With our backyard toasting in the summer heat,
And my closing-in-on-2-years-old-son having a blast out there ...
I'm ready to put down my coffee,
Shut off this computer,
And stop struggling to make an intro that satisfies me. I'm trying something new with this article and I just need to hit publish.
Here's the thing,
Over on The Guardian Academy I write quite a bit of content. I'm not the only one making stuff, but I write.
One of the projects we're growing over there is The Arena. It's growing fast and it's a really good and unique program.
Maybe I'm bias, but the feedback from those in it agrees.
Because we grow through action, smaller steps, and raising the floor, it sometimes seems to unfold like a hodgepodge, but there is a method to the madness. This past month, Nic quietly relaunched The Guardian Academy podcast over there to be "The Arena Podcast."
Nic tends to show up best in person, and then on video and audio. He's an effective writer (having communicated very well in that medium for a long time), but it's not where he plays his best game - in comes me.
As a part of The Arena project, we're releasing series on the podcast designed to help meet you where you are in the process of Engaging the Field and entering your own Arena (or "The" Arena if you're interested).
I'm taking the audio/video of the podcast episodes, and writing companion articles for those who prefer to read. As much as possible I communicate the core ideas while adding clarity and detail where useful.
Because the ideas we're communicating are so fundamental,
I thought it would be useful - both for myself, and for you (hopefully) - to go through the process connected with each episode here on Growing Trees.
(This is also part of my new pillars I talked about in the 3 Pillars article)
We start with a simple question in the introduction episode which you can find here:
Why do we need to Engage the Field?
In the context of this Substack, I'm going to frame it as ... why do I need to Engage the Field as a writer, as someone who publishes on Substack, as an entrepreneur, and perhaps even I'll include a little bit as a father.
If you don't listen to that episode, or read the accompanying article, some of what I'm about to go through may not make complete sense, but I'll endeavor to tie in the necessary details.
To begin with in answering this question,
We must understand that most people do not know what to focus on.
And by the way,
Most people also believe that they are not most people. So, keep that in mind if you think you're above this.
I'm certainly not above this.
It's very difficult to know the best thing to focus on. It takes presence and intent. It takes going through the process several times, fumbling around trying to figure it all out.
It's a little bit of a chicken and egg situation, because we often think we need to know exactly what to focus on to get started, because in order to effectively get what we want in life, we DO need to know what to focus on ...
However in order to figure out what to focus on, we have to get started.
Engaging the Field reveals understanding within ourselves, about how we interact with the world, which tells us what to focus on.
Taking Growing Trees as an example, I recently made some adjustments and found more effective focus for this Substack, as well as how it fits in the rest of what I'm doing - but that all came after Engaging the Field with my writing here.
But here's the real reason this is important.
Engaging the Field shows us what we can actually do.
It also shows us not only what we are capable of doing, but that which we are most inclined to do as well.
In a world of infinite options and possibility, if you let yourself take action and do things, it's highly likely you'll gravitate towards the things you are not only capable of doing, but that which you are most inclined and likely to do in general.
I've been writing about this lately, most notably in "The Learning Lens ..."
At the beginning of the year, I was looking down several paths and testing the waters with all of them.
One of those ideas was to build up my personal email list focusing on email copywriting, and then sell information/courses/education/coaching around that subject.
Alongside that I had Growing Trees which I thought I might use as evergreen principled content to support that work and be a bridge into The Guardian Academy and Man Bites Dog where I was also writing.
What I found as I did the work, is that I was NOT inclined towards actively building an audience of copywriters to whom I would sell information. I'll probably get into detail on that in time - I'm sharing mostly to illustrate that Engaging the Field has revealed to me where I'm most effective and most inclined to take action.
And that's in writing to the audiences that already exist in The Guardian Academy and Man Bites Dog.
I actually enjoy my personal email list writing, but it's not serving my current goal,
Which brings us back to another reason why we need to Engage the Field:
The Arena is all about an intentional structure which increases your ability to get what you want. I follow that structure,
So if I'm Engaging the Field as a writer here on Substack, I have to ask myself what do I want here, and how does Engaging the Field here as a writer increase my ability to get that?
Let's explore.
Quite simply,
I want to be able to make a living as a writer.
Shocking I know.
No doubt there are plenty out there who want to make a living as a writer.
But I also suspect there are people who want to write and not worry about making a living out of it (that's me and photography).
So how it all looks is unique to each person.
I want to be able to wake up, go enjoy writing for awhile, then do stuff with my kids, tend to my garden, etc. So I need to be able to make enough of a living from the 'writing for awhile' each day for it to work.
The bigger picture I'm aiming for is important.
I'm not writing for the purpose of making a ton of money. I write because it's how I show up best in the world. I'm just hoping to make enough from it that I don't need to do anything else (and can continue to show up how I show up best).
How do I figure that out?
Here's what I've done over the years, as a writer, and how that's lead me to being here on Growing Trees, and how I believe Grown Trees fits into that picture.
Every time I Engaged the Field over the years, I leveled up my writing game. I talk more about this in "The Learning Lens." The short version is that because my game revolves around writing, every time I Engaged the Field I added to that and/or returned to that.
For 8 years I published a magazine about Coffee. Then I put my shingle up (as they say) as an email copywriter. In that process I naturally gravitated toward longer form in-depth writing.
When the opportunity presented itself to write for The Guardian Academy, I did it out of natural curiosity, interest, and desire to contribute to the community.
The first article I wrote there was The Real Cost of Dopamine.
The next was my capstone about slowing down (I also published it on this Substack).
I continued to write and publish and work and write and publish and work.
When I was invited to officially write for The Guardian Academy last fall, I also created this Substack as I sensed there was a place for this that would make sense in time.
