On nourishing the SUBSTANCE of your work in a world of surfaces.

Since hosting the 3 Creative Confidence Communiqués in December, I don't seem to want to stop rolling with this topic. So here is some more, with a juicy question for you at the end to take into your 2019 planning.

Social media platforms can be, and often are, a rich place of connection and education for many of us. So many conversations are happening there (and gaining nuance there) that people don't have access to in their daily lives.

(I think its important to mention this alongside the other valid and real critiques of social media culture.)

But the world of small digital business marketing, and some of the business "educators" that set so much of the tone for how we promote and sell our work, encourage and even reward the diluting and cheapening of the meaning and substance of the work we do.

The experience we have gained and the body of work we have developed is valued, according to mainstream digital entrepreneurship culture, as a pile of "content" to be harvested for sound-bytes and 'grammable quotes - and these little fragments are meant to be selected, curated and presented to the world strictly with the goal of chasing the next dollar, rather than intentionally building a complex body of work that will contribute to the larger culture in a powerfully good way.

In a sense, we become appropriators of our own work - we are trained to exploit the substance of our own work in order to create a surface appearance.

If we want to protect and honor the depth of our work and ensure its continual growth, we need to commit to the activities that ensure its development -  creatively, intellectually, experientially, imaginatively - and let our marketing be an outgrowth of that, not the other way around.

This is countercultural in a digital business world that values speed, efficiency, and exploitation - not only of people but of ideas and cultural creations of all kinds.

When we protect and nourish the deep creative development of our work, our businesses can truly grow. They can grow from strong, ever deepening roots -- instead of shallow ones that need 10x the water and fertilizer to stay alive.

Deep work equals deep roots, and slower, more sustainable, wealthier work - and when I say wealthy, I mean financially, but also abundant and resilient in all kinds of other ways.

So...here's my question for you, meant to help you (and me) develop  a creative mindset of depth and substance in a world of surfaces and packages:

In 2019 - even in the midst of high-speed digital culture and the many tasks involved in living & working each day - 
how will you build in practices and processes that support the depth and substance of the work you do, and your development as a creator?

How can your marketing itself (for example, your social media feeds) be an expression of, and an outgrowth of, your body of work? How can your social media feed become a practice that allows your mind and heart to grow, and allows your work to develop meaningfully?