The Problem With Creating Things You Love

It was about 13 years ago. I sat down with this girl’s parents and I told them, I would like to marry your daughter. And I remember sitting there on the couch in their house. We were at home over Christmas at the time we were living out in California and we were back for Christmas vacation and I was like, I’d been planning this for, for weeks, is that I was gonna sit down with her parents, ask for their permission. And then the next day I was gonna go out and with my friend, I was going to propose. It was this very big, elaborate proposal, but I’ve been planning this for a hot little minute. And I thought sitting down with her parents, that would be a nice formality. It shows respect and all this stuff.

And I thought it was just a foregone conclusion. It’s just something people do. And I thought I had a good relationship with her parents. So I wasn’t really overly concerned about what they were going to say. They were generally very nice to me. It seemed like we get along very well. Well, all that to say, I sit there one night with them in their living room and her mom just looks at me dead in the eyes and she says, what are you going to do to provide for our daughter? And she said it almost like an accusation. What are you going to do? It wasn’t like, tell me your plan.

Show me your business model or anything like that. It wasn’t like, I believe in you. This wasn’t a softball pitch for me to knock out of the park and tell her all the ways that I was going to make something of myself because at this point in my life I was just a dirtbag rock climber, really. I was working at a climbing gym. I was a professional in the sense that I was getting paid to climb and take videos and do all that stuff, but it doesn’t pay great money. But it did allow me to pursue a thing I was very passionate about, which was great for me at that point in my life. But what it didn’t really do is it didn’t put me in a position to be able to provide for anybody financially, much less myself. I was barely keeping it together at that point.

And so her question, it was very pointed, but it was a fair one in the sense of like, yeah, but what are you going to do, Anthony? And it was the first time that I felt society’s weight, the weight of society’s expectations upon me saying, like, you need to be a provider. You need to be a meaningful contributor to society. And I had been Peter panning for so many years rebuking society’s pressures ever since I’d gotten out of college. I said, I don’t want to play the games that society tells me I need to play anymore. I’m going to do my own thing. And this was the first time I was like, okay, well, here’s the consequences. The price of going and doing your own thing is that people will look at you, they will judge you, and they’ll say, you are not worthy. And I felt very not worthy coming off that conversation.

All that’s to say is, I got their permission as I left there that night. But her question really stuck with me, and it put a chip on my shoulder, and it made me want, for the very first time in my life, to prove people wrong and show them that I could win the money game. I had just never really been trying. I’d never been playing it for real before that, at least this is what I’d been telling myself, right? And often we tell ourselves, oh, I could win that game. I just choose not to play it. There’s so many games like this in life. Money is one of those for most of us. I had been playing it in that way for so many years, just telling myself, I don’t want to be rich.

It doesn’t matter to me. That was the first time where I was finally like, you know what I do? I want to have money so I can push it into somebody’s face. Right? Now. All has to say, as a year goes by, I get that girl to agree to marry me, and then she leaves me a year later, and now I have to live in the back of a van. I’m dead broke. And so we know that my financial journey wasn’t like an overnight success, right? I did not succeed in just going and winning the money game the next day. It wasn’t like that at all. In fact, coming off of that conversation, I racked my brain.

I was like, what can I do to make money? What are the different ways? And at that point in my life, I had no demonstrable skills that I could figure out how to leverage. And I had no clue even what a valuable skill was necessarily, especially when it comes to making money. I was like, I don’t know. My mind kept going back to being a lawyer or an accountant. I’m like, that seems like a thing people pay a lot of money for. But I didn’t know what. Entrepreneurship still hadn’t really crossed my mind at that point. I didn’t leave that conversation and think, I’m going to go start a business.

That’s not where my mind went. My mind went, okay, who do I know that makes a lot of money? And at that point in my life, I was a very avid reader. I read a ton of science fiction and fantasy, and the first people, no shit, that came to my mind was Stephen King and J. K. Rowling. Now, the reason Stephen King came to mind, it wasn’t that I had read a lot of his books and thought he was like, the bees knees or anything, is because when I was 14 years old, my dad, for some reason, bought me for my birthday. Stephen King’s book called on writing. It’s a book just about his writing process.

And I had no clue why my dad was giving this to me because I had never expressed any interest in writing, really. He noticed that I had a natural aptitude for storytelling and writing, and he fostered that when I was a child. But it wasn’t something that I had taken the onus of imperative upon myself to go and pursue. I wasn’t passionate about it. It wasn’t something that I’d ever been interested in. It was just a skill that somebody else had said I had, and he was trying to help cultivate it. Well, all those years later, then when I leave that conversation with my fiance’s parents, I’m like, well, Stephen King makes money. My dad believes that I’m a good writer, and he thinks that I could be a great writer.

