8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Category: Part 2 – Nowhere but Everywhere

The creative professional and what it means to create at and for work, pay, and career. The work of creating.

Chapter List

  • Strange Runs

    I took up distance running seriously in 2008, shortly after my daughter was born. I had been dabbling in the sport for a decade previous, but right around new years and that time of making resolutions I signed up to join a training clinic at the local running supply store. Nearly two decades later I’ve run tens of thousands of kilometres, completed hundreds of races, and found a network of people who are some of my closest friends.

    Being a runner also had a strange effect at the office. 

    There were enough of us runners that we found each other. In meetings, in the lunch room, or by winks and nudges from others who relayed that “did you know so and so is a runner, too?”

    This is not a post about running. 

    This is a post about networking.

    Taking up a sport, a hobby or a creative passion and being open about that in your professional life has a weird and magical way of interconnecting us in the otherwise dispassionate spaces of the work world. 

    …not that this is some deep insight. Shared interests forge tribes, after all. 

     But while you could just as easily find that tribe talking about a great band or the local sports club, finding out that your coworkers are aspiring authors, avid photographers, spending their evenings composing music, or just own a really expensive running watch, too, is a different level of camaraderie that shouldn’t be overlooked by creative spirits.   

  • String Games

    I remember watching tv when I was a kid and that old trope of tying a string around your finger was something that snagged on my consciousness. After all, how the heck does trying a string around your finger help you remember something? But a lot of tv and film characters seemed to do it, so, there must have been something to it, right?

    Much later in life I realized that the finger trick and similar memory triggers are a bit of a hack—and not necessarily tied up in string.

    For example, sometimes if I need to remember to bring something when I leave in the morning, the night before I’ll leave something else out of place: I’ll move my toothbrush or put a sock in my shoe. It’s stupidly simple, but the next morning I’ll see the out of place item and my brain will connect with the reason it out of place which is tied back to the little story I put in my head about needing to remember that thing and… boom, there it is.

    String around the finger was just that: a memory hack. Why did I tie that string around my finger again? Oh, right… I need to do that thing.

    It got me thinking about memory hacks for creative work. What’s the driving down the road and suddenly being struck with inspiration without a notebook equivalent of the string around the finger?  How can I make sure I don’t lose a great idea just because I can’t immediately write it down? 

    I think if I figure that out, I’ll have a lot more great ideas—or at least one’s that I remember when I’m not sitting ready at my computer.

  • Hustle Up

    What if the people buying are not into what you are selling?

    Consumer-driven culture and basic economics would argue that supply should meet demand. If you are supplying something that no one seems to want, capitalism argues that you need to shift your product to where the demand seems to be.

    But what if the supply is, well… you?

    What if you are selling yourself and your skills, or your ideas and your art?

    Is it worth shifting the product to meet demand? Should you change to align with what someone seems to want from you? 

    Say, you submit a proposal for a big idea or walk into a job interview or call into a pitch meeting—and what you are selling there is your ideas, your skills or yourself—but they are not buying?

    Are you in the position to say I’m not going to be or do something I’m not, sell something I don’t have, or pretend to be good at a skill I don’t yet have just to get a gig or a deal? Or are you full on ready for the hustle of becoming someone different simply to get the work? 

    Maybe you are. Maybe you don’t have that luxury.

    Either way, it often seems to be little more than a balance between selling yourself …and being yourself.

  • Productivity Obsession

    I will admit that I have a bit of an obsession with the notion of tracking personal productivity.

    I have tried apps, journals, lists, calendars, logs, books, spreadsheets, databases and more.

    This afternoon I vibe coded an app for my Mac that (for now) emulates the key features of the popular and once-trendy bullet journal but in a task list-meets-log sort of way. Maybe I’ll even use it… for a while.

    Does any of it actually work tho?

    I’d like to sit here and write the virtues of all these tools in leading to a more productive creative life, but at the end of the day what probably works best is just simple accountability to self. All of these little gimmicks are meant to bolster that accountability, but if one doesn’t have it to start with then no amount of filling pages, sorting lists, or checking boxes is going to change what ends up on the pages that matter at the end of the day.

  • Derailed Days

    To say it is easy for a creative person to get derailed in the span of any given day is almost not worth saying, it is so obvious. Stephen Pressfield in his wonderful little book The War of Art[1], a must read for any creative soul, calls this a kind of resistance.

    Resistance is the force, says Pressfield, that keeps us from doing our work as creative people.

    Today, I found my day full of resistance, derailed and amok.

    I will spare the details of the chaos in this post, but needless to say that I ran up against a lot of external resistance in the hours when I would usually be creating something worthy of the concept.

    And yet, here I am and I have opened my laptop late into the evening to fight the resistance that swelled up over this day and to finish off the waning minutes having done at least a little of something.

    It is easy to get derailed, but it is important to find one’s way back to the tracks sooner than later. Resistance is tricky like that, always tempting you to take the easy route, go to bed having accomplished nothing, when all it takes is to resist right back.