Why So Many People Are Wasting Their Potential

I often get the feeling I am not reaching my full potential as a writer and a creative person.

Do you know what I mean?

It’s not for a lack of trying.

I am up most mornings at 5am, working hard to crank out blog content before I even get started on the work that actually pays me money. I’m often up until 10 or 11:00pm, tweaking last minute changes and making sure everything is ready to go for the next day.

And at the end of it all, I usually feel like I’ve spent every last bit of creative energy I have and I still haven’t done everything I’m capable of doing.

I want to produce something of real value but I’m just not quite doing it.

The other day I was talking to Don, asking him for advice about writing, and I asked him what mistake he sees young creative people making when it comes to their careers.

He said something that really surprised me.

He said, “If you want to write books, why are you spending so much time writing long Instagram posts?”

That stopped me in my tracks.

He was right. I do spend a lot of time writing long Instagram captions. An embarrassing amount of time, actually. After he said that, I started paying attention to how much time it actually was and realized he was right. It was too much.

At first, my response was defensive. I told myself:

“I have to spend time on Instagram if I want to grow my platform…”

It was an easy defense to take. After all, it is sort of true. But the problem was that wasn’t the real reason I was spending so much time writing tweets, Instagram captions and Facebook posts.

The real reason, I realized, is I get instant gratification when I share my writing on social media. I get likes and comments—which I don’t get when I sit down to the daunting task of writing a book.

Writing a book is long, lonely, hard work.

I’m reading a book called On Managing Yourself from the Harvard Business Review. It’s a collection of essays and the first essay in the book is by Clayton M Christensen. He says, when it comes to maximizing your creative talent:

If You’re not guided by a clear sense of purpose, you’re likely to fritter away your time and energy on obtaining the most tangible, short-term signs of achievement, not what’s really important to you.

The problem with wasting too much time writing Instagram captions, aside from the fact that it doesn’t pay my bills, is that that it isn’t congruent with my long term goals.

If we want to do creative work that lives beyond us, we have to start giving our creative energy to things that are sustainable and lasting—even if they don’t give immediate results.

It’s not that we stop posting articles online or even writing Instagram posts completely.

We simply have to be very intentional about how we’re spending our creative energies. Storyline Blog