Does Everything I Love Need to Become a Project?

So, I have this occupational hazard that apparently comes with having made things for a living for most of my adult life. I know how to turn almost anything I enjoy into a potential project, and I know it really well.

Seriously, give me any interesting subject and five minutes. It won't take long before I'm at least wondering whether there's an essay in it. Possibly even an entire series of them or a whole-ass newsletter I'll run indefinitely, publishing schedule and all.

I'm not exactly complaining, as this is an instinct that's served me pretty well over the years. Entire publications and bodies of work exist solely because I became fascinated by something at some point and it stuck long enough for me to eventually build it a home.

But sometimes I worry that I'm missing out on a perfectly enjoyable stage of any human experience – just liking something, full stop.

Part of the reason I've been thinking about this lately is that I've rediscovered how much I enjoy really listening to albums and writing about music. There was even a point many, many years ago when I briefly thought about trying to write for Rolling Stone, or Pitchfork, or similar.

Remembering that, even briefly, naturally had me wondering for a hot minute whether I might like a dedicated music outlet of my own to shout my thoughts into. But then I actually had a sensible, much more realistic thought. Maybe I could just… listen to more music instead.

Revolutionary stuff, right?

Creative People Are Very Good at Seeing What Something Could Become

Making things, especially for a living, trains you to recognize a good possibility when you see one.

Sometimes, a casual experiment goes unexpectedly well, and suddenly I'm imagining what ten more might look like. Or maybe someone responds enthusiastically to something I shared when I didn't expect anyone to actually care. Suddenly, the tiny development department in my brain has a meeting scheduled.

I abandoned the hustle culture script years ago at this point, but that doesn't necessarily mean I lost the impulse to chase things and develop some of the potential I sometimes see in certain ideas.

Nothing deepens the pleasure I get from a favorite pastime or recent obsession quite like a project, and I've always been this way.

I still recall being 10 or 11 years old and voraciously looking forward to my approaching summer vacation because I had a project in mind.

Said project involved writing a series of story collections, with each "volume" focusing on one of the major players in my life at the time, including my parents and my pets, as well as my school friends and their pets. It also involved original illustrations, self-designed "covers" made of construction paper, and bindings made of strategically placed staples.

And I didn't just daydream about this and forget about it the following day, either. I actually did it. (Made for a pretty lit summer, if I'm honest.)

In fact, some of my favorite creative undertakings over the years began exactly this way. I just kept returning to certain subjects until they grew big enough to practically demand that I turn them into something. I can always totally see it, too – a total rush for any creativity nerd.

But I've also learned that seeing possibilities doesn't necessarily mean I should actually launch a new project.

Appetite vs. Architecture: Two Very Different Beasties

Most creative people I know have way too many interests to possibly carry every one of them all the way through to whatever their full potential might look like. I love cooking, and gardening, and studying foreign languages, and music, and art, and technology, and so many other things. I've loved many of those things for years.

Writing about things I enjoy has presented me with a really cool happy medium that lets me go deeper without necessarily having to turn something into my next career choice. But even that has required me to set some boundaries with myself.

I've also had to learn the difference between appetite and architecture:

• Appetite generally means you really just want more of the activity itself.
• Architecture means you also want to construct and maintain something around that activity.

Sometimes those two things overlap, but considerably less often than my own project-happy brain would really like to believe.

Like I said, I've recently had to remind myself that I can love listening really closely to old albums and occasionally writing about them without necessarily making myself responsible for a music publication. Just like I've had to remind myself that I don't particularly need to create and maintain a food blog, a horoscope newsletter, a living guide to backyard birding, a tarot deck storefront, and a million different other things.

Interests usually show you their natural frequencies

By now, I've learned to let ideas sit a while instead of jumping in feet first right away. That's time you can use to really think about what you're considering taking on, especially when it comes to frequency. You know:

• Weekly?
• Twice monthly?
• Every Thursday?
• First Sunday of the month?

Sometimes the activity or topic in question generates more than enough content to fill a weekly newsletter or an entire book. But usually, they come and go. For me personally, sometimes the "go" part lasts a long time.

If I write about music or movies or books exactly as often as I honestly feel moved to, we're probably realistically talking about a handful of posts once in a blue moon. As fun as in-depth publications about any of those things sound on paper, I know darn well that I'm better off just blogging about them when the mood strikes.

What might "success" actually require?

By now, I'm used to "having a following" being something that comes and goes for me. Like, I might do something that brings a lot of people my way for a while, but most of those people don't really stick around as I explore different things and evolve as a creator.

Don't even get me started on algorithms, social signals, and all that jazz. I have to worry about that enough for work on behalf of my clients. My personal stuff is, and always has been, content I create for myself first and others second (if at all).

I really don't entertain dreams of "blowing up" and winding up with some runaway success on my hands anymore. But I still need to consider what I'd hypothetically do if opportunities started coming my way because of something like that. (It's certainly happened before.)

Like, what would I actually spend my time doing? Where would one of those hypothetical opportunities take me, and is that somewhere I actually want to go?

Because creative success sounds beautifully abstract from a distance – more readers, more money, recognition, maybe even the occasional email containing the phrase “We'd love to work with you.” But things are more complicated than that in practice.

For example, a successful music newsletter might eventually mean albums sent for review, pitches from publicists, requests for coverage, interviews, mountains of correspondence, deadlines, and readers who understandably have expectations they'll expect the publication to meet.

None of those outcomes are inherently bad, and plenty of people would be thrilled by them. But would you be?

I know from personal experience that successful passion projects feel great... at first. But I also personally find it hard to deal with some of the stuff they bring my way:

• A lot of requests for your involvement in additional projects that don't interest you in the least
• Occasionally unreasonable expectations from people who consume whatever it is you're putting out there
• Downright hate from people who don't respect boundaries or understand why a creator might set them in the first place
• Forces beyond your control taking your personal brand in directions you aren't ready for or just plain don't like

You may also become very well known for whatever one thing this project sprang up around. A successful music pub means you could wind up being Music Guy™ for the foreseeable future, along with all that entails.

I eventually decided I was fine with those possibilities when it came to the esoterica publication I started last year. Not so much with the art collab a known political page offered me around the same time. (I didn't particularly care to be known as Political Art Bitch™ from that point onward.)

Leaving a Few Doors Unmarked

I'm still a very intellectually restless, curious person who loves staying productive, so I'm pretty much never retiring from projects completely. (I may even be incapable of such a thing.)

I do want to leave a little more distance between "I insanely love this" and "I need to do something bigger with this" moving forward. Less time working on yet another mandatory content calendar means more time actually pondering and enjoying the media I consume.

In the meantime, I'll leave a few doors unmarked and see where I keep wandering.