Embracing the Unknown in Creativity

📚 Resources and Links:

* 📩 Connect with host ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Michelle Pellizzon-Lipsitz⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠team Holisticism⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

* The North Node is OPEN! You can learn more here. Doors close on July 6th.

* Inquire about 1:1 work with Michelle here

* Holisticism Resources 4 u:

* Ruthless Clarity — an 8-week email course designed to help you achieve crystal-clear certainty about your goals, desires, and energy allocation

* How to Begin: A Project Planning Class — a 90-m on-demand class that teaches you exactly how to sketch a effervescent project plan that'll fill you with glee and inspiration and instantly banish procrastination and overwhelm, so your brilliant ideas can finally come to life.

* The Subconscious Audit — an 11-day diagnostic framework that helps you identify what's holding you back and making you *feel* blocked. Because you're never actually blocked

* The New Age Playbook for Spellbinding, Can’t-Stop-Reading Copy — a 35-page downloadable workbook to take your writing from blah to bingeable

study guide: for when you’re ready to take a leap

So you've graduated from our first study guide ("Help, I'm having an existential crisis and my life feels like a badly written Choose Your Own Adventure book") and now you've entered Phase Two: "I have an idea and I'm pretty sure it's either genius or delusional, but I'm going to find out one way or another."

Congratulations! This is actually gorgeous progress, starbeam. You've successfully evolved from "What should I do with my life?" to "I know what I want to do but HOW DO I DO THE THING without accidentally creating a dumpster fire that can be seen from space?"

This is the study guide for people who're now standing at the edge of the cliff, ready to take a leap of faith.

Maybe you've been carrying this idea around like Gollum with the One Ring—precious, obsessive, and slightly concerning to your friends and family. Maybe you've Googled "how to start a business" so many times that your laptop has started suggesting business schools. Maybe you've made seventeen different vision boards and you’ve filled a year’s worth of Moleskines with your plottings.

Either way, you're here because you've got something you want to birth into the world, and you'd prefer to do it without completely embarrassing yourself or accidentally creating the next Fyre Festival of whatever industry you're entering.

This is a study guide for someone who is about to take the leap

This is for you if:

* You've got an idea for a business that you've thought through approximately 847 times, but when it comes to actually executing, you wish you could just Google "how do I start a business for people who are excellent at overthinking everything" and get a reliable step-by-step guide that doesn't make you want to take a nap.

* You know where you're starting, you know where you want to end up (rich and famous, or at least financially stable and emotionally fulfilled), but you're feeling very very uncertain about those pesky in-between steps. You know, The Journey. The part where things actually have to happen in the real world with real consequences.

* You feel paralyzed by the idea of wanting to "do things right.” You have a general feeling that this idea is Important with a capital I, and that it's vital to get the foundation right. But you also suspect you have about as much business experience as a golden retriever, which is to say: enthusiastic but probably not qualified to make major strategic decisions. [On that note, consider this my formal petition for someone to write an Air Bud sequel that involves Bud having to step into the wingtip shoes of a Fortune 500 CEO]

* You've stopped and started this project 57 times already, but when it comes to your idea, you're basically in a toxic relationship. "I just can't quit you," you whisper to your business plan at 3 AM, no matter how many times it has disappointed you or made you question your life choices.

* You really have no desire to build a business/write a screenplay/launch a community/become a person who has to talk to the IRS about tax classifications, but it seems like the Universe has appointed itself your personal project manager and won't let you live your life until you execute this thing. You feel cosmically compelled to do it, but you know you want to do it "on your own terms" — you're just not entirely sure what that means, or if your terms are even reasonable.

Relatable! (If it's not relatable, you're probably on the wrong study guide. Go back to Study Guide #1)

Personally, I never wanted to be an artist, entrepreneur, community builder, or any kind of person who has to explain what they do for work at dinner parties. I wanted to live a nice, quiet life and mind my own business.

Alas, I am plagued by ideas. Cursed, some might say. I truly felt possessed by the idea for Holisticism — it stalked me in my dreams like a la Freddy Krueger, eavesdropped on my conscious thoughts and left cryptic messages in my unconscious until I finally said, "F**k it, we ball," and begrudgingly decided to go through with it.

But once you commit to the FIWB (F**k It, We Ball) lifestyle, then you actually have to do the thing.

The Inconvenient Truth About Starting Things

Here's the thing: There's not one right place to start.

There are approximately 47,000 things to do when you decide you want to launch a website/business/album/book club/digital course/501c3 that protects endangered sea algae of the Mediterranean. (Respect to the sea algae protectors — someone's gotta do it, and its definitely not me because slimy things make me gag.)

And it's tougher than a two-dollar steak to figure out where to prioritize your energy. Where do you start when everything feels both critically important and completely overwhelming? When your to-do list looks like it was written by someone having a caffeine-induced panic attack?

I'm going to do the extremely annoying consultant thing and say, "It depends!" because that's legitimately the truth, and also because I've been in this business long enough to know that anyone promising you The One True Path is probably selling something snake oil adjacent.

BUT (and this is a big but, I cannot lie), I can give you a high-level, non-custom quickstart guide for getting your potentially brilliant idea out into the world without completely losing your mind or your life savings.

