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sholioQuite a bit of my reading over the last couple of months has been nonfiction about marketing and running a small business. My year's theme is sustainability and reinvention: learning how to do this business in a way that makes decent money and doesn't burn me out. I've had some misses, but I felt like I got useful insight (for me personally) from these:
Write to Riches by Renee Rose: I am deeply annoyed that one of the most personally useful books I've read in the last few months is a book on manifesting. (For those who don't know, manifesting is big right now in the indie writer community; it's a philosophy that involves nurturing the correct energy to energetically attract/manifest the things you want from the universe. In other words, if you want a new house, tell the universe that you want a house and really believe in getting a house and it will give you a house.) I don't believe in the energy side of it at all. But ... more on that
the positive thinking, forward-looking, "seize the opportunity when it comes along" mentality of it has actually been very helpful for me on a purely non-metaphysical basis. Similarly, manifesting philosophy is big on clearing "energy blocks" that prevent the energy from flowing freely through you, but - once again I am deeply annoyed that this is so useful - on a non-metaphysical level, it involves identifying the specific beliefs that are stopping you from going out and getting a thing you want, and going, "Well, is that a rational belief to have? What's the basis of it? What if I didn't believe that? What if I tried anyway?"
From an actual best-practices standpoint, it turns out that going into a new venture, even if it's just like, doing a highway drive or something, and telling myself ahead of time that it's going to work out for the best, I'll have a good time and accomplish what I want and I'm prepared to deal with anything that happens along the way, is useful! Far more useful than dwelling on what might go wrong. To be completely fair, this isn't a huge perspective shift for me, more like leaning into my natural optimism and confidence, which I do have a lot of to begin with, at least on my more positive days. But doing it deliberately and with intent is something a bit new for me, and I like the results, so I think I'm going to keep working at it.
I ran into a summary of the useful-for-me aspects of manifesting somewhere else, not in this book, which is basically (paraphrased from memory): if you really want a duck, and you spend all your time learning about ducks, and you hang out around people who have ducks and talk about ducks and start noticing ducks and tell everyone you want a duck and spend time in places where ducks are, eventually you will have a duck. Manifesting at its less energetic end is just that. Once you start really applying yourself to getting a duck, you notice ducks everywhere! Or at least you realize that if you want a duck that badly, you need to change your life in ways that are compatible with duck ownership.
(This book has a number of journaling exercises that also combine well with some other journaling practices I've been discovering via other books I've been reading, so if nothing else I might come out of this with some self-soothing journal habits too. Like writing down three successes from the day, major or minor; that kind of thing. Or asking your subconscious to help solve a problem while you sleep. I'm not doing any of this regularly, but I'm kicking around the idea of doing more of it, and more often.)
Slow Productivity by Cal Newport: This book is on pacing yourself to avoid burnout. I don't know how personally useful it's going to be for me, but I enjoyed reading it - there are also quite a few actionable suggestions in the last section for putting this into effect as a creative person - and I think in particular, this book is reassuring as a reminder that you don't have to be on the go all the time to get anywhere. Fallow periods and taking the time to do something right from the beginning are just as important as rushing through to the finish line, and this is not only a reminder of that, but it has a number of useful case studies of creative people who played the long game well. And sometimes intentionally making less money and enjoying life more is the right choice. As indie publishing can be geared towards sellsellsell at all times, this was a nice antidote to that.
10x is Easier than 2x by Benjamin Hardy & Dan Sullivan: This is a book with a caveat, which is that it's based on this one self-help guru's "get ahead faster" (and pay me money to find out how!) shtick. But it actually did give me quite a bit of food for thought. The idea here is that, as a creative person trying to make a living or a small business owner, incrementally improving your business/creative life by making small improvements to what you're already doing is actually more difficult and less productive in the long run than learning to make big sea-change shifts to discard what didn't work before, embrace the best of what you've already learned, and level up rapidly. (And be happier, work better, and enjoy your life more.) More on that
Basically, you can go on making small improvements to things you're already doing - or find ways to toss/eliminate/outsource everything that is cluttering up your creative life and embrace the aspects of it that you really want to do more of, to lean into what you really want to do rather than being sucked down by minutiae and aspects of creativity/entrepreneurship that you don't enjoy.
This book is largely aimed at self-employed people, whereas the Slow Productivity book is geared more towards those who don't have as much freedom to self-pace. So they're complementary in a way. But the philosophy of both has some things in common. I think one thing that keeps coming up in the books I'm reading is: as a business owner, outsourcing or - if possible - eliminating the things you don't want to do simply makes sense. It's better business practice (why do something exhausting, that you're not that good at, that takes you away from what you really want to be doing?) and frees up more time for doing what you're good at, that you do and enjoy best, or simply having more unstructured leisure time to refresh and recharge.
Obviously the exact amount of usefulness in any of these books is going to depend on where you are in your life, creatively and otherwise, but these are hitting me in the right way for what I'm currently working on figuring out, which is how to go forward in a way that's more sustainable for me long-term than the past few years have been. My big issue is that 2022-24 burned me out so badly - not just including work, but also personal, health, family issues - that I'm only now feeling like I'm starting to get back some of the creative fire that I used to deploy without even thinking about it in the 2010s. So I'd like to keep enjoying and building on that in a healthy way going forward, and not dig myself right back into the same hole.
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