Building a body of work
Really, we're talking about legacy here
In “Frankenstein,” Mary Shelley wrote “everything must have a beginning… and that beginning must be linked to something that went before.” Indeed, few things happen in a void and out of nowhere; most things are linked to something that happened before that, which is linked to the thing before that and so on.
One could easily argue that women running for office now couldn't have just *happened* in a void but happened because of the work of women before... organizing work done by, say, Gloria Steinem and Angela Davis, and political barrier-breaking by Shirley Chisolm, and we could say none of their work could have happened without suffragists like Susan B. Anthony and Jane Addams, and their work couldn't have happened without Mary Wollstonecraft... etc. (That's a grossly over-simplified list, but you know what I mean.)
Now take that in a forward-facing way, applied to our own work. What might we do with each creative project to do better help ourselves do the next one we want to do? In its forward expression, each thing is just the start of the rest of everything else that follows it, including each of our own incremental actions.
Which is the way we must approach both our big plans and our tasks within projects, incrementally chipping away at big goals: launching the site, launching the minimum viable product, writing the next paragraph, writing the pitch, getting the next episode out, and so on. Each thing the act of inching ever-closer to each goal and doing the work.
But, we can also do ourselves a huge favor by looking for themes between our projects to buoy them all, and by asking ourselves how our current project might simultaneously further boost the thing we did before it and also be maximized for the sake of itself and in order to better set us up for the project which will surely follow it. Each creative project can do those three things.
I invite you to take a moment today and envision what you hope your creative actions today—both large and small—might have a week from now, a month from now, year from now, and what domino effect those actions might have rippled out and caused decades from now. What might it look like? What might it have accomplished? To what power might it have spoken truth?
And, take time to think about the themes and similarities between your existing and current work, and how your past projects might bolster your current and future work.
The aim of the activity isn’t to put more tasks on your plate, but to open yourself to imagining the biggest possible expression of what your daily work might mean and what your own momentum might accomplish alongside you, a force all its own. It’s to be very deliberate about stringing together our creative efforts to build a cohesive body of work.
Let’s do that. You got this.
