I remember being a very impatient kid.

Christmas was especially challenging – for some reason, a ton of my friends opened their gifts before Christmas and it drove me nuts. I needed to see if I got that new Pokémon game NOW!

That impatience existed in other areas of my life too – I was always blazing through my tests or homework for school, making stupid mistakes, because I just wanted the things that I wanted as quickly as possible.

As I've gotten older, I've developed a lot of patience. It's one of the skills I'm most proud of, actually. I can delay gratification quite a bit, especially if I'm confident that it will in fact happen.

I understand the power of compounding effects in terms of money (compound interest) but also attention, effort, and so on.

Patience plays really nicely with compounding...in fact, it's a requisite part of compounding!

About 10 months ago, I wrote a piece called Patient Ambition about pairing ambition with patience so that we don't live in constant go-go-go discomfort and unhappiness:

But I'm starting to notice that my relationship with patience may have a dark side...sometimes I hide behind patience.

At some point, I became confident that I was on the path. I was getting a better handle on my work, where I was deploying my resources of time, energy, and money, and I was pushing myself to do more. Not to do everything TODAY, but I was pushing myself.

With that recipe (ambition, focus, incremental improvement) patience works really well.

But what happens when you lose focus or stop making incremental improvements?

You may still publish consistently, your output may continue to exist at the same threshold, but are you getting closer to your goals?

It's really easy to find yourself coasting without even realize how you got there. Sometimes we create such a machine that just maintaining the status quo is a huge effort week-to-week...but patience plus the status quo won't get us where we want to go.

Striving for incremental improvement is so important to keep front of mind. Incremental improvement in the quality of your work...incremental improvement in your works' distribution...incremental improvement in your relationships!

If you aren't focused on incremental improvement, patience isn't your friend. Patience is a convenient scapegoat for not getting closer to your dreams.

And it's not that I didn't know this before...in that same piece from 10 months ago, I wrote:

It's so hard to build a business based on content and attention. Content is time and labor intensive, and attention is fickle. You have to CONSTANTLY show up at a high level and push yourself to do better and better...and it's really easy to slowly settle in to going through the motions.

Patience is part of the recipe, not a panacea. It's a multiplier – but to play at the highest levels, you need to step up your game.

I need to step up mine.

​

​

On Creative Elements 👨‍🔬

Gina Bianchini is the founder and CEO of Mighty Networks. Mighty Networks helps creators bring their community, courses, memberships, and events together in one place under their brand.

Mighty Networks has more than 10,000 paying creators, brands, and coaches today. Users include established creators and brands such as YouTube star Adriene Mishler, Xprize and Singularity University founder Peter Diamandis, author Luvvie Ajayi Jones, comedian Amanda Seales, Girlboss founder Sophia Amoruso and brands such as the TED conference and wellness scheduling platform MINDBODY.

Before Mighty Networks, Gina was CEO of Ning, which she co-founded with Marc Andreessen. Under her leadership, Ning grew to 100 million people in 300,000 active social networks across subcultures, professional networks, entertainment, politics, and education.

In this episode, we talk about the opportunities for creators to build a membership business, what the most successful community builders are doing today, the major problems with Facebook Groups, and why Gina believes that great sustainable memberships can be built with fewer than 30 members.

​Click here to listen​

​

​

You may be asking, "Why does Jay feel like he needs to step his game up?"

Candidly, this is by far the best year my business has ever had. But to be honest (and it's good to own this) I want Creative Elements to be a BIG show. I've gotten enough feedback from listeners who love the show to know the content is good enough, but the content is also is dependent on my guests.

Where I play small is not making enough interview requests of big guests. I don't want to solely interview big, known names – but it's undeniable that people love those episodes and that it lends credibility to the show.

I also play small in not focusing more on distribution for both my writing and my podcast. Yes, great work will spread, but that's a compounding effect too. When you have 1% of your audience sharing your work, there's a big difference in reach if 1% of your audience is 10 people or 1000 people.

So there's no reason not to put on my marketing pants and push for stronger distribution too. But it's hard. It's scary, and it's unknown. So I hide.

I tell myself that I just need to keep creating great work – which is necessary, but not sufficient.

That's being tough on myself, but I think I need to be. It won't all happen tomorrow, but I could be doing a little bit more each day or each week to advocate for myself. And that's what I'm going to do.

Checking in – how are YOU? What are you working on? Hit reply to this email and let me know!

Cheers,
Jay

PS: I hosted a really great workshop on Friday about Memberships & Advanced Community Building. I intended the workshop to be 60 minutes, but I over-prepared and it stretched to 80 minutes! 😅

This was intended as a follow up to my Community Building Crash Course, and it is totally new material. It got some rave reviews, so if you're building a paid community or membership, I highly recommend checking it out! It's available for instant download.