Permission to Play

Hello again and a happy new year to you!
I hope everyone had some time to rest and rejuvenate at the end of 2024, and I hope that you’re allowing yourself to ease into 2025 at your own pace. I know I did, hence why this issue is hitting your inbox a few days past my usual posting schedule. The reason? This week has been a combination of self-reflection on 2024 and preparation for 2025. That, combined with this being my 10th issue of the newsletter (!!), means that I’ve been doing a lot of thinking around how I want to embrace this year’s theme of Playing in Public. I’m excited to share this with you, so let’s dive in.
xx Alex

Permission to Play: Why your creative success isn’t measured in likes

As we talked about last issue, my theme for 2025 is “Playing in Public”, but I didn’t go into my why. My theme is adapted from a concept by Anne-Laure Le Cunff of Nesslabs called “learning in public” which encourages sharing the whole process, not just the finished work, publicly. It’s a similar idea touted by other creatives, like Austin Kleon in Show Your Work, and once I noticed this repeated message that I was gravitating towards it became clear that this was a good starting point for my 2025 theme.

Something was missing though.

See, to me, ‘learning’ and ‘showing’ as action verbs always make me think of an audience first. Despite being a naturally curious person, too much time in formal education has also led me to be easily swayed by the external validation associated with the act of learning or showing—the performance aspect of it. After some hemming, hawing, and good-old brainstorming, I went with the concept of ‘playing’ instead; it evoked a mindset of mild hedonism and self-indulgence that I liked. If “learning” or “showing” is like baking cupcakes for your whole grade-school class for valentine’s day, then “playing” is that part before you bring them in where you get to enjoy licking the bowl and eating spoonfuls of icing 🧁

I publish, therefore I am?

To put that intrinsic motivation front and center this year, my theme emerged as “Playing in Public” and now that it’s been 7 months and a day since I published my first newsletter and 3 weeks since I published my first YouTube video, this need to emphasize the intrinsic motivation feels more important than ever. See over this time period, I’ve noticed an increasing pull towards extrinsic motivations for continuing to publish. Before starting to share my hobbies and ideas through this newsletter and YouTube, my enjoyment of thinking, writing, journaling, and planning all came from within because doing these things was inherently interesting and enjoyable for me—it was all intrinsically motivated. Then, when I opened these ideas up to the world wide web, I suddenly became exposed to a bunch of extrinsic motivators due to external rewards and pressures. Using any publishing platform gives you access to all these shiny metrics and data, and suddenly I had concerns about things like “audience retention” and “subscribers” floating through my head as I was in my creative flow—I wasn’t so sure I liked it.

There’s a kind of double-edged sword to the sharing aspect of doing things publicly. On the one hand, it’s helpful to have that accountability of knowing that someone might be actually looking forward to seeing what you’ve created, since this can help with motivation and consistency. On the other hand, focusing too hard on who might see our work could lead to perfectionistic tendencies as we struggle to keep up with imagined expectations. Or since a lot of publishing platforms seem to have some kind of streak measurement built into them, either transparently or through the looming black box of “the algorithm”, it could push us to keep posting things just because we want to avoid what a publishing platform has decided is the scariest outcome: low engagement.

I wasn’t at the point where I was struggling with this yet, but as I could feel the extrinsic motivators overtaking my intrinsic ones, I knew something had to change. If I didn’t adjust how I was approaching sharing my creative hobbies with the internet, either my perfectionism or a drive to “keep up with the creative Joneses” would eventually take all the fun out of my creative process. I didn’t want the validity of my ideas to be wrapped up in things that were largely outside of my control, like follower counts and likes. And since the solution wasn’t “stop sharing”, I decided to focus on using my intrinsic motivation to mitigate the impact of metrics on my creative confidence.

If fear is a creativity-killer, then face fear with joy

To reconnect with my intrinsic motivation, I asked myself: “Why did I want to start posting my ideas and hobbies online in the first place?” The answer was easy—to find community. For me, community is an opportunity to connect with people through shared interests and our ideas about them. This is the thing that brings me the most joy, and it’s what makes me excited throughout the process of writing a newsletter or filming a YouTube video. The idea of connecting with others is what keeps me going, especially when I’m 2 hours deep into editing a 50-minute long video and I’ve only finished the first 10 minutes of it 😅

So with that idea of community and connection in mind, I’ve done some brainstorming and here are three steps I’m taking right now to keep myself focused on what really matters:

1. Over-indexing on how I feel: The quantitative metrics, aka the number stuff like subscribers, likes, and click-throughs, are served up on a silver platter by publishing platforms when you start sharing your work. I decided that I needed a space to focus instead on the fuzzier things, like how I feel about a piece I’ve just written or what cool conversation I had with someone about my latest video. So, being the planner-loving person I am, I decided to set up a planner dedicated to those kinds of feelings-based qualitative metrics, and I’m using most of the various trackers in there to focus on those kinds of feelings instead of the quantitative stuff. If you want to see how I’m going to be using this planner and a bunch of other ones in 2025, subscribe over on Youtube so you don’t miss my next video all about this, coming out Thursday January 9th.

2. Building self-reflection into my workflow: In that same planner, I’m setting aside time and space for weekly reflections that let me be introspective about the highlights and lowlights I capture at a high level in the trackers. I answer the same 4 big questions I answer in any of my other reflections, but focus specifically on the creative work that I made over the past week. I ask myself:

   1. What was my favourite moment?

   2. What went well?

   3. What didn’t go well?

   4. What am I learning?

   This self-reflection is crucial because it keeps me focused on feelings over figures, which counteracts their potential to demotivate or overwhelm me. This clears up mental space for me to focus on enjoying the process of developing my craft through practice instead.

3. Setting the bar for metrics in hell: I have really low expectations for all those quantitative metrics that publishing platforms share. Seriously. Like anything over 1 is a win—whether that’s 1 subscriber, 1 open, 1 like, 1 comment, 1 view. By keeping my expectations super low it’s made it really easy for me to not care about how one published work compares to another. This actually came in handy recently with my YouTube channel: my first video had over 1000 views in less than 2 weeks, but my second video? It hasn’t even passed 100 views yet and it’s been up for almost a week now. But never fear, low expectations to the rescue! Keeping the bar this low makes it really easy for me to avoid fixating on things largely outside of my control and stops me from falling into a perfectionist mindset about the next piece I’m working on publishing.

These are the techniques I’m currently using to remind myself that my creativity isn’t validated by the act of sharing things publicly. These introspective tools and practices built into my workflow allow me to stay focused on the play aspect of the process that I enjoy, meaning that I get to happily share my work with the knowledge that I’m doing it so that I can connect with others, not so that I can push some random needle in an app. I’ll be sure to keep you posted on how they’re working out as I keep posting and publishing!

Confronting your own creativity-killer

So, is there anything your working on that you want to share publicly this year? I bet something just popped into your head, so here’s my number one tip to help you start getting that idea from your sketchbook/Google doc/camera roll out into the world: focus on your why. What is it that made you want to share your work in the first place? Like me, is it also finding people with similar interests to connect with? Or, maybe you view publishing as the cherry on top? The thing that makes a project feel like it’s actually complete. Whatever it is, figuring out what your why is lays a solid foundation for identifying what you want to track, not just what publishing platforms tell you are important metrics.

Tell me what creative pursuits you’re planning to explore, and if you’re going to be sharing them online. If you are, I’d love to follow your own creative journey so hit reply and tell me all about what you’re working on and where you’re posting it! Think of it as your first exercise in playing publicly 😉