This is the fourth episode of the Summer Series. It’s about the most valuable thing you do, which is so often the very thing you’ve stopped noticing, because it comes so easily to you.
It’s about a quiet blind spot almost every creative I work with has. The most valuable part of your work is so often the very part you’ve stopped noticing, because it comes so easily to you that you’ve quietly decided it can’t be worth much. It’s about why that happens, and what shifts when you finally start to see it.
There’s a moment I see again and again. Someone finishes a piece of work, hands it over, and the person receiving it says, “how did you even know to do that?” And they give a small shrug, and say, “oh, I don’t know really. I just did.” Because to them, it honestly did feel like nothing. It was obvious. It was just how they work.
And that little shrug is the whole thing, really. Because the part they’ve just waved away is very often the most valuable thing they do.
Why we can’t see it
When something comes easily to us, we assume it comes easily to everyone. It feels so natural, so obvious, that we can’t quite believe it counts for anything. So we quietly discount it. We decide it’s just how we are, nothing special, and we leave it out. Out of our website, out of the way we describe our work, out of the whole story we tell about what we do. We show people the finished thing, the lovely result, but never the years of judgement and taste that went into every small decision underneath it.
And it’s usually the specific, unglamorous things. The way you prepare before you begin. The questions you ask a client that nobody else thinks to ask. The standards you’d never let slip, even when no one would ever have known. Your eye. Your taste. The particular way you see. To you, all of it feels perfectly ordinary. To everyone else, it’s the whole reason your work is what it is.
Ease is not the opposite of expertise
This is the part I’d love you to sit with for a moment. The fact that something feels effortless to you is not a sign that it’s worth less. If anything, it’s the opposite. Effortlessness is what years of practice actually feel like, from the inside. All those hours, all that experience, all the things you got wrong and learnt from, they fold themselves into you so completely that, in the end, the hard thing simply feels like second nature. That isn’t nothing. That’s mastery, worn so smooth it’s stopped drawing attention to itself. The ease is the evidence.
Letting it show
So the work, if there is any, is simply to start noticing it again. Not the finished piece, but everything underneath it. The decisions you made without thinking. The options you quietly rejected. The reasons behind every choice. The care nobody ever sees, because it would never occur to you to show them.
Because when people can see that depth, they understand what they’re really getting, and why it could only be you. When they can’t, they’re left comparing you on the surface, where everything looks much the same.
It’s a funny thing, but so much of building a business you love turns out to be exactly this. Not reaching for cleverer, shinier things, but noticing what’s already there in you, and letting a little more of it show.
The thing you’re most tempted to leave out, because surely everyone can do it, because it’s nothing really, because it’s just how you work… that may well be the truest, most valuable thing you have. It always was. You’d just stopped noticing.
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