Hey Reader,

I had grand plans for my content this year, while also planning to take the pressure off of myself.

If you've been reading regularly, you'll know I recently started a series in which I'm reintroducing the WEIRD process, which I've written about before outside of this newsletter, but have new insights and lessons to share having spent that much more time with it since then.

My ideas and ambitions often outpace my capacity, however.

Over the course of planning out and writing the first few issues of the series, the actual creation process went from joyful to dreary to dreadful. It felt like homework, and the self-imposed pressure returned.

It's not my style to ask AI to crank out content for me just to be able to ship it out the door consistently and check the "done" box. No judgment if that's your thing, but it's just not how I operate.

In the world of entrepreneurship and personal branding, even among the movement for a softer, hustle-free world of self-employment, there is still plenty of messaging encouraging us to show up continuously even when we don't feel like it in order to remind people we exist in a hypercompetitive attention economy.

Whether you also create content or are simply trying to manage the stale text threads in your phone and respond to emails you've lost track of, you don't need to remind everyone you exist all the time.

The right people will remember you. The best people will sing your praises when you're not in the room. The rest aren't worth your energy to chase.

I'm not at all an expert in, nor have I even solved for myself, the problem of visibility on the internet as someone who doesn't want to be seen but still needs to reach people, but I can confidently assure you that it's okay to do things your way. You don't have to show up the same way or in the same places as everyone or anyone else. You can take a break when it gets too hard and you're not getting meaningful returns on your effort.

Wait, what? Why aren't you telling me to keep going because my breakthrough is just around the corner?

Because maybe it's not (not yet, not for a while, or just not, and it's impossible to know the difference). That's okay, but continuing to push could just make you more burned out in that case, whereas listening to yourself and your needs will benefit you in the long run and create space for what you really need (and want).

There's a difference between doing the necessary hard things to realize our goals and doing hard things because we've been taught to believe they'll benefit us just because they're hard, regardless of whether they're even yielding the results we want, or if the goal we're striving toward is even what we want, either.

Speaking of which, that brings us back to the WEIRD process and Want to Change. I hope to continue the series, just at a slower pace. I might also intersperse the series with the same type of random thoughts I published prior to the series, so I'm less boxed in.

I'm not sure when you'll hear from me next. Content experts impose the "should" of publishing on a regular schedule, but if I have to keep that up, it stops being fun, and that goes against everything my brand is about...finding joy, being weird, and doing things your own way.

Thanks for bearing witness once again to my own messy process and I hope you stay tuned for what I have to share next...when it feels right, not on a weekly schedule.

Bye for now, and I hope you can find some joyful moments to connect with yourself and your creativity until I land in your inbox again.