Another breakthrough in how I think about creativity and productivity.
A friend recently introduced me to the thoughts of a guy named Gary Vaynerchuk, or GaryVee as he’s better known. He seems to be constantly filming or recording himself, or outputting SOME sort of thought online. Every day. Multiple times a day even. To me, that sounds exhausting. And it’s not the act of filming and speaking which is necessarily tiring for me, but the thought of having to have fresh and original ideas to produce every single day.
However, the more I listen to what Gary is saying day-to-day, I noticed something. He is not necessarily coming up with a new idea every time he flips on the camera, but he is often reiterating the same thing over and over. The thought of GaryVee can be summed up in two words:
WORK HARD.
I noticed that he doesn’t really stray very far from this simple idea. He pushes people to work hard. Gary himself is the child of immigrants who built himself from nearly nothing to a thriving entrepreneur who shares stages with the likes of Tony Robbins and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. He relentlessly spouts pithy lines such as, “If you have ever spent five dollars on a Starbucks cup of coffee, you cannot complain about your life situation.”
His main idea is simple, but he somehow always comes up with new ways to communicate it. And I (and evidently millions of others) continually tune back into his videos because he is inspiring. His redundancy reveals the passion he has for hard work and pushing people to be their absolute best (fair warning: he cusses excessively).
I realized that I often create in an opposite manner. I write a single blog post on, say, God’s interaction with our emotions, and think to myself, Welp. I’ve covered that. What else can I come up with?
The ironic part is, I often get messages from readers saying how grateful they are for a certain post or video because it helped them see x, y, and z in a new way. The only problem is, the things they picked up were not exactly what I was trying to say (and sometimes, they’re way off).
All this means is that it’s time to take a chapter out of Gary’s book: Talking about the same things repeatedly, but communicated differently. Maybe even with only slight differences. The reason being, some things may click a certain way with some people, while other ways of saying the same thing click with others.
For instance, I am passionate about speaking against pornography, and I often feel like I’m beating a tired beat on the same old drum, but others don’t seem to think so. In fact, an influential person in LA once told me so. He said that you actually need to narrow your scope of things to talk about. Become ‘the Christian porn guy,’ or the ‘motorcycling yoga girl.’
There’s already a GaryVee online telling people to work hard. And there’s a Matt Komo teaching people how to shoot beautiful film. And there’s a FunForLouis galavanting around the world with dreadlocks. But what exactly is your passion? What is the one thing you feel like you could talk about 100 different ways without running out of things to say?
I’m asking myself this. The problem with being an extrovert is we have a tendency to be a mile wide and three inches deep with our interests. Someone may dedicate their life to playing guitar, while I prefer to reach a certain level of competency before moving on to my next big interest.
But really, all of this is to say that I’ll be continuing to write and shoot videos and podcasts, and if you hear a topic which sounds familiar, this is why. As a creator, I think the most important thing is to keep creating, even if it’s reformatting an old idea.
What do you think though? What’s your big idea?
Let me know!
e
P.S. I’m now writing for Medium, so if you prefer that….medium…..click here!
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