A Creator's Transformation: The Unseen Journey Behind The Effective Engineer
A Creator's Transformation: The Unseen Journey Behind The Effective Engineer
Celebrating the 9-year anniversary of my book and the shift to soul-aligned creation.
This Friday is the last day to apply for our 4-week Mastering Desire course that starts Monday, March 11th. If you feel the fire of desire burning in your soul, yearning to create the life, work, and relationships you truly love — come join us on a powerful journey of transformation.
Nine years ago today, I self-published The Effective Engineer. It astounds me that the book continues to sell extremely well.
Last year, the book brought in $35k+ in passive income, and lifetime sales have exceeded 23k copies sold and $500k in income.
Even though I’m no longer involved in tech or engineering, I feel proud about the accomplishment and amazed at how a product I spent nearly two years of sweat and tears creating goes on to impact people. I’m grateful that the book’s core message to focus on the highest-leverage activities gets to keep spreading.
What I’m more proud of and what I’m celebrating today, however, is how much my relationship to creatorship has changed.
I’m in the middle of two ambitious, soul-aligned projects — launching my Mastering Desire course (this is the last week to apply) and drafting my second book (more details to be revealed soon) — and the act of creation feels so different than how it felt a decade ago.
Some core elements have remained the same, of course.
I want to make a huge impact on people’s lives.
I want to create high-quality products that I’m deeply proud of.
I want to invest my time and energy on big bets that feel fully aligned with what’s important to me.
I want to harvest and distill the greatest, hard-earned lessons that have impacted me and share them with the world.
I want to leverage the power of storytelling, vulnerability, and intimacy to make big ripples in work that I do.
But some things also feel vastly different.
The Hidden Cost of Creating From Fear
When I first started writing The Effective Engineer, I was about to turn 30. Something about hitting that threshold called forth a sense of my own mortality.
I could feel myself in the phenomenon that some call a third-life crisis. I hadn’t yet done something that I truly and deeply felt proud of. And some part of me panicked.
What will be the legacy I leave behind? If I died, would I have made a difference?
I remember reading hospice nurse’s Bronnie Ware’s reflection on the top five “Regrets of the Dying,” . At the top of that list was the regret:
“I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
I didn’t want to die with that regret. I didn’t want to keep toiling away and burning my time and energy at a startup that no longer felt alive for me.
And so I quit and embarked on my book writing journey.
A big part of me wrote the book because I wanted to and because I knew teaching about high-leverage activities was the highest-leverage thing I personally could be doing in the world.
But I’ll also be honest.
Some part of me also wrote the book from a place of proving myself.
I wanted to prove that I had value to add.
That I could create something meaningful.
That my life mattered.
That I could tackle a large project and succeed.
It would take me many years later to realize that at the root of any need to prove ourselves is fear.
Fear that if I didn’t do something ambitious with my life, I’d be a failure.
Fear that if I didn’t succeed, it’d mean I was inadequate.
Fear that if I didn’t build a legacy, my life wouldn’t have mattered.
Fear may be a powerful motivator — I did finish a successful book after all — but it’s neither the most effective nor the most enjoyable.
I remember days when I’d sit at a cafe, holding my daily writing target of 1,000 words. And then I’d pressure myself, often agonizing in my chair and powering through, until I was done.
On some days, I felt inspired, and the words flowed easily.
On many days, though, it wasn’t enjoyable. It wasn’t self-loving — I was essentially bullying myself to write and punishing myself when I wasn’t feeling creative. It definitely wasn’t the most productive way to invite my own creativity. And I’d go home feeling exhausted and drained.
I remember days in the last few months before the book launched, when finishing the book felt like an insurmountable mountain, when some part of me wanted to give up, when I had no creative energy or motivation left, and when I felt so hard on myself at the idea of having coming so far only to fail.
It was hard.
I feel some embarrassment in admitting this, but when I launched my book nine years ago, I didn’t even proactively tell all my friends or my co-workers. I didn’t take time to celebrate. It felt too vulnerable to let myself feel the enormity of my accomplishment and how far I’d come.
I immediately focused on improving all my sales funnels. I outlined more content I could write to drive more traffic. I gripped so tightly to the need for the book to succeed, never having even consciously defined what that meant.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I was subconsciously doing all I could to avoid a deep-seated fear of failure.
That was the hidden cost of being motivated by fear — I’d put myself on a never-ending hamster wheel of powering through the next thing, with no way out. Even after the book was published, the fear kept lurking there.
