#53 – 28 Apr 2023

Welcome to The Looking Glass, My Creative Calling!

Yes, I’ve changed the newsletter name!

Why?

Well, when I first started on this journey, I had no idea what I was doing.

But I felt called to create.

Chances are you do too.

But after one whole year of writing newsletters, I can comfortably say I know where my interests lie and what topics I feel excited about exploring. 

And I see the opportunity:

The creator economy. 

Many people are living below their potential.

They barely exist and suffer through a work life that doesn’t fulfil them. This frustration then spills over into an unhappy family life at home. 

The creator economy is a light in the tunnel of darkness.

It’s a possible way out of mediocrity. 

We no longer want to sit in a cubicle all day, punching out the same dull weekly reports. 

And with the rise of AI, leaning into our humanity and creativity is our advantage. 

We feel alive and passionate when we express ourselves creatively. 

We don’t want to be stuck in work environments enforcing a “carrot and stick” culture where we feel forced to do things we hate.

No, we humans work best when we are intrinsically motivated.

We like to dance to our own tune.

I can see this with my baby son at home.

He’s still in that beautiful natural state before all the rules and reprogramming that comes with life. Bliss! He doesn’t like to be told what to do. It’s all about exploring things for himself. No fear. He wants to touch, feel and poke around. Test those boundaries!

Many of us have accepted the boundaries and stay well away from the edge of our limits.

When was the last time you poked around your self-imposed boundaries?

We limit our own potential to “keep us safe”.

But growth happens on the edges.

So what do we crave?

Dan Pink outlines three key factors for intrinsic motivation in his book Drive:

• Autonomy
• Mastery
• Purpose

All three of these factors are found in pursuing our creative calling.

So I want to double my focus on helping others realise their creative dreams. 

Today I will unpack six reasons why I renamed the newsletter to My Creative Calling.

Let’s get into it:

Six reasons why I am renaming the newsletter

1. The old name was unclear and confusing 

I liked the title The Looking Glass.

But really, what is The Looking Glass?

And outside of the “name”, I haven’t done anything else to build that out as a concept.

It did not clearly represent what my newsletter was about, so it probably wasn’t resonating with my target avatar, and subscriber growth has been slow.

I first chose the name “The Looking Glass” as it was a double metaphor for me:

• From the Alice In Wonderland book series and me, changing careers and diving into the creator economy was like “going down the rabbit hole” into a new world.
• The idea was to look in the mirror and reflect on lessons learned from my journey.

This name may have sounded cool, to me anyway, but the backstory is overly complex and confusing to people.

If you were a creator who stumbled across my website and had a quick glance, it probably wouldn’t be super clear that this was a newsletter to help you on your creator journey.

Let’s face it. We are lucky to get 3 seconds of someone’s attention these days. And people judge a book by its cover (or title).

Come on, I know you do it too!

So I have come around to this view of keeping it simple. Make it clear from the title what you are about.

Don’t try to be too clever. You will lose people. 

This leads me to:

2. The new name makes sense – My Creative Calling

So why the new name, my creative calling?

Through creating, I have worked out what I stand for and where I want to help people through my work.

I had unintentionally been building on the “Follow your creative calling” theme in my social media channels.

But why?

Because that was my journey.

The easiest thing to talk about is ourselves. We understand our dreams and struggles best as we are sitting in the driver’s seat. 

I felt frustrated and trapped in my “boring” accounting career. I had this creative spirit inside of me that was contradictorily slowly dying and bursting to get out at the same time.

In essence, I felt called to be more creative.

I knew my life purpose wasn’t to sit for hours on end at a desk crunching numbers in Excel to send out the same old monthly reports. 

I looked at people in positions above me. They seemed stressed out and unfulfilled, trapped on the corporate hamster wheel. Who really wants to be stuck working evenings and weekends, spending less time with their loved ones, on something they don’t truly enjoy?

I wanted out. 

I felt like I wasn’t living my potential, and creating was the way out.

