This week my video show, On My Shelf, is celebrating one year. If you were to look at followers and number of views and stats that all the business people tell us mean something important, you wouldn’t be able to tell that I’d been doing this for a year.
As I crept up on this one-year anniversary of producing a show that first began as a weekly show and more recently became a weekday show, I found myself mired down a little by these statistics. I don’t usually check statistics because, honestly, they don’t really matter that much to me. I do what I do because I love it. Because I have to. Because there is no other choice for me but to share books and advice and life so that others might find themselves in the things I have to say or feel encouraged and inspired, or, at the very least, find their next great read.
So I don’t often check statistics. But an anniversary is also a time to consider what’s working and what’s not. I have a lot on my plate as a writer. I publish five blogs a week. I publish five videos a week. I write at least 50,000 words of fiction and nonfiction every week. I have six children. I have a husband. I have a life outside of my career. Producing this video show eats away hours of my time every single week.
The statistics of it started weighing me down a little. Writers are constantly battling the ups and downs, the victories and the not-quite-victories, the visible and the invisible. I started to question the value I had to offer. I started to question what I was possibly doing wrong. I started to question whether I should do it at all anymore.
This isn’t the first time I’ve asked myself all these questions. Periodically, I’ll find myself in this pervasive state of invisibility, and it’s not easy to climb out from under that cloak. But what it always boils down for to me is that I create value so that, in the future—whether I see the results of that now or not—someone will find my content and their world will shift a little for the better. I’m not doing any of this for notoriety or fame or even the coveted viral spot on the Internet. I’m doing it because it’s vital to my life. Without it, I’m a little less me.
(And it has to be the same for all of us. Creativity for creativity’s sake.)
But even if it didn’t boil down to that, it would boil down to another concept that’s become important in everything I do for my writing career. I like to call it the Long Game. The Long Game is exactly what it sound like—long. It means that whatever success looks like for me—and sometimes, I admit, that’s hard to define, because sometimes the world steps in and says it should be number of books sold and number of views on a video and number of visitors to a blog—but whatever success looks like, it’s not going to happen overnight.
We do not become brilliant writers overnight. One essay, one story, one idea doesn’t make us brilliant. We become brilliant in the work, the every-day creation of those multiple essays and multiple stories and multiple ideas developed into whatever it is they become.
This is a long, long game.
[Tweet “We do not become brilliant writers overnight. This is a long, long game.”]
The Internet and its visibility likes to lure us in and say things have changed in recent years, but they haven’t. Writing has always only been a Long Game. The ones who show up every day and work in spite of who’s reading or watching or listening—they’re the ones who will become brilliant.
[Tweet “The writers who show up every day and do the work are the ones who will become brilliant.”]
A writing career is like a Giant Himalayan lily. Do you know about this flower? For most of its life, it exists as a clump of shiny leaves, but after five to seven years it almost magically grows nearly 10 feet and unfolds its trumpet-shaped flowers for the first time. It becomes beautiful, noticeable, brilliant.
Next week I’ll talk about some practical applications of this. But, for now, remember the old adage “slow and steady wins the race.” Persevere. Even when no one is paying any attention. And maybe, if we’re both lucky, we’ll see each other under our invisibility cloaks and wave and give a thumbs up and carry on our separate ways.