Below is my recommended order of operations for birthing your brainchild into reality. I've also included the courses and challenges from our member community, The North Node, that I'd personally add to your study guide to navigate each stage without having a complete breakdown. (Partial breakdowns are still on the table — this is creative work, after all.)

Step 1: Figure out why you're doing this

While it can be interesting/fun/mildly terrifying to start hammering away at a project without an ounce of self-reflection — purely operating on vibes, adrenaline, and whatever energy drink is on sale — at a certain point, you gotta ask yourself the timeless question: "Bella*, where the hell have you been** loca?!"

*Your name, obviously **What's your actual aim here

We've talked about intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation before (intrinsic = "this feels meaningful," extrinsic = "this will impress people at high school reunions"), so I won't belabor the point. But the same exact project could have WILDLY different outcomes depending on why you're doing it.

Getting clarity on what actually motivates you will help you keep going when things get hard. (They will get hard. They always do. This is not pessimism; this is physics.) It'll also help you stay on track when you inevitably get distracted by seventeen other shiny ideas that seem way more fun and way less complicated than whatever you're currently building.

Check out:

* The Ruthless Clarity 8-week email course (you can literally start this right now, like while you're reading this!)

* The Subconscious Audit (10-day challenge) in the North Node

* The Audacious Abundance Shadow Work Challenge (5-day) in the North Node

* Building Your Spiritual Operating System course in the North Node

Step 2: Look around and see what else is out there

This is a crucial step that approximately 73% of enthusiastic idea-havers skip because it feels boring and also because they're secretly terrified they'll discover someone already did their idea but better.

Before you charge onto the scene, you gotta see who else is already doing what you want to do. If there's truly nobody else on the case, it's crucial to investigate why that might be. Is it because you're a visionary genius ahead of your time? Or is it possible that people have tried to execute on this idea before and failed spectacularly, leaving behind only cautionary tales and abandoned websites with broken links?

Necessary research, my friend. Like checking if the ice is thick enough before you decide to ice skate on the pond.

During this delightful process of internet stalking (sorry, "market research"), you'll also need to get clear on who you're making this thing for. Who's your ideal client/customer/audience/person who will give you money in exchange for your creation? What do you actually know about them vs. what you're assuming? What do you need to learn about them to avoid creating something nobody wants? (This happens more than you'd think. See: Google Glass, Crystal Pepsi, whatever happened to Segways.)

Check out:

* The Ideal Client Casting Workshop for authentic ideal client work

* The Ideal Client Tarot Spread

* Market Research and Analysis Process Workshop

Step 3: Come up with a prototype

Listen, this isn't the Old Testament. You're not Noah getting divine instructions to build an ark for the first time in human history because an omniscient voice told you to.

You're not gonna build a massive, perfect thing in the middle of nowhere, fill it with everything you think people need, and then miraculously have it work WITHOUT LEAKS for 40 days and 40 nights while chaos reigns around you.

Absolutely not.

You're going to test your idea like a normal person who lives in the 21st century and has access to the internet.

Piece by piece. Bite by bite.

You don't have time to waste building something that's completely wrong. You don't have the money to spend on creating elaborate solutions to problems that don't actually exist. You don't have the emotional bandwidth to discover that your "visionary" idea is actually just a slightly different version of something that already failed in 2019.

Life is just one big experiment anyway, and so is literally anything you create. It's a process of trying something, seeing what worked and what flopped harder than a fish out of water, tinkering with the pieces that didn't work, and trying again. Iteration, as the business bros say. (BTW, publishing content is an excellent way to prototype or test an idea for the low, low price of free.99)

Check out:

* The Heroic Imperfect Action Course and Challenge, a 30-day process that helps you develop a product or service, prototype it, and launch it in 4 weeks (because if you're gonna do something potentially stupid, might as well do it quickly)

* The Holographic Sales Universe 3-day class, which has an entire day dedicated to validating your ideas but also covers positioning and pricing your creations

Step 4: Build your brand stance (aka figure out your vibe and commit to it)

There's one piece of advice I received while trapped in a tech accelerator program a million years ago (fine, it was 2017 or 2018, but in startup years that's basically ancient history) that I repeat constantly like a mystical mantra: Fall in love with the problem, not the solution.

This might be a controversial take that will make some brand strategists clutch their Pantone color wheels, but I don't think you should build out all the pretty details of your "brand" until you've completed the previous three steps.

Once you know who you're helping or talking to (aka your ideal client/customer/human who will hopefully give you money), it becomes exponentially easier to define what your "brand" should be. It's like having a conversation with a specific person instead of shouting into the void and hoping someone cool hears you.

Check out:

* The Baddie Brand Book template

* Stages of Awareness Workshop

* The Growth Edging Course (listen, I hate that I named it this because it sounds vaguely inappropriate and tells you absolutely nothing about what this incredible course actually contains, but basically this is my copywriting masterwork and I'm too stubborn to rename it now)

Ready to take the leap, but want to pack a parachute just in case? Welcome to The North Node, where we’re there to help you build the plane as you fall through the sky.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thetwelfthhouse.substack.com/subscribe