A few days ago I came across Work to Publish. It’s a video from Jack Conte, who is half of the musical duo Pomplamoose and co-founder of Patreon. He is super-cheerful and enthusiastic, and I’d been following him for years because his energy is really close to the kind of feeling I want to strive for in my work: engaging, welcoming, novel, and happily quirky.

The link to the video is below, but briefly Conte’s insight is that finishing a project is fraught with anxiety. One would think that finishing a creative work would bring a sense of relief and accomplishment, but it actually doesn’t! That’s because finishing a creative work doesn’t really have a sense of finality in the way that, say, a sports match does. Conte calls it a “vocabulary problem”, because the work of being a creator isn’t to finish works as much as it is to PUBLISH. It’s a great video; check it out below!

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