer describes creativity as collecting, connecting, and sharing. And she talks about how different artists are more attracted to different parts of that process. For me, my favorite is the sharing part. And I said, “So when my work falls on deaf ears, it is less fulfilling for me.” which he really related to.

And the conclusion of that conversation was that perhaps the solution is to directly share your work with people. I had always shied away from this in the past because I worried that it was cringe sending individuals my work and asking for them to engage with it.

The truth is, it may be cringe…and so what?

one of my favorite memes of all time

The people that find it cringe and don’t want to engage are welcome to tell me as much and there are other people that are happy to do it. Because ultimately, I think that the things I put out into the world are valuable and therefore I believe that there is mutual benefit. I receive fulfillment from being able to engage with someone around these ideas and concepts and they receive the value from those ideas and concepts.

What’s funny about this is that the content production side of things is probably going to change very little. I will probably make all the same stuff that I have been making. I have just changed my relationship to it.

It is no longer some code that I am trying to crack. Instead it is my pile of journals that I share with those that I think it could help.

Might this change? At some point might I no longer resonate with the idea of the hermit in the hut and want to crack the code? Of course. But for now I feel content in this. And that’s okay.

I told my wife about this realization and her response also helped to reinforce that this was right. My wife has a savant-like quality to her in that she is able to take things that seem very complex and express them simply and profoundly. It is something I cherish about her.

So when I told her about my realization she told me that she feels similarly. That ads allow us the exposure that we need in order to sustain in the world but if that weren’t needed we would probably be a couple that lives off the land and helps people.

One last piece of this that I want to share with you. I was telling my parents about this and as I finished explaining it they were unsurprised. They told me that I have always been that way—content in my solitude. I’ve always loved being home doing my thing. Never had much desire to go out and explore when there are whole universes to explore in my mind.

It is a wonderful reminder that we often need to be reminded more than we need to be taught. It’s not about making a new you it’s about constantly returning to yourself.

So thank you for stopping by my little hut in the woods today. If you made it this far comment “hut” so I know that we asynchronously sat down and shared some tea and conversation. I hope it has been valuable for you and I wish you the best of luck in your journeys.

With care and service,

Sean