This year, as I've progressed in my writing for The Guardian Academy and then Man Bites Dog, I became CMO for both of those publications as we launched The Arena to help people implement all the things they are learning in life.
During all of that I was plotting a transition away from a heavy focus on client work which was my source of income for the past 4 years. In answering the question of what it is I wanted, I came to the conclusion through Engaging the Field that serving clients for 40-60 hours a week was not going to work out. I also felt like I was not able to show up completely in the work itself due to limitations with that dynamic (the deep dive on that is for another time).
Parallel to my time stepping into my current role at The Guardian Academy last year, I worked in partnership on multiple projects with Lukas Resheske - running his New Email Masters Program last summer, I ended up working with and helping several copywriters one on one. We launched AI Email Masters in the winter (which I produced), and I saw that as a springboard toward my own brand as a copywriter.
But, as I pointed out earlier in this article, what was revealed to me through Engaging the Field was that my natural inclination did NOT take me in that direction.
I hypothesized that if all I needed to do every day was write an email to my list and from there make "enough" then that would be pretty sweet.
Starting in December I Engaged the Field by beginning to write and send an email every day. If I couldn't do that, it wouldn't work.
That turned out to be really fun and successful.
My next test was to build the list. I started Engaging the Field there with Laurel Portié's ad and content strategies, along with looking to my work on TGA and MBD Substack to create networked effects.
I collected data for 90 days, and then looked back, and realized a few things:
I'm not a course creator. Yes I can make them. Yes I like teaching and helping. But I don't actually like creating and selling courses. A topic I'll get into another time.
I can create an email list and nurture an audience - I've done this countless times both for myself in previous areas and for others. But I wasn't doing it on my personal list now (more accurately, I was growing subscribers, but at a snails pace compared to the audience I speak to here and on TGA and MBD). In retrospect the reason being was that it just didn't fit into the picture of the direction I was headed.
I had thought, if I had an independent audience on my own email list I could leverage that to also support TGA and MBD.
That's not a bad idea.
But, the honest analysis of my own behavior and position kept telling me that the more sensible opportunity was sitting here on Substack.
That I should cut, instead of adding more.
All of this came from Engaging the Field.
In doing.
It's obvious in retrospect.
But I can't know how the pieces are going to fit together until I make a hypothesis - that the pieces will fit together a certain way - and then try to fit them together.
Either I discover thats the right way, or I discover that's not the right way - at least, not right now.
Rather than flounder around trying to make my own email list work, do something with Growing Trees, publish in TGA, and on MBD, and work on growing The Arena ...
I cut my efforts on my list and my "personal audience."
Substack actually makes this easy.
Because I have an audience growing here. It's just not the audience I originally thought I was going to make.
It's actually better.
Because its the audience which is naturally emerging from my work.
And that's my preferred source of outcome - emergence.
The emerged outcome is always the best outcome (in my eyes), because a system is always perfectly designed to produce the outcome it produces.
As a brief aside on systems: You have two options in creating a system (your life is a system, your business is a system, etc) ....
1 - either you think of the outcome you want and then try your best to specifically engineer that outcome
or
2 - you do things in congruence with the way you want to be in the context of the ideal outcome, and then observe what emerges from that system, and then adjust course to serve the outcome.
The secret 3rd option is to do both.
That's what The Arena and Engaging the Field are all about.
Hopefully the exploration of my path through Engaging the Field as a writer made sense. It's quite a bit, and perhaps a hodgepodge, but that's actually life - especially when you do things.
Most of the time when you do things, when you Engage the Field, the outcome will not match your expectation.
That's why I wrote "Set the Goal, Burn the Plan" - because the best way, in my opinion, to live life and do things and get what you want is to let go of the idea of what you think your outcome is going to look like, and use present and self awareness to follow what emerges for you.
There's one more reason why we need to Engage the Field.
That is to establish Planck Knowledge over Chauffeur Knowledge.
Again, read the intro piece or listen to the audio.
This is becoming the doer, instead of being a knower.
Because when you do things, you become what it is you think you know. The most effective and useful knowledge and understanding comes from what happens when you Engage the Field.
Look at everything I shared above.
There's a ton of nuance and experience in the path I went through, and I can speak to that nuance and detail from actual experience, not from theory.
I can give you an experienced based explanation of why you may or may not want to build a personal email list.
I can actually give a huge depth of explanation and detail on the effectiveness of email across the board because I've been working in that domain for over a decade.
(Go see my writing on Man Bites Dog if that is of interest to you)
As a writer,
Here on Substack with Growing Trees,
Where does the Planck Knowledge come from?
There's a significant element of this that comes just from publishing, but
Like presence,
It requires intent.
So what I've been doing here on Growing Trees is to build in more intent and more presence with the purpose of this publication.
I wrote about this recently in "The 3 Pillars"
That article is an example of me going through the learning process in real time, building Planck Knowledge of being a writer and publisher on Substack.
I'm baking this in as one of my pillars. In that article I called it the "Over the Shoulder Learning Lens."
It's basically "here's what I did, here's what happened, here's what I think next" as I continue to go through the learning cycle.
This article you’re reading now is in that category. As I go through writing the structure of The Arena, I'm going to do those exercises for myself - in many cases I've already done them, but writing them out like this is useful for myself and hopefully insightful for you.
The outcome of all of this,
As a writer, here on Substack,
Is that I'll continue to grow my own Intensity (see Frequency, Intensity, Purpose) and hopefully through that reveal Purpose ...
Which means my work here will stand out uniquely, both in resonance and in usefulness to anyone who comes across it.
My unique Planck Knowledge cannot be replicated, because this is all based on me, my life, and my experience ...
I can't think of a more effective way to make a living as a writer than to be uniquely useful playing my own game.