I wanted to be doing the work I would happily be doing anyway, for free! The work that didn’t feel like “work”. The work I was called to do. 

The clues are in the energy, particularly if you have to do it outside normal work hours. For example:

• Crunching numbers all weekend left me drained and miserable.
• But coaching or writing on the weekend filled my cup. I was left energised and excited about life.

Now I get that my ideal work may feel like a prison to someone else. You could argue I am leaving a corporate hamster wheel for a content hamster wheel. But our life changes when we follow what lights us up. Purpose matters. Many of my accounting friends get a real kick from reconciling a spreadsheet, which is awesome!

Since embarking on this journey of becoming more creative through creating, I feel like I have become a new person. My life is so much more fulfilling and purposeful.

Since learning this insight, the power of exercising our creativity, and the potential of the creator economy, I have decided to pivot my coaching and writing efforts to help others on this path:

Helping others to discover and follow their creative calling.

So why not rename my newsletter in alignment with that?

Then people can gauge a feeling from the brand.

“If you know, you know”, as they say.

But this is where it became a new name became hard.

I originally wanted to have “creator” in the name. Still, many of my brainstormed names were already taken. When you merge “creator” with “calling”, many god / religious connotations emerge online.

I liked the idea of following a creative calling, but there was already a book with that name. 

So I thought, why not build out “my” own creative calling?

This led me to the idea of “My…”

This naming format has worked well for other creator brands:

• My First Million
• My Daily Business
• My Millennial Money

I like “My” because I can tell my story and feature stories from others’ perspectives. 

So I settled on My Creative Calling as the domain name was available, and it has room to grow within the one project.

3. I want to be known for one main project

One thing I have found challenging is shaking off my old identity (accountant) and carving out a new one as a creator and coach.

It felt weird on LinkedIn, where I quit my job and started building “Matt K. Head”.

Sounds a bit self-indulgent, lol.

I still believe our name is our greatest asset in the creator economy and social media. People want to follow people, not corporate brands. For example, on Twitter, Elon Musk has ~136m followers, whereas his company Tesla only has ~20m followers.

So building under our name is critical on social media. But having a main project outside ourselves is nice to direct that audience, an idea bigger than ourselves. 

For example:

• James Clear directs to his 3-2-1 Thursday newsletter
• Chris Williamson leads to his Modern Wisdom podcast
• Anne-Laure Le Cunff refers to her blog Ness Labs

I appreciate the value of building something outside our name regarding a project.

It feels more tangible.

You see the difference:

• Matt Head, founder of Matt K. Head
• Matt Head, founder of My Creative Calling

It lands differently, doesn’t it?

I want to expand into new mediums without managing multiple brand names for each project, for example, a podcast or YouTube channel.

4. Room to grow within that project

I have previously spoken about my failure to launch a podcast.

Well, now I would like to take that opportunity seriously.

And rather than launch a new podcast under a new brand name, I would call it all the same thing.

So I’m launching the My Creative Calling podcast.

And within that, I have room to explore and grow in many different directions.

I can talk about my creative journey and interview others on theirs. 

I want to live by one of my mantras from last week’s letter:

Start before you are ready. 

The easiest way for me to begin without overthinking is to start the podcast as an extension of the newsletter. 

For example, Dan Koe simply riffs off his weekly newsletter to create his YouTube videos (which have been blowing up massively!).

This makes starting easy, as most of the grunt work on topics has already been done. This ties in with Anthony Pompliano’s “create once, publish five times” principle.

And many people don’t enjoy emails or reading but love audio and video. So you can instantly appeal to a larger audience. 

Yes, it will suck at first. But that’s all part of the journey to mastery!

You’ll hear more about the launch in a future letter.

5. I want to keep it (relatively) simple

I can’t expect my audience and potential audience to remember multiple things as I grow.

