What does working lightly mean, especially with content? How to create lightly?

You may have heard me talk about working lightly or creating lightly, right? And then someone asked me, can you be more tangible about what it means to specifically create lightly? So, first of all, working lightly is a mantra that I like to tell myself and I'd like to say to clients as often as I can. And the general idea is that most of us, the fact that you're watching a video like this, the fact that you're in my audience means that you probably highly prioritize educating yourself and improving yourself, you know, being the best version of yourself that you can. And another, another way of putting that is you tend to be kind of hard on yourself, okay? Because if you didn't, if you didn't care about self improvement, you know, working lightly would just be a normal thing, okay? But because you care about becoming better, you tend to take things quite seriously, especially when you produce something you want it to be. Some of us may have perfectionistic tendencies. So working lightly reminds us. The way I think about it is in order to produce excellent results, it requires skillfulness, right? You can't produce an excellent result until you are skillful. And the more skillful you are, the more you can create excellent results without much effort. Right? Think about the master. A master painter can paint something that looks amazing and it looks easy for them, and for them it's not that hard because they've done it so much and they've, they, they've increased their skill. An early painter will look like they're a child's drawing or something like that. Yeah, sometimes people may appreciate that. But, but people who are connoisseurs will say, ah, that's, that's a very childish or, you know, not a very skillful thing. I mean, whatever, you want to apply this to music, you want to apply this to, you know, whatever skill, right? Any craft, excellence or excellence requires skillfulness. Okay? You got that? So in other words, when you're in the beginning of a skill, to expect excellence from yourself is unrealistic and is going to make you work so hard that you probably burn out. And this is true in business too. Some of you are saying, okay, I'm, I'm now going to create content. George says to create consistently. So I'm, I'm going to create content and I'm going to expect every time I create, publish content out there, people better like it. You know, you have this, maybe you don't even say it to yourself, but you have this assumption that you post something out there and people should like it. How come, George, how come no One's liking my posts. So then I would ask you, are you an expert content creator yet? No, I just got started. Or I don't know if I'm an expert. I haven't really been improving my skill in that area. I haven't been. I haven't been deliberately practicing the improvement of my content creation skills. Oh, so you really are a beginner content creator. I don't know. I don't care if you've been creating for 10 years, if you haven't been deliberately practice deliberately practicing the improvement of your content creation skills, you are still a beginner. You're still a beginner, and so therefore you produce beginner results and beginner results are. Nobody likes anything you post. Okay? It's nothing wrong with you, it's just that you are a beginner. That's it. So this is where working lightly comes in. Working lightly understands that there is a journey to become to producing excellent results. The journey is by deliberately practicing the improvement of the skill that you want to become excellent at. So, for example, writing. Let's say I, I want to write things and have people like it and people share it. Okay, well, that's good. That means you need to study the writings of the people whose writings get shared, the people whose writings are popular or are resonating with the people you want to reach. You have to study how they do it and then you understand, oh, wow, this is how they do it. They have any skill has, you know, sometimes dozens of sub skills. So for example, writing well isn't just somehow you're brilliant. No, writing well involves studying the market. It involves how to brainstorm well, it involves how do you then turn the brainstorming into a draft and then involves editing well, it involves how to title well, I mean, just a handful. And each of these things has multiple sub skills underneath it. So somebody who cares enough about becoming a good writer says I need to understand what the various sub skills are to writing well to resonate with this audience. And I'm going to deliberately practice improving each of these sub skills and stack sub skill upon sub skill until they become so natural that I'm naturally a great writer. That journey is a journey. It is not. Well, today I'm not so good and I took a course. Now I'm an excellent writer and everything. Now maybe the course is, you know, three to six to 12 months long. And then over time you do become a better writer. For example, you can apply this to making videos, you can apply this to podcasts, you can apply this to creating images Right. You can apply this to offers like George. How come I put an offer out there and nobody buys it? Then I say, have you been deliberately practicing in creating aligned offers? No, I, I just thought that I. I'm gonna try my best. Okay, you're gonna try your best. You're still a beginner. That's why your offers are not getting bought at all. Because you don't understand market discovery. You don't understand how to create an aligned offer. You don't understand the art of a gentle launch. You don't understand any of that. And your offer's not getting bought. This is why there's no. There's nothing wrong with you. You're just a beginner. That's all there is, a journey towards excellence. Okay? So working lightly says, if there is a journey, I need to make it all the way to the end of that journey where excellence is until I expect excellent results. Now, along the way, you'll get some results. Of course, the beginner gets almost no results, right? Sometimes you get beginner's luck and you get some results, and then the intermediate gets some results, and then the intermediate advance gets more results, and then the advanced gets more results. And then, you know, the master gets the most results with the most ease. That is a journey. And if you are to actually sustain yourself on that journey, you can't overwork. You can't burn yourself out. And this is what a lot of people do because they ex. First of all, burnout happens in part because of misplaced expectations. Right? A lot of beginners say, I tried. I really, really tried. I tried for three months. I'm like, three months. I've been in business for 16 years. You tried for three months? Okay, it's like, no, I