In 2019, I started a publication on Medium called The Original Impostor. It was a completely different time in my life. I had just graduated from University. I thought a career in computer science awaited me. I spent my free time taking Udemy and Udacity courses on Machine Learning. Podcasts were a thing I listened to, not a thing I made. I still lived with my parents and my family still lived in the small two-bedroom apartment I grew up in. The absence of my younger sister who moved to the US hung fresh in my life. Most people who knew me called me Isu, not Mo. No one called me Mo, I had yet to redefine that aspect of my identity. I daydreamed of romance and held romantic notions. I used Twitter on a daily and borderline obsessive basis. Twitter was still called Twitter. I had not yet completed a marathon. I had never travelled out of Nigeria. I did not even own a valid international passport. I was only at the beginning of a crisis of faith that would shift my entire relationship with religion, that is to say, I was a better Muslim..
Also, I looked like this
Like I said, it was a different time in my life. I was a different person.
The Original Impostor was a corner of the internet where I wrote niche, often science-themed articles in what I thought was accessible language. I was a big fan of Tim Urban’s wait but why and you could tell. My first article was on the psychology of road rage, the last one was about art critique. A two-part series on Mars followed this article about my 3 weeks in Nigeria’s post-university military-style camp. This publication barely has a discernible theme except that I let my curiosity take me to weird and interesting places.
I recently went through some of the articles on that blog. I felt like a stranger reading them. My writing style has changed a lot (although it is still clear that I write in strings of thought.) While reading an article about love, I had one of those rare moments of pride. I thought to myself:
‘This is actually pretty good.’
In each article, I had a curiosity I wanted to explore. I followed that curiosity without really knowing where it would take me. It always led me to something new, sometimes in an unpredictable way.
Then I had another thought.
“I don’t know how I did this. I don’t know how I wrote these articles. “
I had a similar moment about a week earlier when I tried to make a teaser trailer for a podcast I have been working on for over 6 months. For inspiration, I listened to a trailer I made for an earlier season of the same podcast when I realised something:
“I could not for the life of me figure out how I did it. I did not know how I made this thing“
“I don’t know how I do hard things”. OR put another way, “I don’t remember how I did the hard things I did in the past”. The consequence is that making hard things is not getting any easier. Every podcast trailer I make; every essay I write, feels just as hard. This is one of my biggest problems with work; it slows me down the most.
Each new hard thing feels equally challenging because I am not doing anything to retain the knowledge of how to do it. And it’s not like I am telling myself something idealistic like each time is a discovery. No. I am just being careless.
With each new project. I can only do a small part at a time and end up procrastinating the next part for a dangerously long time because it feels so incredibly hard and I don’t know how to approach it.
Hard things remain hard if you don’t teach yourself not just how to do them but also to make doing them replicable.
So in today’s essay. How to do hard things again and again.
In case you are new here. My name is Mo Isu. I am an audio producer based in Lagos, Nigeria. I am currently attempting to build a career in audio storytelling and art. This newsletter features personal essays about this journey.
You are reading issue 28.
Starting with the Basics; knowing what to do
A few days ago, I updated my work history on LinkedIn, a symbolic act as I acclimatise to a new role. I have just taken up some new responsibilities which I am excited about but also anxious about. It seems anxiety must accompany all my feelings.
As my new team finalised the scope of my contract and I was slowly brought into my first story, I shared my anxiety with the senior producer. He responded by asking me some questions. They weren’t so much questions he wanted me to answer for him but questions I needed to answer for myself. The questions were meant to give me direction; to provide clarity. Anxiety brews strongest when clarity is missing. I should know, working freelance with all its uncertainty has ushered in the most anxious period of my life. Dhashen, my senior producer, asked me these four questions.
What do you enjoy doing?
What do you want to keep doing?
What do you want to get better at doing?
What do you want to do less of?
It’s a strange new thing to think about a job as an opportunity that serves me - serves my life’s purpose. At some point over the past few years, I started to see responsibility as an opportunity to disappoint other people. It’s a depressing confession to make but there’s a disturbingly large amount of truth in it.
Freelancing, with its terrifying uncertainty, has become a safe place for me. It has provided me with so much freedom and the comfort of knowing that the only person I let down with my inaction or failure is myself.
