Over the past couple of months, I’ve been busy posting on Twitter, making summaries of interesting podcasts to share in public, I've been following an online course on how to run decentralised communities, I've been shaping a long-term strategy for my personal work, and I've also been writing short and long-form articles and course outlines for topics that I’m interested in exploring deeper.

It might sound like I’ve been creating and doing loads of things, and in some way I have, but I’ve also been struggling a lot to adapt to the life of a creator.

The truth is, I have been feeling more and more stressed over the past six weeks. And particularly over the past few days. Ever since I transitioned from holidaying and writing posts in Mexico to ‘doing all the things’ as ideas of things to do were increasingly popping up in my head, I’ve reached levels of stress that I had not experienced since some of the peak stressful moments of working as a senior leader in a large company.

‍I feel like I have way too much to do, that I have no time, and that I am not progressing through my ‘to-do list’ at the pace I want to.

The thing is, no one is placing any expectations on me but myself.

I am the only source of the stress, here, and it is taking a toll on both me and the people around me. I wake up really early with thoughts racing through my head and I feel the need to get up and go to work. Yesterday, I struggled to enjoy a(n objectively really lovely) sunset walk because I had just thought of a couple of new things I could make that could be valuable. I was feeling an urge to start making those things now, or at least capture their essence so that it wouldn’t disappear from my mind. As I walked, the ideas kept roaming about inside my head, aggressively asking me why I wasn’t not dealing with them here and now… “who cares about the sunset walk, we’re more important” they kept saying in frustration, even though I know deep down that they are not.

None of this is a surprise, really… I am trying to grow into being someone I was not only a few months ago, and the only way out is going to be through both exhilarating and painful moments.

But it really feels like I am clearly making the journey much harder for myself than it needs to be.

Sure, I have loads of ideas of things I could make e.g. creating a learning platform to teach collaboration, communication or strategy skills in businesses, building a small youtube channel to share snippets of information for free and to start learning how to make videos, sharing things on Twitter so people get a feel for who I am and for what are interested in, posting updates on my blog etc.

The list is long. I have new ideas of things I could do every day! But I don’t have the time, the energy, the skills or the connections to make them happen just yet. And certainly not all of them at the same time. Yet, I’m still cramming in as much work as I can in the time I have, building up skills in parallel (video making, writing, teaching etc.) in such a way that I am learning none of them properly.

I am also realising progressively that each of those things I am thinking of making is ‘actually’ a bigger thing that I usually imagine it to be when the idea first appears in my mind. Either because the new things I have decided I am going to do is objectively huge (e.g. building a course to teach strategy skills) or because it is something so new to me that even a small thing takes me a lot of time and energy to make (e.g. posting on Twitter, creating videos for YouTube).

I’m clearly trying to grow too hard and too fast. And it definitely feels like there would be value in slowing down, doing things one at a time, and enjoying the journey I’m on. This is easier said than done, though, particularly given that I had been training myself into growing as hard and fast as I could in my recent decade-long corporate career.

In the corporate world, people who take on chunky pieces of work and deliver them smoothly progress rapidly and are given increasingly interesting things to do. I quickly got known for being someone that just made things happen. Even big and complex things. No problems. No drama.

I put the word ‘just’ in italics in the previous paragraph on purpose. When you work in corporates, you hear that word all the time, usually from someone who needs you to do something for them. Sometimes they say ‘just’ because they want to minimise the complexity of the task at hand so that you don’t think twice about taking it on. Sometimes they truly don’t realise how complex the thing they are asking you to do is.

You’ll hear things like:

• ‘can you just give that person a 2-min call to check in with them on the project?’ (truth: this kind of thing doesn’t take 2 mins, it takes 30 because you need to understand who that person is, their relation to the project, and why you need to call them now before you actually call)’
• ‘can you just prep a quick update for the Executive Team on your project?’ (truth: preparing a Executive document usually takes a couple of full days of work or more, if you want it to be effective)
• (and this the best one I’ve heard, I think) something like ‘can you not just run a campaign to make all the recruitment happen at once?’ (truth: this takes 6 months of extraordinarily hard work and at least 15 people if you want to make it happen in a way that is controlled and not fully chaotic).

