There’s a lot of talk about inspiration, and waiting for inspiration to strike. But I think that most of the time, the creative spark isn’t what we’re missing. Rather, it’s the stamina to fan a spark into a flame. That’s why so many people say they have great ideas for books, businesses, social campaigns, etc. that they never act on.

What I notice in myself and see echoed by other creative professionals I’ve worked with is that often, creative energy can be overwhelming.

For example following creative inspiration, you might get a deluge of ideas - it’s exciting and motivating. But then, how do you make space for these new ideas? How do you choose where to start? How will you find time to see them through? What will happen if you try something and it fails? What if it succeeds?

A spinning mind is a creativity killer.

We need infrastructure to support creative flow

I have been thinking about it like a monsoon. One time, when I lived in Tucson, AZ, I was walking along the path by the river wash (a dry riverbed) in the blazing hot sun. In the distance, near the eastern mountains, a monsoon storm was dumping rain. As I walked, I noticed a strange rushing sound in the distance. I looked for the source, then found it! Up ahead of me, the river was full, and it was rushing down the dry wash. A literal wall of water coming my way, fast.

It was an incredible experience to witness. On my walk out, the wash was completely dry, cracked earth and all. On my return trip, I was walking aside a fast, flowing river.

In desert cities, there are natural washes and constructed diversion channels in strategic places to manage the flow of water from storms. The hard ground can’t absorb it otherwise, so it needs to be guided into reservoirs.

I think as creatives we are quite similar. We can’t absorb all of the creative energy in a monsoon. It will wash right over us, or through us, and we’ll dry back up in a few hours the way a desert landscape does. We need to be able to channel creative energy in some way so that we can store it, absorb it and pull from it over time.

Structure helps us flow with the creative energy

Similarly, creative practices and habits provide structure to get creative energy moving rather than staying stuck. If you consistently write, draw, craft, dance, etc. then when an idea comes your way next, your much better able to capture it and do something with it. But without any consistent practice, it’s easy for the creative energy behind the idea to get stuck. And stuck energy is overwhelming and exhausting.

So, yeah! That’s my take on why morning pages work and change people’s lives. If you’re looking to get more creativity into your life, this is an easy way to start. It has benefits beyond creativity too (read: mental health, reflection, finding meaning, to name a few).

Try it, and let me know what you think! If you already practice them, I’d love to hear about your experience. Send a quick reply!

How I’m channeling creative energy for my business

In the most nonchalant way possible, I decided I am going to rebuild and reopen my business. This feels like a huge undertaking, but this time, I have the benefit of both foresight and hindsight on my side! I get to intentionally design a business I want to lead (foresight) and I get to use learnings and scraps from my previous business (hindsight).

One thing I always struggled with in business before was marketing. Pretty much everything about marketing felt like a struggle to me - from finding the right copy, to knowing how to invest in marketing campaigns, to finding partners or freelancers that could help me market.

This time around, marketing is top of mind. I want to find a way to do it that feels true to me, and makes a difference on my business’ bottom line. Because I know if I don’t my business won’t grow and I’ll be sad if running a business means primarily doing marketing activities I don’t enjoy.

One way I am approaching this is by turning all of my content, notes and communications into a database I can mine. I realized that I had a wealth of insight, verbiage, pain points and triumphs from past prospects and clients that I could directly turn into marketing assets, if only I could wrangle them.

An AI tool I started using to organize all of my past content and future ideas

Speaking of structure — I needed some to help me find patterns and opportunities in my content. I began searching for a tool to help me do this efficiently. I found mem.ai and am giving it a go. Their promise is that you can make sense of all your ideas, notes and content without having to organize it, and nothing gets lost. What a dream!

It took me about 4 hours to get almost everything in there. Their importing tools are limited, but they do have an import from Notion option. I have been using Notion since starting Rekindle, but the rest of my content was stored in Google Drive, my CRM system and handwritten notes. 🙈 So, I first had to download and zip up all of my GDrive content and import it into Notion (this was the longest part of the process, so many clicks and lots of wait time). Then, once it was all in there, disorganized as all get out, I imported my Notion database into Mem.

Some things I did not expect:

• I had a CSV file with my old email subscriber list that uploaded. And, for some reason, Mem interpreted each row as it’s own mem (what Mem calls notes). So now I have 5k+ mems with a person’s name, email address and a couple other segmenting fields. I don’t think there is anyway that having this info in there as mems is useful, but I also don’t have time to delete 5k mems! I wish I would have seen that one coming. (FYI, I reached out to their support team and they said I can delete my entire import and try again, excluding these files. I’m keeping this here though as an educational/warning point for anyone interested in solving a similar problem)

• There are definitely new workflow challenges. For example, one of the major benefits of Mem is that you can use it to create new content and ideas from your existing content. Think ChatGPT using your own content as the primary datasource - it can learn your style, norms, expectations, etc. Buuuut… I don’t want Mem to be where I store everything, because, seasons change. I can use Zapier to make new content in Google Docs or Notion flow into Mem, but what about the other direction? Maybe this won’t prove to be an issue, but I’m cautious of it.

• I moved so much content into Mem, but I feel like I do not have the right content in there yet to accomplish my goal. To get the info that would be most useful for me, I’d need to type up all of my handwritten notes, add coaching call transcriptions (which I don’t have historical record of), email threads with coaching clients, and add transcripts of all of my podcast and video content (which I don’t have yet either). Maybe I should just focus on the future and not waste time getting historical data in there, but I knwo there’s valuable gems in there if I could surface them.
  
  As an aside, this is really weird to be writing about. I work for a BI company that serves data professionals. I run our customer education program, so my work is all about about helping customers surface insights from their data to drive business decisions. Now, here I am trying to turn my content into data so that I can yield my own business insights.

I have one day left in my free trial before they charge me for the annual subscription. So holler at me if you know of a different/better tool I should consider for this work!

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As always, thank you for being here! If you know someone looking to add more creativity to their life, or whose on the journey to build/rebuild something, please share Rekindle with them.

Warmly,
Jennifer