Flowing

The world today is flowing.

It used to be that the day was broken to fit into neat packets. 9 to 5. The school day, an hour presentation with a 45-minute lunch break and so on. Ditto for money, and substance.

But today what matters happens in its own time, and on its own timeline.

Got breaking news? Report it.
Finish your post? Ship it.
Have an offer to make? Email it.

Feeling like you've got the energy to go late into the night with work?Burn it down and wake up to a slow morning.

The window of opportunity and excitement opens for its own duration.

Best to catch it and ride it through.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not speaking about discipline or devotion to mastering your craft. This necessitates rigor. But that rigor is based on your own flowing. And it's up to you to figure out how to lead yourself in a way that supports this.

And if you can regularly provide your product, if you're churning with creativity, you want to ship and get to your next work.

With these emails, I send you them when they're done, rather than on a content schedule.

Sure, I curate. I try and take risks. I don't send unless I believe it will be relevant. But the best way to get there is to be moving forward; processing, thinking, creating, discovering...

And right now we're seeing the limits being tested; Youtube Vloggers, beat makers and writers are showing up every day to create. New videos daily, for 365 days. It's incredible.

The ante has been upped for us all.

We're being taught this lesson by our feeds.

You don't wait to post, you publish. And the timeline is jacked due to the algorithm, so what use is it to delay posting when it might show up in 2 days for someone else?

We're being taught this by our politicians.
You announce your ideas in the public, direct to the public...

We're being taught this by on-demand products.
Uber and Seamless...

It's why I'm a loyal fan to Flying Southwest; because I can change my flight up to 15 minutes before I board FREE no questions asked. People's schedules change, or their plans change or they slept in and they want to catch the next one.

The stock market opens and closes M-F and not on major holidays. The Cryptocurrency market doesn't open or close, it's just open.

But this flowing is helpful to us as creatives. It's to our advantage. We didn't fit in the old model. Slowly our society is breaking from its bounds away from the industrial mindset into the artist mindset.

More and more companies are allowing work from home days, working remote. Flexible vacation policies. This is a good thing; not just for productivity, but ultimately because this is our LIVES we're talking about.

So we're all trying to optimize our time when the real goal is to optimize our creative output and for the feeling we get when we're living our lives in a flow of things instead of on a schedule.

Work ebbs and flows.
Productivity ebbs and flows.
It's natural to have this tide like cycle.

And for the ambitious, when the tide goes out on one project, they have a 2nd project to ride the tide back in.

And this is a good thing.
Because as a, all you want to do is...

Just. Keep. Flowing.

xx David