Show Notes

Jay Acunzo (@jayacunzo) is the founder of Marketing Showrunners.

Pair today's show with: Detaching with Hanif Abdurraqib - https://bestadvice.show/episodes/2020429_detaching-with-hanif-abdurraqib/

To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST

TRANSCRIPT:

ZAK: Are you feeling creatively stuck or intimidated? If so, today's advice is going to help you to profoundly demystify what it means to make stuff.

JAY: First and foremost, creating anything is an act of you trying to understand it. The creator should be, for example, writing to better understand something. Not writing to share what you already understand. Because by forcing yourself to articulate something, you're gonna have to really interrogate your assumptions and the holes in your thinking. You're gonna have to learn how to articulate things that you can remember and others can hold on to. Write to understand. Don't write to share what you already understand. So you think of it as the process of self-discovery and learning instead of I'm a completed product or at least I'm done learning about this one thing and now I'm sharing that back to you. And the way you do that is you have to start creating. You have to force yourself to go a little bit further than you're comfortable because that's where you'll do your best work. And so for me, that's the act of writing before I understand something. I'm writing to understand. And then that leads to new questions. And that's the next thing you write. So it's this awesome, virtuous cycle.

When somebody assumes that their heroes or inspirational sources or even just whoever they're consuming today has it all figured out and now they're sharing what they've figured out, it prevents them from seeing writing or the creative process for what it is, which is the act of them understanding through them creating.

ZAK: Jay Acunzo is an author and public speaker. He's founded a company called Marketing Showrunners. He's also a really helpful twitter follow. If you have some advice on the creative process, fighting writers block...I would love to hear it. Give me a call on the advice hotline @ 844-935-BEST.

I think episode pairs particularly well with an early episode from this show. It's called Detaching with Hanif Abdurraqib.

HANIF: I see people talking about this idea of growth and it has be paired with a disdain for the work that one created before they grew. And I think a way that I've avoided that is by understanding that I did the best I could with what tools I had and because I wrote that book, I was able to grow and write something else.

ZAK: You can find that episode with Hanif in today's show notes. Thanks for listening and I'll talk to you soon.

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