> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://joesmusings.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Why you avoid your life’s work - URL: https://joesmusings.com/why-you-avoid-your-lifes-work/ - Published: 2026-08-21T12:01:59.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-02T13:55:46.000Z - Description: A story of keeping my dreams at arm’s length - Author: Joe - Tags: #Migrated-1790948619853, #Import 2026-10-02 13:44 > *Why is the work that matters so much to us, often the hardest work to do?* Back in the dark ages of 2018, I was a digital marketing intern discovering the personal development side of YouTube—filling my ears with Gary Vaynerchuk, Tom Bilyeu, Evan Carmichael... the list goes on. I saw these creators, the success of their content businesses, and a few videos about how to grow a YouTube channel, and it inspired something in me. These people were able to turn their passion for helping others into their career, and it looked like they were making a lot of money doing so. A question stuck with me: “Was this something I could do too?” One night I took out a red 99¢ spiral-bound, college-ruled notebook and told myself, “if I can fill an entire page with video ideas, then that’s my sign that I should start a YouTube channel.” Ideas began to pour out of me and—15 minutes later—my page was filled. Five minutes after that, I was halfway down the back. Within the next few months I settled into a full time job and my own apartment, and I started to follow through on my commitment. I posted three videos, but something felt wrong. I was telling people to do things that I struggled with doing myself. It felt inauthentic, and I felt like a fraud. How can I help others improve their lives when I struggle so much with my own? I told myself that I just needed to “work on me” a little bit more, *then* I’d share content once I “got good at living life.” A year passes. I listen to audiobooks on my commute to and from work, sometimes remembering a couple of sentences by the time I get to my destination. Countless self-help videos, podcasts, and articles clog my browser history. One writer and speaker particularly strikes a chord within me this time—Seth Godin. His thoughts are clear and fresh. His writing has no fat, cutting right to the meat of whatever he’s talking about. In his writing, he emphasizes the importance of daily publishing practice. Once again, this inspiration to create lights me up, and I commit again. I publish 26 “posts” through the spring and summer of 2020, but the writing falls flat. This isn’t anywhere close to the sort of writing Seth does, no one is reading it, and the inspiration slowly fizzles out. Eight months pass. Within that time, I try posting on Twitter to persuade an algorithm to get people to read my writing. There on Twitter, people are writing short, “atomic” essays as part of a writing group called Ship30for30—challenging them to ship 30 of these essays every day for 30 days. While I don’t join that group, I take up the challenge on my own, wanting to become a better writer and grow a following. Another 28 posts are sent into the world, but I’m still not happy with the content. Writing is hard, and I struggle to put in the time that I think each blog post requires to be a quality piece of content. Five months pass. I watch a webinar from a writer who publishes on Substack, where she talks about how the platform is growing, and shows how to grow a following there by niching down and writing consistently. So in September of 2021, I started a newsletter on the topic of “effortless action.” I make a commitment to myself to publish an essay every Wednesday for twelve weeks. This time I had a detailed graph of the topics I wanted to explore and an overflowing digital folder of content that I wanted to use for reference. I was excited and I was prepared. I had everything that I needed in order to become the writer that I wanted to be. Despite this prep, each week, my essay fell far from my vision. I usually wrote most of the piece the night before it was meant to go out, then would send it off after a quick edit in the morning. I would take a break for a couple of days, maybe read a few articles on the weekend, then struggle to come up with an idea at the start of the week. That put me right back to Tuesday night, giving me half a day before my next self-imposed deadline. I enjoyed writing and publishing, and I followed through on all twelve of those newsletters. On top of that, I received a couple of comments from people encouraging my work. I had a few readers, I was publishing, and it felt like I was growing as a writer. But it still didn’t feel right. This method wasn’t sustainable. The process was unreliable. The output was nothing like what I wanted. Six months pass. I publish once. Another year passes. Maybe the weekly deadlines were too much, so I started back on Substack, this time giving each piece of writing whatever time it needed. There in 2023, I published 10 newsletters during the summer and pivoted to my current “Joe’s Musings” branding. But—the astute among you may see a pattern here—even without the crunches, I end up disappointed with what I’m able to create. The vision that I originally started with was still left unfulfilled. The big ideas I have around helping others live their best lives are still unwritten. And when