really, really. Well, first of all, you really, really tried. You probably worked too hard. And by the way, it doesn't take three months. Okay? So like, so it's like, okay, you need to start and, and, and be committed to the journey and know that I don't know how long it's going to take you. It could take you three months. It could take you three years. I don't know. Everybody has different ability to. And an amount of time to improve their skills. Okay? So if you're going to take this journey, the only way to sustain yourself is to work lightly. Working lightly. Working lightly allows working consistently, which then allows skill development, and skill development ends with great results. Okay, so back to the original question, George, what does creating lightly mean? Okay, so now that you understand working lightly, creating lightly means to Apply. Let's just say you're writing. Okay? Apply writing to this whole journey. Okay. Right now, I'm a beginner writer, so I'm going to have beginner expectation. I'm going to have expectations of what a beginner gets, which is nothing, which is no likes. No one's reading my posts. And if you had that expectation at the beginning, then anything you get even one, like, oh, oh, who's that? One person, you know, then you won't burn out. Because if you say, oh, George, I tried for three months, and every time I post something, nobody likes it, you've burned out, of course, because expectations are not matching reality. So creating lightly means, first of all, to have light expectations and to have the correct expectation of the journey to say, I don't know how long it'll take me, but it's going to take me a journey to get there. And I'm going to create lightly. And create lightly means. Actually for some of you, it means spending less time creating. Yeah, that doesn't. George, I thought, no. Yes. You probably are working too hard. If you're asking the question, how do I create lightly? You might be working too hard, you know? So, for example, I. I meet some people, I, I coach some people who are, who are creating content, and they tell me, I ask them, how long does it take you to produce a blog post? I said, well, you know, I first spend two hours brainstorming ideas, and then I spend another couple hours drafting, and then eventually I have to do some editing and polishing. So I don't know, maybe. Maybe it takes me two weeks to write a blog post, and every week I spend four hours to six hours on that. I'm like, are you kidding me? I don't. Okay, it takes me about. Well, these days it takes me about two hours total. From the beginning of an idea all the way to publishing it and sharing it everywhere. It takes me two hours total, over four sessions, half hour each. It takes me. Currently it takes me about two hours, not even that I say about. Takes me an hour and a half from the beginning to the end of a blog post. And if you're in the beginner journey, you probably shouldn't even take an hour and a half to write a blog post. You should probably take half an hour to write a blog post. Yeah. The beginner should take less time than the master, probably because the master understands more of the process and there's more already a system there and they want to, you know, there's a big bigger audience. A beginner one of the blessings of a beginner is you don't have an audience. So you shouldn't work too hard for a non audience. Obviously in the beginning you're not working in front of for an audience, you're working for yourself. You're working for your skill development. So, so creating lightly means to spend less time, it means to spend less effort and it means to have less expectations. But it also means to show up more frequently. So it might, So I would say, please write. So for example, when I teach writing courses, or I taught several content creation courses and I give people a 7 minute timer to say, I want you to write something that you could publish on social media in seven minutes. And I said, that's impossible, there's no way. And then I start the timer and then people create it. And then they said, I didn't know I could do that in seven minutes. I said, yeah, you're, you're a genius actually. You just need a timer. You are a genius. You just need a timer. You're brilliant. You just need a timer. Okay, now seven minutes is kind of extreme. I, I, I'll allow you half an hour. I will allow you 30 minutes. If seven, if people can do it in some in my students, including you can do it in seven minutes under pressure, you can do it in 30 minutes with less pressure. And remember, the expectation is, I don't think anybody will read this. I'm writing this for my, for my own skill development. And I want to work lightly so that I don't burn out. And I want to work lightly so I can keep showing up. So maybe, maybe say right now I want to become a better writer, that people will want to read my things and maybe share it. So then I will show up for half an hour, two times a week, three times a week. So because skill development, deliberate practice, requires frequency and requires noticing to say, okay, what did I do well there? How, how can I keep doing what I do well? And how can I improve something I could do a little bit differently, a little bit better? So creating lightly means less time, less intensity, more prolific, and a lighter touch. So don't spend two hours writing a blog, but spend only half an hour maximum writing a blog post. Maybe not even, you don't even have a website. Don't, don't have a website. First do it on Facebook first do it on substack. First do it on, you know, LinkedIn first, whatever social media you want, they already have a website for you and they already have people who could find you. Why don't you do it there first. Don't have a website yet because that's going to take you time to set up, and you might be perfectionistic about it. It hard to work lightly, create lightly. Less time, less intensity. Less time per session. Less intensity per session, more frequency of sessions. So, for example, I produce one blog post per week. When you're a beginner and you're learning, I want you to do two blog posts per week at least. Okay? You need more. More reps. They call it reps, right? Like when people are. Are. Are learning a skill, they say you need more reps. Whether it's reps, repetitions, Right? So you're. You're learning the violin. Well, you need more reps at that. Same at that passage, right? You're learning how to. How to make pottery. You need more. Do you need to create more pots? You can't just create one pot and say, I've learned how to create a pot. No, you need to make multiple pots. So every time you go, okay, I need it. Yeah. Right. So lighter touch, less time, but more reps. Okay? So I hope this makes sense. Comment below on how you will create more lightly going forward. I'd love to see that.