Choose your lane. Even if it has potholes.
It’s underway.
Last week, I started in Act Two, the new creative course from former bosses and current friends Will Mannon and Dan Sleeman.
The purpose?
To help people find their creative way—by getting out of their own way—and making something worth committing to.
Our first assignment was to write a letter to ourselves with these instructions:
Write a letter to yourself setting your intentions for the next five weeks.
Use the exercises and discussions you completed in the kickoff session as your starting point:
What Second Act might be beyond your horizon? [Your Why]
What project can help you get there? [Your What]
What obstacle(s) will you have to overcome? [Part of your How]
I’m sharing my letter below. Maybe you are working through something similar in an area of your life. And maybe this will help.1
Hey Matt,
Do we need to write this? I mean, we know what the issue is, right?
Ok, fine. We’ll spell it out.
You’ve written hundreds of newsletters and untold sums of Tweets. You’ve helped hundreds of other students find their voices online and grow audiences.
And yet your own audience remains … limited.
1,600 Substack subscribers and 2500 X followers (minus bots, of course) is something. And you’re super-appreciative of every single person who takes the time to read and respond and interact. You have genuine gratitude for the people who do read you2.
But … it kinda gnaws at you that you haven’t broken through to a higher level, right?
It does. Not the toss-and-turn in the night kind of gnawing (that’s reserved for more serious matters), but the kind that seeps in in quiet moments and asks what your problem is. Why you haven’t seen the growth you’ve helped other student writers achieve.
You know the problem.
The problem is you’re a nibbler. You play around the edges.
It doesn’t seem that way sometimes. After all, you’ve published well over 250 newsletters. That’s not nibbling. That’s a steady diet.
But you nibble on topics. You’re afraid to commit to a lane.
Sometimes it’s fitness. Sometimes it’s music or sports or career or books. The output is there. The focus isn’t.
You’re afraid to commit to a topic.
Which is weird for you. You’ve shown up at the gym for 35 years now. You’ve been married for almost 25 years. When your daughter said she wanted to go to school in Michigan, and your wife said it would be nice to be closer to family, and your other daughter wanted a fresh start, you didn’t hesitate. You tore up carpets and painted interiors to get the Florida house sold. You packed up and drove everyone’s stuff in two 20-foot U-Hauls3 (1,319 miles per trip) to make it happen.
That’s commitment. You are a committer.
Except for your creative output, nibbler. There, you like to “keep your options open.”
Now you feel a strong internal push—no, it’s a pull, not a push—to create content around your home state, Michigan. You want to help, because as beautiful and resplendent as this state is, it needs a lot of help.
You want to create content to celebrate this place, because in your first 22 years here you didn’t celebrate it much. After age 12 or so you mostly thought about going somewhere else.
Well, now you’re here again4, by choice, and you’re excited about it. You see opportunities and lots to promote and celebrate. You see many areas where bridges need to be built. You want to be a Statesman for the State of Michigan.
So, commit.
See this through. Create online and talk about it offline. Take pictures and write stories and comb through boring government documents to learn about this place all over again and share it with others.
So that’s the project: commit to what you know you are supposed to do. You know in your soul it’s the right move. So get out of your head and into your heart. Create.
Your key obstacle?
That’s easy. Staying the course. And while you don’t love metrics as goals because all you can control is your effort, 3,000 Substack subs and 5,000 X followers seem like nice numbers. Not final numbers, but a step beyond where you’ve been.
But most importantly, stay the course. The metric signposts will appear down the road when they are supposed to—as long as you don’t take an early exit.
—Matt
Hopefully, you found something useful in there. For me, I’ve put it out there as publicly as I can5. Time to follow through.
Also: this keeps me accountable here.
Seriously. It still blows my mind sometimes that people take the time to read my work.
Lower back status: still in recovery
Life so loves to mock our convictions
I mean, I’m not going to buy billboards or anything. This is it.
Let's gooooooooo✨
Thanks Matt. This post has resonated with me in a big way. Cheers.