What do we do when we want to create, but there’s nobody there to see it?
By: Russ
Estimated length: 7 minutes
Years ago I wrote about an internal frustration around writing itself. In short, I wasn’t creating as much as I felt I should, and I was bothered. Turns out my dissatisfaction wasn’t all that uncommon. While I didn’t create nearly enough for that blog, when people did check it out, that was the post they tended to bring up later. It’s been a few years, and I approach this problem a little differently now, so I thought it was worth revisiting.
For anybody who creates things—whether for pleasure or work—there’s an annoyance that can creep in when you aren’t producing as much as you think you “should.” That aggravation becomes the voice that suggests you can’t, and it stops many people in their tracks. So how do we get around it?
Ego is the enemy
“The task that stands in the way of your task is your task.”
The voice inside your head has a great deal of power, so it’s worth learning how to tame it—or at least distract it with something shiny. We have to start with a basic reality of creating anything good: it usually takes more time than we expect. Probably almost always.
The inner voice has a fascinating way of ignoring that. It can be your hype person and your cruelest critic, but it’s wildly unqualified to be much else. Whether it’s telling you you’re unstoppable or you don’t have what it takes, it’s wrong.
We watch other people succeed and think it should have been us. Their success looks simple from the outside. We’re surrounded by rags-to-riches stories, and if we could just get up at 4 a.m. like whatever billionaire is popular this week, we’d be the ones on the magazine cover.
That’s the voice talking—and, as established, logic is not its strong suit. We aren’t seeing the 6 (or 60) years of work that led to that “sudden” success. We’re witnessing the final act of a story that’s been playing out far longer than we appreciate.
So when you look at your analytics and see that nobody is visiting, reading, listening, or talking about you, it makes sense that you feel deflated. For you, this has been the most exciting stretch of your life: you’ve breathed life into an idea and watched it become something real. It’s brutal to realise you may be alone in that excitement. The voice says you couldn’t do it—and it’s starting to look like it might be right.
How you react to that slow start is everything. Is this where you pump the brakes, or find another gear?
It’s common to dissect successful people and look for the silver bullet that made it all work. Usually that analysis ends with a list of habits that sounds like a punishment: cold showers, meditation, and a smoothie that tastes like lawn clippings. And sure, routines can help—but the common thread is less glamorous: successful people aren’t always the best at things, but they’re often patient and resilient.
Put another way, they have a different relationship with the voice. They don’t listen to it when it expects too much, too soon. The voice exists, but it doesn’t get to drive.
People don’t become amazing and then start creating. It’s the other way around. They create, they improve, and eventually they become the person you’re watching now. Only then are they ready to “hit it out of the park.”
Adjusting your relationship with your inner voice is what allows you to take the first uncomfortable step: creating garbage that nobody will care about. The hard work isn’t creating—it’s overcoming the part of you that wants to hide when you aren’t succeeding.
Reframing success
So how do we do it? Overcoming the voice clearly isn’t simple or common. How do we move beyond it and get to work?
There are plenty of paths, but my personal favourite is framing—specifically, how we define success.
If you look at this from a different angle, something freeing appears: there is no single definition of success. Is it a certain number of readers in a given time? Downloads? Ad views?
We can pick a definition, but there’s definitely a wrong way to do it. If success is tied to any of those external measures, you’re putting your wellbeing in the hands of a fickle, distracted population. I’m not even big on letting strangers pump my gas, let alone handing them the kill switch to my sense of self-worth.
So let’s reframe success as something attainable and internal. Give yourself more control. Make it easier to rack up wins and build momentum.
You’re trying to create something. Do you enjoy creating it? Let’s assume you do, at least on some level. If your job is to create and you hate it, that’s a different problem—because then you’re up against pure willpower, which is naturally (and tragically) finite. But the things you genuinely enjoy? That’s a different ball game, where willpower matters far less.
So if you enjoy the thing, can you find purpose in simply doing it? Can the bumps in the road become the point—lessons you end up grateful for? Can success be redefined as creating, full stop?
If it can, you stand a chance of becoming something dangerous (in the best way). Instead of bathing daily in “failure,” you build a momentum of wins that makes you hard to compete with. Where will you be in 3, 6, or 12 months of showing up like this? Will you even notice the time passing?
Being immediately good at the thing isn’t the main factor. Incremental improvements are the quiet superpower you’re about to start collecting.
Be ready for your opportunity, because it’s coming
One day you’re going to connect with a pitch. You probably won’t see it coming. It’ll spark off a formula you didn’t realise you had. You’ll create a post, song, piece of art, or product that feels like “just another one for the pile”—and then suddenly, it won’t be.
Maybe a critical mass has been building. Maybe you’re about to run straight into a patch of luck. Either way, something is going to tip in your favour.
The right people will see it, share it, and interest will find its way to you and your work. That’s the absolute curse of early success: there’s nothing to build on if you haven’t been building. You made a cool thing. Congrats. Now what?
This is what you gently point out to your inner voice when it asks why you should create when nobody is watching. If you listen to the voice too much, the day you catch lightning in a bottle ends sadly. When people finally show up, they’ll find nothing—because you spent your time mourning the attention you thought you deserved instead of creating. You’ll watch a golden pitch float right through your strike zone because you never bothered to build a bat.
The game plan
So build your bat.
The most important factor to keep in mind is that because we’ve redefined success as doing something you enjoy, this process can actually be pleasant. Your inner voice is welcome to keep being a prick, but it won’t get much room to interject when you’re hitting your definition of success every day.
Schedule 10 minutes to do something tomorrow. Put the bar so low you could fall on your arse and still clear it. Maybe you’ll find flow and stretch that 10 into 60. If you don’t, it doesn’t matter. Your only goal is 10 minutes of producing something you enjoy.
Then do it again each day for a week. By the end of the week, you’ll have at least an hour of progress.
Your inner voice may have something to say here. Only an hour? Don’t let it drive. It’s that downer friend who needs you to stay small so they can feel better about being stuck.
Run the alternate reality where you watched Netflix instead and accomplished nothing. Be proud of yourself. Talk to yourself like you would a friend who did the exact same thing—you’d be proud as hell of them.
Go create
Procrastination around difficult things has never been a mystery to me. Things that aren’t fun are hard to do. What confused me over time is why we sometimes procrastinate on the things we actively enjoy.
It took me a long time to recognise that the problem wasn’t the task at all—it was the way I was approaching it. Using the ideas above, I’ve found some personal success, and I hope you can too.