write the manifesto you need to read

All the best manifestos I've written have been birthed during a moment of personal frustration and turmoil.

The Ungated Manifesto came after hitting yet another wall with the promises of the "creator economy." The non-coercive marketing manifesto was a desperate reckoning with my relationship with marketing. And The Source was about making peace with my endless capacity for self-sabotage during a particularly challenging season of life. These manifestos helped me make sense of some underlying distress I could no longer ignore, then chart a path away from it. They were all written, first and foremost, for myself, to satisfy my personal hunger for self-renewal.

As it so happens, all three of those pieces resonated with a ton of other people, too. They’re easily my most “popular” and widely-read pieces of writing. They’re the ones people routinely tell me meant something to them, even years after publishing. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

There are two reasons I bring this up. First, I think there's a conception that writing a manifesto is something you do after you’ve figured it all out, when you want to convince other people of the answers you've arrived at. Frankly, I think if that's your starting place for writing a manifesto, you've already lost the game. A manifesto is an energetic transmission more than some kind of rhetorical trick. Your pain and frustration and desperation are core ingredients that charge the manifesto with vital energy. If you feel that you've solved your problems, and have all the answers, your manifesto won't carry the energy required to reach people who are stuck in those problems themselves. Being in the game yourself helps you speak in a way that resonates. It helps position you not as a guru with answers, but as a leader. Someone who’s in the mess with you, instead of above it.

The second reason I'm on about this is because the "conversational creativity" manifesto that I'm setting out to write in public is Very Much one that I need for myself at this moment in life. For the past decade, perfectionism and self doubt and imposter syndrome have whooped my ass to such a degree that I often wonder if I should give up on writing and creativity as a vocational path. Maybe just get a job at a coffee shop or bookstore or something. But alas, I know I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I didn't keep doing this work. Something in me has to write. Has to keep exploring the frontiers of these ideas and stories that spark me to life.

I've had a few glimpses of the conversational creativity paradigm over the last year or two. Moments where I was able to tune into some larger spark of inspiration, and just flow with it as if it were a conversation, rather than a performance where I had to “do it right” in order to prove my worth. Moments where the self-doubt receded into the background, where the rigidity and fear melted away, and I was just able to deepen into relationship with something.

There was spell of about eight weeks where I wrote a new poem every single day. Most of them weren’t good, but they were sincere expressions of something that was (and still is) alive for me. The other example is writing The Source a few months ago. When I surrendered what I thought that manifesto should be, I encountered a voice deep within me that led somewhere unexpected and beautiful. Conversing with that voice for six weeks, back and forth, led to a piece of writing I’m more proud of than anything I’ve ever written.

All of this is to say, I want and need more conversational creativity in my life. I know it's possible for me. I know the wisdom for how to do this, how to embody it, lives inside me right alongside all of my self-doubt and fear. The purpose of writing the manifesto, therefore, is to help me remember what I already know, and act on it more often.

So yeah, I'll be unpacking more of what conversational creativity is in coming posts. Gonna flesh this thing out, piece by piece, conversation-style. But for now, just wanna emphasize this point again. There's a heck of a lot of power in getting intimate with your deepest frustrations, then writing the manifesto you need to read yourself.