And so I thought, well, maybe I’ll just go and be the next Stephen King. Maybe that’s the thing that I’ll do. So I went to the Internet and started researching, okay, how do I do this? How do I get good at writing? How do I become a great writer? And the thing that everybody kept saying, you hear about that 10,000 hours, Malcolm Gladwell rule, like, you need to put 10,000 hours of concerted effort into a craft to master it. And with writing, it doesn’t quite work the same because you could spend 10,000 hours at a computer, but you only write 100 words. That’s not very helpful. Right? So the metric we use as writers is how many words are you producing? How many words have you written? And the word count everybody was using was 1 million. They were saying, you need to write a million shitty words. Until you can get underneath the bedrock to the deep good stuff, you can find those good words worth sharing with the world.

So I sat down and I mapped it out as, okay, a million words is about 3000 words every single day for the next year. If I pound out 3000 words every day. I can do this now. That first week was very easy. I sat down every single day and wrote 3000 words. They were flying out of me because I still had like that fiery anger chip on my shoulder. I’m going to prove everybody wrong. Then it gets a little bit harder and it turns out 3000 words a day is quite a lot of words.
That’s a chapter from a book. That’s a chapter of a book. Generally speaking, that’s a lot. Most professional writers are maybe doing three to ten pages a day. That’s around 1000, maybe 1500 words for a professional full time author. So doing 3000 a day, that was a lot of writing. But all that’s to say fast forward a year and a half later, my fiancee has left me. I’ve been in the van for a couple of months now.

We’re just starting the window washing business. And it’s around this time that my very first book is published. This book I’ve written at this point probably a million and a half words. And so this is the very first thing that’s ever come out of me publicly. And it’s called time heist. And it was a very interesting experience. It was an interesting experience in that I had poured so much of myself for the very first time in my life into something I loved, into creating something that was a piece of me. And there are lines or chapters, there are characters in that story that I’m just so deeply in love with.

And sharing that with the world then was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. And one of the hardest things was that the way my friends and family reacted to this book made me feel like they didn’t love it as much as I loved it. And it was really hard to reconcile that because I thought the people closest to me would be the ones that loved it the most. Now, that book went on to do very well, all things told, and it got a lot of great feedback. But the feedback didn’t ever come from my friends and family. And I remember that being very hard to reconcile at that time. The idea of it’s like having a child that you want everybody to love and think is beautiful and like, look at my great, and look at my baby. And then when somebody tells you your baby really sucks, your baby’s ugly, you’re like, ooh, that’s okay if it comes from a stranger, but when it comes from your dad, you’re like, yeah, your baby’s fine.

You’re like, wait, you don’t love my baby as much as I do. That’s how I felt with that first thing. And I experienced that over and over and over again as I pursued my fiction writing career. I published a dozen books and novels and novellas, and each time it was very similar. I loved what I’d created. There’s something about in fiction, if you don’t love what you create, it’s not ready for the world. If you create something that you’re not passionately in love with, then it’s probably not going to be something anybody else is going to be passionately in love with. The problem with this then, is you get really tied to that thing, to the result of that thing, and based on people, how they react to it, it can really hurt you.

And I share this with you because as I started to pivot over the years into entrepreneurship and into writing nonfiction things, my Twitter, my LinkedIn, the book passive investing made simple. I write less and less fiction and more nonfiction these days, and it’s so easy to be emotionally detached from that because it’s more, hey, here’s the facts, here’s the structure. Here’s the thing that you need to go do to get XYZ result. And I found over the years that I like that form of writing because I can help positively impact people’s life. But I’m never creating something that I’m truly in love with. It’s just not the nature of the beast. Until last week, I decided I was going to write something a little bit different. It was in the nonfiction vein, but I was also going to bring a little bit of my fiction background to it and write it in a way that was more.

It’s a little bit different, and it’s going out in the newsletter here today, but it went out on Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook last week, and it was the first time that I published something in a very, very long time where I read it. I’ve read it 10, 15, 20 times, not just to try and edit it, but because I just genuinely enjoy reading it. It’s the very first time I’ve had that in a really long time, and I shared it with the world. And true formula, it didn’t perform nearly as well as the other things that I’ve written recently. And that made me feel bad, made me feel like, oh, my baby. Nobody loves my baby as much as I do. And the reason I share all this with you is because this is a very real thing that you, as a creator, will have to wrestle with at different points in your journey, whether you’re an entrepreneur or if you are a creative, like a fiction writer or an artist, a graphic designer, is that you will love your babies more than anybody else will love you. And you have to reconcile the fact that that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad baby.

If nobody else loves it, that’s okay. It doesn’t mean it was a bad baby if you love it, that can be enough justification for it to exist in the first place. And that’s something that I had to wrestle with last week, where I was like, man, I kind of bummed out that this didn’t go viral and that people didn’t love it as much as I love it. And that’s just part of the process. And so I share this so that, you know, you’re not alone, that we all go through this, and hopefully that gives you a little bit of strength to continue on. Keep persevering, because the only thing you control is what you do next. So get to it. Go create something amazing and share it with the world, regardless of what they think.