I do write about them, I feel uninspired reading back through them. Will this actually help anyone? Ten months pass. Two posts. Six months pass. Two more posts. I see others growing on YouTube and Substack who are practically just starting out. They’ve been consistent in publishing for a few months, some a year, and are now growing large audiences. What if I had just been consistent? How long has it been since I first started writing? Five years? Would I have succeeded by now if I could’ve just published consistently? Eight months pass. Another post. With equal parts dissatisfaction, unreliability, burnout, imposter syndrome, and constantly falling short of the vision in my head, I was left with a recipe to stop publishing. Over, and over, and over again. However, stopping over and over again means that I started over and over again. In the words of the great William Afton, I always come back. Why? I believe it has a little something to do with this thing called art. I have another story to tell you, a little more fictional this time… ## A boy and his art A few years ago I started reading a manga called [Blue Period](https://kodansha.us/reader/blue-period/volume-1/chapter-1/?ref=joesmusings.com). ![Amazon.com: Blue Period Vol. 1 eBook : Yamaguchi, Tsubasa, Yamaguchi, Tsubasa: Kindle Store](https://joesmusings.com/content/images/2026/10/2c5ade7e-ac90-43b6-ba9b-c4f2097fae89_702x1000-jpeg.jpg) The story is about a high schooler named Yatora, who, despite being a delinquent, gets great grades in school. He takes an art class with his friends for an easy grade that he can take naps during. But, there’s something missing, he finds: “I recently realized that raising my test scores, point by point, or building smooth relationships can be satisfying. But it’s the satisfaction you get from meeting a quota. I put more into meeting those quotas than others do. And my efforts pay off. That’s all there is to it. But when people praise me for my efforts, I feel empty. Why’s it so hard for me to *feel* anything?” On another school day, he realizes he left his cigarettes in the art room, and runs back to grab them before someone finds them. When he walks in, he’s greeted by a massive painting. ![](https://joesmusings.com/content/images/2026/10/8989cc98-114f-4086-8991-65794d39806f_2784x1978.png) He’s entranced by it, and after a little beef with his very poorly hidden enemies-to-lovers foil, he talks about how ridiculous going to art school is, both expensive and unprofitable. Yatora says he’s going to choose something “more normal, more secure.” The teacher then calls him out, noticing how concerned Yatora is with pleasing those around him. She says that she wants to see what has value to him, not what others say is valuable. She mentions that he hasn’t started the current project in class—to depict your favorite scenery—and asks: “What do *you* want to say to everyone? Give us a scene that expresses that. Art is fun, you know. And those who are true to themselves make truly great art. Because art is a language without words.” This starts him on a spiral of self-reflection, where he sees that what he feels when he’s out partying with his friends doesn’t actually belong to him. He realizes that the only way he knows how to communicate and grow “relationships” is to not focus on himself, but the other person, and make sure they’re having fun in the conversation. He makes no room for being true to himself. ![](https://joesmusings.com/content/images/2026/10/f7e734db-a200-4078-aa1f-cb6efaea6d9e_2592x1976.png) We fast forward a few days, and we see Yatora bump into the girl whose art he was so entranced by before. He asks her about the piece, and remarks how jealous he is of her talent. But she takes offense to this, rejecting the notion that she’s talented and instead saying that she “just spends more time thinking about art than other people.” She explains how much work she puts into the study of art, and that calling it a talent is like saying she didn’t do anything to achieve it. To which Yatora says he understands, since we saw his friends call him a genius just because he got good grades earlier in the chapter. It’s all just effort paying off. This culminates in him creating a piece of art that’s true to him: how Shibuya is blue early in the morning. He blends different colors together (learning from what he saw his senior doing with the large canvas), drenches the paper in the watercolor, then tries desperately to draw in the skyscrapers of Shibuya with pencil, ripping into the paper as he rushes to get it done before the end of the class. ![](https://joesmusings.com/content/images/2026/10/4b12b39a-d08b-4a27-8553-6c16f7f968ea_2608x1396.png) Expressing this truth, liking something that others might not, and then putting it out to the world, it’s scary to him. The process is filled with failures, regrets, and self-doubt. He asks himself why he didn’t start earlier and says to himself that he never would’ve painted it in the first place if he knew that it would’ve turned out like this. But because he shared his art and was vulnerable with his friends, he thinks: “At that moment, for the first time in my life, I felt like I had a real conversation with people.” # From fiction to reality Just like Yatora, throughout high school I was satisfied by getting good grades and—like Blue Period so kindly points out for