This simple creative exercise changed my life
Join me for a collaborative workshop to gain creative clarity!
I am launching a brand new workshop series, and invite you to join me. The first workshop focuses on something I have taught for more than a decade: Clarity Cards.
Clarity Cards are a simple process to find more time and energy to make writing and creativity a priority in your life. This is the foundation for setting milestones and goals that will truly move your writing and creative work forward. Most people I speak with struggle to find the time and energy to write and create amidst so many other responsibilities and distractions. Clarity Cards solves that. Without this process, you don’t have a firm footing for creative growth.
In helping writers reach their audience, I have found that the first essential ingredient is creative clarity. When you have creative clarity, you:
Know exactly what to create.
Have confidence in your identity as a creator.
Prioritize what to work on (and what not to.)
Focus your attention on what matters most to you.
Create a clear plan.
Clarity Cards are a tool. The results are a clear sense of what to focus on first, and how it will lead you to the milestones and goals that matter most to you. What you will end up with is a pyramid of 10 prioritized cards that will help you feel focused and make clear decisions to find more time and energy to write. I have taken hundreds of people through this process, and have used them myself for years. In fact, I will be redoing my own Clarity Cards as part of this workshop. This is what they look like:
They look simple, but they have a powerful way of reframing not just your creative goals, but your entire life. I have seen this exercise lead to profound breakthroughs for people, as well as practical ways to find more time and energy to write.
Clarity Cards Changed My Life
Fifteen years ago, I sat down on the floor of my old apartment and took out a stack of index cards. The floors were wildly uneven, and whoever installed the carpet in the living room did it wrong — there was this harsh ridge running diagonally across the floor. There I sat, on one side of the carpet ridge, and on each index card I wrote down a goal for my life.
After I had around 10 cards, I organized them into a pyramid where the single biggest goal was at the top. This became the Clarity Card process. Not long ago, I found my original Clarity Cards. They included a mix of intentions, but one card jumped out at me:
At the time, my wife and I did not yet have kids. I was working at a large publishing company, commuting about an hour and a half each way to work.
With these index cards, I reassessed the distance between my daily reality and the life I hoped to lead. The “stay at home dad” thing was my way of saying that I wanted to be present in the lives of my family once we had kids — not always on a train or in an office 30 miles away from my wife and kids.
The second part of that card included a frantic question: “Earn money from home. How?!” A year or so later, this is me:
In this photo, I am signing forms to formalize the ending of my employment at my job. To the right are the stacks of thank you cards from my wife’s baby shower. That summer, I started my company working with writers at the moment when we were the most uncertain about our future. We took the leap represented in the Clarity Cards.
Since that time, I have run my own business for 14 years. I work in a private studio a mile away from my house, or in my home office, and see my family regularly throughout the day.
It’s astounding to look at this index card and consider the moment I wrote it, and then look at my life today, which has answered the question of “how?” My life has lived up to the intention of that goal. I’m thankful for this every moment of every day.
I have been thinking a lot about what the next version of my Clarity Cards will look like. I’ll redo them this summer, and decided it would be fun to have a collaborative process where we all work on our Clarity Cards together!
Join Me!
This is a 3-week program where you join me and my community to develop your Clarity Cards. This is how to join us and how it works:
To be a part of it, simply become a paid member of my Substack. That’s it. The cost is $9 per month, or $6.58 per month if you pay for an entire year up front, which is a 27% discount. You can sign up or upgrade here:
This is a 3-week program. We begin on Monday, July 8th.
Each Monday (July 8th, 15th, and 23rd), I will send you a lesson via email that includes a video in which I take you through each step. I’ll also work through my own Clarity Cards to show you a specific example of how I navigate this process.
What do you need to participate? Maybe some index cards or pieces of scrap paper. And a pen or pencil. That’s it. Oh, and a willingness to go deep into what truly matters most to you and what you write and create!
At the end of each lesson, you will receive a specific homework assignment.
You will gain access to my brand new private Substack Chat where I will share prompts, and you can share your work, stay accountable, and engage with other writers and creators moving through this process.
You will end the three weeks with a completed set of Clarity Cards.
The results of this workshop will be you saying, “I’m proud of myself,” and me and my community saying, “We’re proud of you too!” And maybe you will have some new creative friends too!
If you aren’t already a paid subscriber, you can become one here:
The official name of this workshop is: Clarity Cards: Create More of What Matters, and it is the first of a new series I am running under the banner of The Creative Success Workshop Series.
My mission is to help you create more and ensure it connects with your ideal readers in a meaningful way. I’m excited for this series because it is more collaborative. Success only happens if you put in the work, and I find that is best done with others. We all get stuck with too many ideas, too much overwhelm, too many habits that feel comfortable, but don’t move us ahead. Collaboration changes that. And to be honest, this summer, I want to spend more time with people like you — writers and readers. This is going to be fun!
If you are a paid subscriber, or become one, please introduce yourself in my private Substack Chat! You can access Chat either in the Substack app on your phone, or when logged into Substack on your computer.
Here are some FAQs (or what I imagine your FAQs to be, this is a brand new workshop after all):
Q: “Dan, what is the schedule?”
A: From Monday, July 8th to Friday, July 26th, we will move through three weeklong lessons. You will receive a lesson (with a video) from me on Mondays via email, and I will give you homework for that week. Throughout the week, I will share prompts in my Substack Chat, and you can also engage with others in the workshop and share your work (if you feel comfortable with that).
Q: “Dan, do I have to show up anywhere at a specific day or time?”
A: Nope! You will receive lessons via email and any collaboration with others in the workshop happens in Substack Chat. Attend to this when you can during the week.
Q: “Dan, will you give me specific feedback on my goals and challenges with this?”
A: It’s possible, but not guaranteed. I’m going to be active in the Chat, sharing a lot of smaller updates and answering questions as we work through Clarity Cards. This is not a traditional course where you submit assignments and I give direct feedback though.
Have other questions? Let me know!
I am so excited to make this a fun and collaborative process. I hope you can join me. You can become a paid subscriber here, if you aren’t one already:
And please let me know in the comments: in what ways has creative clarity been a challenge for you?
Thank you for being here with me.
-Dan
Kids of the Week: 8th grade graduation for the big guy, and last day of first grade for the little fella:
And at my mom’s nursing home they held a mock wedding as an activity, and my mom got to be a bridesmaid!
Physical index cards are great, but there’s a decent cellphone equivalent for iPhone, called CardBeat — try it!
Looking forward to this! I've done a lot of this work over the past year, as I'm in the middle of a career pivot. So I see your Clarity Cards as an opportunity to work within a system/process to "get there" more efficiently, effectively and with accountability. I'm not a writer, but I am a creative person (20 years as a photographer with my own business and a dance teacher before that), but am now moving into health and wellness coaching and hope to have my certification completed by this time next year. Clarifying what matters most is the first step in the process of achieving one's goals. I've been following you, Dan, for a couple of months and everything resonates with me both personally and as a future coach -- I just wanted to let you know that!