This thought was triggered after reading a blog from Jay Clouse, where he discussed the challenges of building multiple brands:

It was so hard to talk about BOTH the Creator Science (newsletter) brand and the Creative Elements (podcast) brand.

I firmly believe that people struggle to associate multiple things with their concept of YOU. We just don’t care about others enough to keep it all straight.

I didn’t want to be “Jay Clouse, the writer of Creator Science and host of Creative Elements.”

Jay Clouse

So Jay recently merged his newsletter and podcast under the “Creator Science” brand.

He described how painful this task was, given the work involved and the scale of his audience, but it had to be done, as the confusion was costing him. 

Now I am nowhere near the audience size of Jay.

So I see this early stage as an advantage for me to take on board the wisdom from other creators’ lessons learned and make some changes now. Big changes like a rebrand will only become infinitely harder as I grow. So I would like to align everything under one simple banner rather than building multiple projects with separate brands. 

6. Focused content

When I started out, my content was all over the place in the broad domains of “work” and “life”.

These were the categories on my blog:

• Career Engagement and Performance
• Creativity
• Goals and Habits
• Leadership
• Learning and Growth
• Meaning and Purpose
• Mindset and Thinking Better
• Productivity and Focus
• Wellbeing

But now that I know what I am about and who I can best serve, I want to narrow in on the topics which serve the mission:

Helping others to follow their creative calling.

And creating meaningful content online while building a lifestyle and business around that.

I want all my content to serve that goal of helping others realise their creative business and lifestyle dreams. And through my “serve-first” mindset, I will attract coaching clients who want support on their journey. 

Next Steps

Firstly, I am interested to hear your thoughts on the change. Please reply with your first impressions or any feedback.

Secondly, I’m trying to keep it simple at this stage and live by what I preach:

Just start!

Don’t get bogged down on the perfectionism of fancy designs and logos.

This anti-overthinking mindset means no professional designer or endlessly fretting over possible logos. I have quickly designed it myself in Canva and based it on the old design and colours for “The Looking Glass”, so there is some familiarity. I can improve over time. 

Thirdly, I’ll need to go and update my website, email platform and landing pages, CTA’s, social media and everywhere else it pops up. I’m sure I’ll miss somewhere, but oh well, “rip the band-aid off”, as Jay Clouse said in his rebranding blog. 

Reflection

What are you building? 

• Is it under your own name or a separate brand name or project? 
• Is it aligned with your future goals and possible exits? 
• As Stephen Covey said, “Begin with the end in mind”.

Are you unintentionally building out too many projects under multiple brand names? 

• What could it look like to simplify?
• Can you make your message clearer to your audience?

If you were known for one thing, one mission, what would that be?

What would be your top 3-5 content categories if you focused all your content on your mission?

A quote to ponder

That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity.

Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.

But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.

Steve Jobs

What happened this week 

Life challenges

I’ve been fairly quiet on social media this week.

Lately, I’m finding it extra tough balancing family/dad life and the creator business. Haha, it feels like such a house of cards at the moment! One sick kid or late-night hospital visit can turn my world upside down.

We’ve had a few short work weeks, too, with the Easter break and then a public holiday long weekend here in Australia, so I’m finding it hard to stay on top of things.

In other news, we have just announced that another “baby Head” is on the way, so the chaos will only worsen, lol!

I keep telling myself:

If I can still deliver great content and coaching while I’m feeling at 60% capacity, imagine what I am capable of when I can get back up closer to 100%.

It all feels a bit fragile, so I am pondering Nassim Taleb’s idea of Antifragile, “that category of things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish.”

This may be a fruitful exploration that will be of value to you in a future letter: 

• How can we thrive through adversity? 
• How can I draw advantage from my frequent state of chaos and disorder?

Let me know if that topic sounds interesting to you. 

Final thoughts 

Today’s writing background playlist was the album Lonerism by Tame Impala.

If you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it with a friend, and if you haven’t already, sign up here or below.

It would be great to have you on board!

Cheers!

Matt K. Head