I have a recurring joke with my friend about accepted pitches. We joke about the dreaded moment of learning your pitch has been accepted, because now you have to do the damn thing. And what if you don’t do it well? What if you can’t do it?
The first pitch I ever wrote got approved, I wrote about it in this newsletter almost two years ago. I never finished the work. An incomplete draft still sits in my Google Drive, taunting me. Taunting my inability to do the work I promised because I don’t know how to do hard things.
I have been collaborating with Radio Workshop frequently for about a year now. Almost exactly a year ago, I first met the team in person, in the Addis Ababa airport.
Since then, I’ve produced three stories with them including Love Is a Conversation. For new readers, love is a Conversation is an episode about a chat I had with my old-school Nigerian dad around seeking therapy for my anxiety. I say ‘old-school Nigerian’ in hopes that it summarises that my father isn’t really someone with whom a conversation about therapy is easy to have.
I remember missing a deadline for a script draft for that story and talking with my editor about it. I was so anxious because I was letting the thing this story was about hold me back from making the story. She responded to me with an unprecedented amount of grace. Something about that has stayed with me. She said in response to my anxiety about delaying the timeline, ‘We don’t work in advertising, it’s fine if you need more time.’
Working with this team has been a lesson in care. I think I am pretty lucky that I get to relearn what it feels like to have responsibility by working with people who check in on each other’s well-being. It means in the place of dread, I feel some safety. I am trying to build on that safety by actually doing the work that is expected of me.
I have been here for a little over a month. The first thing I realised is that I have sort of fallen out of the routine of showing up every day. Having a job had become a thing that scared me. So far, I am doing pretty well with meetings, not so much with deadlines and urgency. But there’s patience for me to pick things up and I am really trying to do that.
I had a call with the managing producer two weeks ago where she worked me through the task management system. She’s the 4th person I spoke to since I first started writing this essay about doing hard things and from her, I have picked up the last little lesson I felt I needed for this. While on our call, she did something that sort of just finely wrapped up everything for me. For each story, we produce, we have a task and underneath that, there are many more subtasks. On the call, she pulled out a template for the story I was doing and ticked off all the tasks I had already done. That was it. A template. That was the magic solution.
I have spent the last week making templates for all of the things I do. Steps for each type of output I make. Including one for this newsletter (which hopefully means you will be hearing more from me).
I am putting a lot of areas of my life through the same process I went through to write this essay.
Starting by articulating my purpose. Asking the simple question of why I am doing this.
Then there’s the question of how to start. It’s not an easy question to answer the first time but it doesn’t need to be as hard every single time.
Finally, there’s the reminder that I don’t work in advertising or finance. I don’t need to be led by toxic urgency.
I turned 27 a few days ago and my friend asked me what I was looking forward to in the new year. I told her ‘ease and working at a high capacity’. I really do believe it’s possible to do good work without feeling like your life depends on it. That’s the thing I am trying to do for myself in this new year. Ali Abdal, the productivity YouTuber, recently published a book called Feel Good Productivity. In it, he tries to answer the question ‘What would work look like if it were fun?’ It’s a different sort of approach to doing hard things - making it fun.
For me, I think there are a few extra questions to getting started.
How can doing this give me more energy?
How do I overcome the inertia of doing hard things? or put another way, how do I make sure I know what to do next time?
Thank you for reading to the end
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One final note. I have spent this week thinking about how to better treat the readers of this newsletter. A few questions have come to mind and I’d like to get your answers in the comment.
Do you feel any emotions when you see the newsletter pop up in your inbox (eg, excited to read etc)
Is it important to you to know when to expect the next issue of the newsletter (Especially as I am so sporadic in publishing)
Do you feel strongly that the newsletter should come more frequently or are you happy with the surprise of getting each issue unexpectedly?
i'm a new subscriber, and i'm glad i found your publication. i really enjoyed reading this. I felt seen. Look forward to reading more from you.
Hi Mo, nice to hear from you again. I follow Ali as well, and his book and his work is such a good example of ease (as much as it is possible) and high quality.
I hope you get that in this new year. Wishing you the best and looking forward to more letters. I really enjoy reading them.