us—people pleasing. Despite turning into a theater kid, I told myself “I wasn’t a creative person.” It didn’t feel like I was rejecting any sort of passion, but looking at career options, anything creative wasn’t even a consideration. I only ever considered—like Yatora—what felt normal and secure. As a straight-A student, I started college as a physics major, switched to marketing after a semester, then dropped out to work full-time in the marketing space. Each decision was min-maxed and ROI calculated, with possible outcomes carefully planned out in advance. Even dropping out of college was done while hedging my bets. I took a “leave of absence” for a semester while I was attempting to get a full-time job so if I failed, I could go right back and still keep my scholarships. But what happens when the bell schedule disappears and the assignments are gone? It’s up to us to decide what to do with our time—our lives. Since then, I’ve been lucky enough to find a career that—most of the time—I can enjoy parts of. But still, it felt like something was missing. Some sort of “truth,” as Yatora’s teacher says. So this brings us back to the start of the introduction, where I try to create content. It was a fun little hobby, but shouldn’t be taken that seriously, right? I was a math and science kid. I never took an art class after graduating middle school. Each attempt at writing was like Yatora dragging his graphite against the freshly painted paper. Inspired, but lacking. Making art is uncomfortable. It’s hard. This challenge was something I wasn’t used to. School had come easy to me, and staring failure in the face was a direct hit to my ego. So maybe one part of me kept another from fully committing. I looked back and was embarrassed by what I put out into the world. ## Why art? I’ve been talking about this content creation thing as “art,” but we’re just writing blogs, shipping newsletters, tweeting tweets, and YouTubing some videos—this is nothing close to writing a poem, painting on canvas, or composing a piece of music. What gives? Personally, I always thought of art as this high and mighty creative act, where people with incredible talent show you a meticulously crafted piece of their world. But for our purposes today, I’d like to talk about art as the work you dream about. As Blue Period puts it, your truth. For me, I see it as this nagging voice in your head that wants to be brought out into the world. This nagging voice is quiet, but persistent. Self-doubt and comfort are much louder, but there’s this quiet hum of discontent that—when all else is quiet in the brief gaps between doom-scrolling—begs to be satiated. It seems like it’s a responsibility, a discipline. As much as healthy eating and exercising is a discipline that nourishes the body, the discipline of art nourishes our soul. Expressing this goodness in our soul is exactly how we flourish as human beings (so claims the first ten pages of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics that I’ve been able to get through). The fact that it *is* so important makes it easy to neglect. To shy away. To hide. This is especially true when we call it a “calling” or a “purpose.” These bring the spotlight, the pressure, and the expectation to perform with perfection. To actualize your potential and become everything you could be. To do what you were born to do. What if we mess up? What if our work is not what we imagined? What if we’re not good enough? Avoidance becomes comfortable. Procrastination enters stage right. This procrastination has a multitude of ways that it manifests, and in order to fight it to do the work that matters, we must know our enemy so we can go to battle. # How procrastination manifests ## Distractions Distractions obviously keep us from working. Scrolling social media, binge-watching shows, playing video games, of course they’re not productive if you want to be working on your art. However, there are more nefarious types that make us feel like we’re making progress, when we’re really not. ### Roundabout Goals One distraction for me was focusing on content creation as a business strategy. Niche down. Grow your audience fast. Monetize and optimize. A handful of years ago, I attempted to transition my personal brand to focus on Notion—I posted 3 tweets, 2 YouTube videos, and subsequently abandoned publishing. I thought I could build an audience fast and start doing some consulting. In that short time, it got some traction: almost 60k views on YouTube. But it was a way for me to hide from my art. My core reasoning was foundationally wrong. I had this itch to create content, and I was sold on the idea that I could build a business with my personal brand that would let me quit my job and give me a happy life. I took this itch and turned it into a way to satisfy material needs, rather than the needs of my soul. I turned to optimizing too early for some quick path to monetization. I tried to turn content creation into a job, rather than a way to feed this inner hunger for creation. I was doing the things that others were saying to do—pick a niche, develop a content strategy, engage on social media, start a Zettlekasten system—rather than listening to the voice inside of me. It turned creation—this act of self-expression and truth-telling—into a means to an end. It trapped me in a hole I didn’t want to be in. What if I