As I was thinking back to those times where people were asking me to just do something for them or for the business, I realised that this is exactly what I am doing to myself now. Every day, I am suggesting to myself that I ‘just’ make this new thing. And I am expecting myself to do it. At pace. One day, I’ll just suggest to myself that I should write a short summary of an interesting podcast (it takes me 6 hours to make as summary fo a 2-hour podcast); or to just write my long-term strategy (it took me 3 full days of work over 10 days to create something I was happy with); or to just build an online corporate strategy course (as I was scoping this out, I realised that this would obviously be weeks of full-time work). Each of those things is actually a big thing, and I get unreasonably frustrated that I can’t ‘just’ do them all quickly and well.

So I think I’m going to shift my thinking in a few ways…

First, I am going to consciously stop 'just’ing myself every time I have a new idea of something I could make. I recognise that most of the ideas I am having are big ideas, and that I will not be able to make them all happen. And that’s okay. The only times I am allowed to tell myself ‘I could just do this thing’ is if said thing takes less than 2 mins to do.

Then, I am going to learn how to say ‘no’ to myself. Not all ideas are good. Not all ideas are meant to be actioned at the time you have them. Not all ideas will serve your long-term goals in an effective way.

It took me a while to learn how to refuse to take on a task while employed in a business. I only started being able to do this once I recognised that (i) I had limited time and energy, and that (ii) if I accepted to take on all the things that I was asked to do (or that I wanted to do) then I was bound to do some of them badly. So I learned how to say no, even to senior leaders, to preserve my energy and my reputation.

It’s the same thing here, really, apart from the fact that I have little experience in saying ‘no’ to myself. This is a wholly new concept to me because I’ve never had that many ideas of things I wanted to do so badly. I love having many ideas. And I love making stuff. I want to make all my ideas happen. But I shan’t. Because I don’t want to burn myself or my levels of excitement out, and I want to make useful things rather than many things.

So I will learn how to say ‘no’ or ‘not now’ to most of the ideas that come into my mind.

Then, I am also going to build more slowly, and in public, even if it means that I am building things much more slowly than if I were locking myself up in a room for a week to make them.

Many experienced creators talk online about the value of building in public and the value of making a lot of noise about what you are building. Building in public means that people get excited about you are building as you are building it, and they make suggestions on how to build it in a way that they would find more useful. Or they don’t and then you know that the thing is not worth building, at least not now.

Ultimately, by the time you are ready to launch your product or service, you’ve already formed a community of people who are excited to use what you have made. Whereas if you build something to perfection while being locked up from any distractions in your garden shed, it might flop entirely because (i) it is your idea of perfection and not the users’ and (ii) no one knows about it anyway, so how could they know they can use it?

Finally and importantly, I also want to remind myself that the most important thing on this growth journey is to enjoy the growth as it happens. The end game is not to finish making all the things, it’s to enjoy making them. I have been driven by achievement for such a long time that it is easy for me to forget this despite knowing intellectually that most (if not all) of what life has to offer is meant to be experienced rather than completed.

I actually know people who are masters in enjoying the present moment… Morcheeba.

Morcheeba are my favourite artist-musicians from London; they create and play wonderful trip-hop music with exquisitely raw and playful energy. I went to one of their gigs last May and I swear I have never seen a band enjoy themselves as much as they did on stage. They were playing their music in such a way that it felt like it was given freedom to take up all the space it wanted. They were playing with the crowd in such a way that every single one of us felt like they cared about our personal experience of the show. Any mistakes or mishaps were playfully incorporated into the show. And we all left the show with loads of inspiration on how we could be in and engage with the world in a much more playful way.

Enjoy the ride, Morcheeba sing (here on YouTube). And from now on, this is the kind of energy I want to embody on my creator journey.