Hey friends,

Welcome to Drop #001 (!!!) of Create Connected 🎉

This episode’s guest is close friend and longtime collaborator Isaiah Colthrust known online as Isaiah Improves. Isaiah’s creativity takes many forms, most notably on his YouTube channel where he documents his journeys of self-improvement while giving his viewers actionable ways to grow along with him.

He’s also a professional in marketing and digital enterprise, graduating with distinction from one of Canada’s most prestigious universities in the field. I’ve been very lucky to regularly pick his brain on how to creatively bring value to different audiences and domains.

Most importantly though, this conversation gives you some of his tremendous insights into hidden opportunities in today’s content landscape, as well as some ways to juggle a prolific creative schedule while also working a demanding day job.

Find Isaiah Improves on:

Whenever and wherever you're reading this, thank you for coming along for the ride. This drop has 2 pieces. This post (newsletter) and the podcast below:

Get excited!! There's lots to devour below. Read on to...

  • 🚀 Challenge yourself to create something about gratitude
  • 🎤 Learn how Isaiah Improves builds with soul and creates time
  • 🧰 Grab 4 tools to help you use your time better
  • 🧠  Deepen your creative thinking on signals, value, and resonance

Let's dive in.

🚀 Challenge yourself to create, connected

Use this prompt to create with your art form(s). Then use the link below to share it. I might reach out to feature you in the newsletter!

Prompt: Using your art form(s), tell a story about someone who learns the meaning of gratitude through a difficult experience.

🎤 The interview standouts

For this drop's podcast, I connected with YouTube creator and marketing pro Isaiah Improves to chat creativity, self-improvement, and today's content landscape.

Here are some standout insights.

  1. Create with "soul" to be one-of-a-kind The best creators often break the so-called rules to success. How does their stuff win? Because they let their authenticity cut through what's expected.
  2. Creatively time-starved? Search for "dead time" Try to find gaps in-between the big parts of your day. Instead of scrolling, add one small thing to a project.
  3. AI will open new avenues for creativity to flourish Authentic process will hold a premium as it gets easier to AI-generate the end product. Traversing AI feedback loops to tell stories may become a new art form.

🧰 4 tools to help you use your time better

Bolded words are clickable links.

Todoist  helps you track your projects, be the maestro of your calendar, and see where you're losing time. It has a generous free plan.

Ikigai  (both a concept and a tool) helps you find purpose so you better know what to do next. Answer the 4 questions. Find the overlap.

Calendly helps you reduce time spent messaging back and forth to schedule things. Even 10 minutes per scheduled call adds up quick.

Freedom helps you break time-wasting habits by blocking certain apps and websites from your devices during certain parts of the day.

💭 Deepen your creative thinking

This week I wrote about UNDI (useless noise, delete immediately). Basically, the difference between helpful signal that's paid attention to, or useless noise that gets deleted immediately, lays in how much value it brings to the recipient.

Many creatives and artists provide value that's highly intangible. Emotional or cerebral resonance with your audience.

The things you create—your works—are all signals that carry this value to others. You use channels (like social media) to send signals.

Here are 3 questions to consider with us:

  1. How do you gauge your resonance with your audience?
  2. How much signal are you sending to your audience?
  3. What resonates with your audience the most?
🗞️
This post was republished from the Create Connected project.