were to succeed? What if I made a full-time income from publishing Notion tutorials, and grew to hate it more than my current job? I quickly found another distraction here too: I was pursuing freedom in my life—passive income, the FIRE movement, working for myself—and I was convinced if I could build a business that would let me quit my full-time job, that would give me the freedom to work on the things that I love and not have to deal with the whole “working” thing anymore. This constantly gave me fear of missing out on the hottest, best business ideas: *“What if there was a way to build a freelance business and outsource the work? But dropshipping sounds pretty great, just set it up and make passive income? But it looks like you can’t just do print on demand, instead you need to choose big ticket items. But that’s all overhead and small margins. I should really create a digital product to build leverage. Or maybe consulting with high ticket offers is really where the money is at.”* I would constantly hop between business ideas, making progress in the shadows, without any market validation. I would buy domain names and build websites, just for them to flop because I wasn’t putting in enough effort. And it was effort that—after the initial shiny object syndrome wore off—I just wasn’t able to put in. I was trying to get myself to do hard work so I could be free, rather than just doing the work that I would do with said freedom. I wanted freedom to write about the things I cared about, so why didn’t I just make time to write? I didn’t give my art enough time, enough effort, or ask myself the right questions to figure out how I could prioritize this craft to improve. I kept the image of what could be from getting tainted by what I was capable of. I would tinker with my writing setup, change blog platforms, and procrastinate by trying to take the long route. Surely if I made more money I could eventually quit my job and spend more time creating content, right? ### Premature & Over Optimization Here, we get trapped in doing things to support the production of work, rather than spending that time on the work. For me, this mostly consists of spending way too much time learning how to do something well, especially before even making an attempt. Reading a book on writing well before writing something. Watching countless videos on how to learn Japanese, while avoiding sitting down and just studying. This happens to me even in video games. Recently, I’ve been trying to keep myself from looking up guides: which crop is the most profitable to plant for how long it takes, how many should I plant based on the investments I have, what is the right order to progress through the game, which decision should I make at the start of the game in order to make the whole game go smoother, etc. This can be fun to do in video games, but in real life, building skills requires action. Consuming this type of content is much better used as course correction, rather than as a variety of different maps telling you which turn to take. There’s this saying that “the map is not the territory,” which I take to mean others’ recommendations (maps) are going to be much different than what it takes to actually do the work (the territory). Sitting there collecting maps is going to be of little help in actually exploring. This focus on optimization is partially what caused the Notion pivot we talked about in the last section. My brain wanted something tangible, to feel like it was making progress. It was accustomed to working on problems with a clear solution, and tended to gravitate towards that. Finding an underserved niche and doing the work to fill it. But, as I learned, optimizing for a goal is only beneficial if you care about the goal itself. ## Perfectionism The reason why most of us get into this whole art thing is because there’s a truth that we want to express. Something we want to change. A grandiose vision of how the world should be. But, as NPR legend Ira Glass so eloquently puts it, there’s a gap between that vision and what we’re capable of today. This gap will keep us stuck where we are because we love the ideas that are in our head. [Jay Acunzo](https://open.substack.com/users/495593) talks about “[Maker Monsters](https://jayacunzo.com/blog/maker-monsters-how-to-beat-perfectionism?ref=joesmusings.com),” the monsters in our head that keep us from doing the work. One of which focuses right on this issue: we don’t want our inability to taint the vision we have for our creation. So, in order to preserve this perfect vision, we make no attempt at it. We stay planning, ideating, improving. That way, we don’t have to confront the fact that we’re not skilled enough to make it a reality. On top of this, for these grand visions, where do you even start? One of the obstacles to creating content for me is that I have no idea what’s in progress or where to start. I’ve started on dozens of different posts, brainstormed how they could all look, and collected research that’d go into them. But how do I choose? Which one of these ideas is exciting enough to work on, but not so great that I won’t be ruined if I mess it up a little? That brings us right back into premature optimizations. How can I get good enough at this art before getting started? How do you close this gap and overcome perfectionism? Ira Glass says we need to keep creating: to continually make iterations on our art and ship until we hit our vision. But—although I’m barely an amateur at this craft—I’m not sure I totally agree with him. I don’t think we’ll ever close the gap. If there’s anything I’ve learned when it comes to money and hedonic adaptation, as Angelica Skylar puts it, we may never be satisfied. There will always be a next level that we can achieve, someone bigger and better to look up to, different goalposts we can set. On the bright side, it’s those moving goalposts that keep us improving. I think our lives are lived in this gap. We need to learn to live with it, accept it, and love it. If it’s impossible to close the gap, then we have to reframe our work. What if we learn to become satisfied with dissatisfaction? What if we could be happy in the frustration? What if we turn the finite game of closing the gap into the infinite game of making art? What if the gap was the path? But instead of focusing on getting reps in, our brains turn the dissatisfaction and self-disappointment up to 11\. You’ve heard about my attempts at content creation and the thread in my brain that says, “if you would’ve just stuck with some consistency for those 7 years that you’ve been on-again-off-again with creating content, you would’ve achieved something by now.” But, we (I) need to realize that it’s just all noise. Each one of those attempts is a time we’ve learned. As the cliché Edison quote goes, he didn’t fail 10,000 times, he just proved that they didn’t work. It ends up being cliche because there’s some truth to it. If you’re in this multi-million dollar corner of the internet we call self-improvement, you may have heard of a little someone named Ali Abdaal, who—love him or hate him—has a wildly successful YouTube channel. For 7 years, he wanted to start on YouTube. Year after year, he told himself that this would be the year he’d start. And year after year, he didn’t. Even he was a victim of this perfectionism trap. ## Getting truer Each time I’ve started back into creating content, it feels like my mindset, my lived experiences, and the things that I know have changed how I create. Each time, it feels a little more true. Sure, this attempt now feels like my truest truth, but to be very honest, I can’t be 100% sure that writing or making videos is my art. 7 years into these attempts myself, who knows if this whole thing ends up working out? Trial and error guides us in a direction, and our job is to pay attention to that compass. Sometimes, we misinterpret the compass. Other times, we’re reading the wrong compass entirely. We may think we’re going in the direction of the soul, but it turns out to be a get-rich-quick scheme for your material wants and needs. We see the end result that someone else has achieved, and decide that’s what we want to do—until we actually get into the work and realize it’s nothing like we thought (like my failed attempt at being a physicist). But that journey is learning, and I think the most important thing we can do is take the time to look at our past and see what it tells us. That’s what I’ve really enjoyed about writing this essay. I didn’t have these answers before sitting down and thinking it through. Fragments were here and there, but sitting down to put my thoughts together like this has been instrumental in helping me figure out how I feel about content creation: where I’ve gone wrong in the past, and how I want to orient now. What matters here is that we look at our experience—naked and raw—and accept ourselves and our desires for what they are. Learn to be okay with putting everything you have into your art and falling right on your face. It’s going to hurt. Despite being in love with this essay, I’m sure very few people will ever read it. But as of posting this, I’m super happy with the end result. What matters is progress. Don’t let the thoughts that want to keep you where you are, win. They want the easy path, to avoid hard things. And you can’t blame them—energy conservation is literally how our brains are programmed. Frivolous things like art and human flourishing are long-term pay offs, and have much less urgency in your brain than getting hits of dopamine. Pay attention to your hunger, the itches you have. Deep down, what do you wish you had more time to pursue, but keep making excuses for? You don’t need to strain yourself to force the art to come. Instead, you need to let go of the expectations, self-doubt, ego, and noise in your head (from both your own thoughts and those of others) to give space for your art to come out and play. It’s time to listen to that tiny voice that asks “what if?” You’re the only one who holds your truth. No one else can hear it if you don’t share it. --- If you’ve read this full post, it’s obvious that there’s something in here that resonated. Something that you’ve been drawn to pursuing for its own sake. Start small, but prioritize it. You don’t have to go nuclear and quit all content consumption to start creating your art. Start by trading 15 minutes of consumption for creation when you get the itch to open YouTube or scroll on your phone. Protect 10 minutes after you’ve finished your coffee. The loud voice of perfectionism in your brain will tell you that it’s not enough. Thank those thoughts for trying to protect you, and let them pass. Be dumb, be inefficient, and enjoy the process.