The Question That Pulled Me Out of a Slump

Sorry for the radio silence the past few weeks. I’ve spent the better part of this summer trying to get my life and business pointed in the same direction again.

I think I’m finally making some headway… hence, a newsletter!

Here’s the story of what had to change for me, because I have a feeling some of you have been stuck in the same place.

Sometimes you don’t need discipline.

It’s really easy to be effective day-in and day-out when you’re being pulled by the work.

There are certain projects (films especially) that can grab you and won’t let go. Instead of having to muster the willpower to work on them, you have to will yourself to stop thinking about them.

I’ve made films both ways. Sometimes I have to brute-force my way through the beginning stages until eventually something clicks, and suddenly I feel like I’m rolling downhill instead of pushing a boulder uphill. At least until I hit the next major hurdle.

But lately, I haven’t felt pulled towards much of anything, so everything I was working on felt like a slog.

YouTube videos. Newsletters. Scripts. Even typing back a short email became a tall order.

If I didn’t happen to have willpower on any given day… nothing was getting done that day.

The Hamster Wheel

I was burnt out from always feeling trapped in the day-to-day and week-to-week of work. Always stuck working in my business as opposed to working on the business, especially once my old video editor left and my workload really increased.

I never could see too far in the future, it was usually just about finishing the current video before the sponsor deadline. Go go go!

When there was down-time, I would usually waste it by just slowing down the work I was doing until it filled that “extra” time.

Since I hadn’t bothered to stop running on the hamster wheel long enough to ask myself where all of this work is actually supposed to be leading, everything felt kind of purposeless.

And when the purpose of work is just to get done with something so you can get on to the next thing, it’s not an exciting place to be.

As a result I lost more and more motivation. Finally, something had to give.

Thinking Bigger

I had to slow down almost to a stop, take that short-term hit, and try to break the cycle.

After a lot of thought, I realized the big problem. Running this little business requires 2 sides of me – worker Kent, and manager Kent.

Worker Kent was doing his thing, but manager Kent was slacking off big time.

I put on my dusty manager hat and asked myself: What’s the most important thing to move the business forward in the next 3 months?

The answer came pretty quickly, because it was what I was struggling with the most. I needed to get to a point where I could put out videos more consistently. Everything I do and want to do with Standard Story Co relies on that foundation.

Boom. I now have a quarterly goal: Build the system so that publishing a video every week feels ordinary.

Wow, almost feels like a real business.

Once I had the goal, it was pretty easy to start breaking it down into sub-projects that I’d need to do to make that goal happen: Find a new editor (thankfully done now), refine the post workflow, batch write & film videos, create a backlog of finished videos, etc.

Soon I had an entire quarter’s worth of video ideas on paper, and already I started feeling more energized and less overwhelmed.

It all seems very simple in retrospect, but when I was treading water for months it wasn’t so obvious. Only by taking the time to stop and plan ahead, could I actually start getting ahead.

Zooming Out More

Obviously if planning ahead a few months is helpful, so is planning out even further. What’s the big picture goal for the next year?

Just like this quarter’s goal of being consistent with YouTube videos, I think for the year the goal is consistency with basically everything.

After some more thought, I landed on the key word: Reliability.

My goal for the next year is to be reliable to my audience, my business, and myself.

That last one includes the people in my life, and my own health. Too many days and weeks go by without working out or planning something fun in the future because I’m too busy just trying to tread water and get the bare minimum done at work.

If you can’t be reliable to yourself, you can’t hope to take control of your life, stay on top of things, help your people, and actually build the type of life that you want. Instead, every other person and force in the universe will gladly step up to steer your life at random, and that’s not something I’m interested in.

Not sure how concretely I’ll meet this bigger goal in just a year, but it feels like a good one to aim for.

But then I started thinking, what if I do fully get my shit together in a year?

Why stop there, right?

Zooming Out One More Time

I don’t want to have long periods of aimless drifting in the future.

Besides the fact that I feel down during those aimless months, they can also really compound over your lifetime. How much can be accomplished in the span of just a year that could affect the rest of your life? A lot! Why waste it?

So I wanted to figure out an even bigger, unreachable goal.

Goal isn’t even the right word though. It’s more abstract. It’s more about a way of living that would apply to anything I wanted to do, and hopefully be durable enough to last until I die (I’d settle for a few years I guess).

This was very hard to figure out, and I spent a long time thinking and journaling about it.

The problem is, I have no idea what specifically I want to do professionally say 10 years from now. As long as I’m making things and building something, I feel happy. It doesn’t have to be a film career. I’d be content writing a novel or making more shorts on my channel or trying to invent some useful gadget. As long as I get to challenge myself and be creative I’ll probably be happy.

On the other hand, my big fear is becoming someone who’s whole identity and personality is their work, and outside of that they’re a boring, joyless person.

And in light of those 2 concerns, it was hard to come up with any kind of all-in-one-mission-statement for myself. But by changing the question a little bit, it became more clear.

The right question to ask at this level is: What kind of person do I want to be?

Eventually that boiled down to 3 values that I valued across every area of my life, and would apply no matter what my actual work looks like 20 years from now: Live curiously, make relentlessly, and share generously.

When I’m doing all 3, I feel like the best version of myself. And that aspiration trickles down into every yearly, quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily project.

So if what I’m doing on any given day doesn’t live up to that ideal, then I would be wise to start questioning whatever it is I’m doing. It may be leading me towards becoming a different person than I intended.

Results So Far

For the first time in a long time, this exercise has given me that feeling of being pulled in by my work, rather than brute-force getting it done.

I’m also feeling a ton of relief as I’m finally starting to get ahead of work, and should soon even have a backlog of unpublished videos!

The funny part is though that on a day-to-day basis, my work didn’t change all that much. The big difference is that I finally understood WHY today’s tasks mattered.

I can see how it all ladders up to the person I’m trying to become, and at least for now, that’s returned some pep to my step.

How About You?

If you’ve been feeling similarly stuck, I’d encourage you to try the same exercise.

Pop your head out from the urgent-but-unimportant work you have on your plate and try asking yourself some hard questions:

• What’s your biggest goal this quarter?
  • What projects would need to happen to get those done?
• What bigger goal does that build to?
  • What would the next few quarters look like to make that happen in a year?
• What kind of person do you want to be?

You might be surprised how much easier today’s work becomes when it’s connected to something bigger.

And if you figure out some answers to these questions, hit reply and send them my way. I’d love to hear some different perspectives.

Let’s make some movies.

-Kent

PS – I wish I could tell you I just wrote all of these thoughts in a notebook and called it a day. Instead, I ended up spending 3 weeks vibe-coding a to-do app for myself based around this whole idea Classic over-optimizing…

It’s still early days, but it’s been helpful so far and a lot of fun to tinker with. I’ll keep putting it through its paces and let you know if it turns out to be more than an elaborate form of procrastination.