Embracing a New Way of Creating
A few weeks ago, I sat down with my friend Katara who I’m creating Mastering Desire with, and we talked through, ”What would success in creating this course look like?”
Here are some of the things we came up with:
Being vulnerably revealed in what we’re doing to our close friends.
Having fun throughout.
Not powering through and pausing whenever we notice the impulse to do it.
Recording content with pride.
Making vulnerable asks as we enrolled people for the course.
Being reflected as a thought leader.
Feeling capable and fluid enough to make dynamic adjustments to our enrollment strategy.
Letting ourselves really care about how important the work is to us.
Celebrating and letting in appreciation and pride for our work.
Consciously running experiments.
Being so heart-forward and caring in what we’re doing — that we’re willing to be heartbroken if something failed.
Two notable observations stood out to me — in stark contrast to what creating looked like nine years ago.
One, our success metrics weren’t based on outcomes — which we can’t control — but on our ways of being and responding — which we can. That means we set as our North Star that we’re honoring, in every moment, how we want to show up in the journey.
When I set the constraint of not powering through to get somewhere — both in creating the course and drafting my new book — I feel the spaciousness that it opens up for creativity.
I feel the inspired quality that wants to come through naturally — quality that I wouldn’t have accessed given any amount of grinding.
Two, many of the success metrics — especially the ones around letting ourselves truly be impacted by how important this work is to us — oriented around what would feel most supportive of our own expansion and spiritual growth.They pointed us toward facing and growing through our fears, rather than avoiding them.
There were several days early on when I’d wake up with the fear: What if we can’t even get a handful of people to sign up for the course?
But rather than doing everything I could to avoid the fear of failure, like I did when I wrote The Effective Engineer, I’d sit with the fear in my morning meditation until the sensation of fear felt okay in my body.
It was okay and human to be afraid, and I didn’t need to do something to make the fear go away. I could be present with it and welcome it. That internal shift meant that I no longer moved through the day from reactivity but from conscious choice.
More and more, I find myself creating purely from desire, not from fear, and it feels game-changing.
If I’m always expanding my edges through the act of creating — instead of powering through or reacting to fear — the work itself becomes a source of energy. I keep expanding into more aliveness and feel more capable, trusting that the growth will take me where I want to go even if I experience failure in the short-term.
This type of work — where creation is married with spiritual growth — feels infinitely sustainable.
Optimize for Aliveness through Desire Not Fear
On the anniversary of my book last year, I shared how I’d gotten one critical thing wrong in the book. The way to live the most meaningful life isn’t just to optimize for leverage and impact. It’s actually to choose and optimize for your aliveness. Aliveness is a measure of how much life force energy something gives you.
This year, I’m internalizing that creating from desire rather than from fear is how we optimize for aliveness.
That mindset is true whether we’re creating a product like a course or a book or whether we’re creating the life our soul truly wants. It’s human to be afraid — the question is whether we allow fear to be our motivator or whether we choose to welcome the fear without needing it to go away.
When we create from desire rather than from fear, we tap into the abundance of time and energy that Gay Hendricks refers to in The Big Leap as “Einstein Time”:
Einstein Time gives you a way to expand the amount of time you have for creative expression and intimate connections… With Einstein Time, you’ll also discover how to liberate the energy you need for accomplishing your most precious activities. You’ll understand exactly what drains your creative energy and how to stop the drain.
The result: no more rushing, no more time pressure, no more feeling exhausted because you worked all day and didn’t get any of the important things done. Instead, you have plenty of time, an abundance of energy, and the skills that will keep both time and energy in a constant state of refreshing renewal.
Ultimately, we are the creator of our own lives. We may have big dreams about how we want our lives to look, what type of purposeful work we’re doing, and the relationships we want to have. And how we relate to our creatorship shapes how we feel through that journey.
Do you want to feel like you’re grinding and powering through life?
Or do you want to feel like every step through life expands you more fully into who you are?
The choice is yours.
This Friday is the last day to apply for our 4-week Mastering Desire course that starts March 11th.
If you’re ready to become the creator of your own life and to start creating from desire and enjoyment, rather than from fear or proving yourself, this program is for you. We’ll be focused on connecting you with what you truly want in life and redefining what success and fulfillment actually look like for you.
We’ll be keeping the group small and intimate — it’s looking like the group will be no more than 8-16 people — so that we can give everyone in the program a high-level of personalized attention and support. We don’t expect to keep the size this intimate in future cohorts, so if you’re wondering whether this is the right time — this will be a great opportunity to get in on a small-group experience.