Eek, I hate making choices

Oh, hi friends!

So what if you had a choice…

You could grow your audience very quickly.

This means thousands of new subscribers overnight, thousands of views on Instagram, thousands of orders on Etsy, tons of new responsibility, so many new clients it makes your head spin. 

Or you could you grow your skill very deliberately.

This means thousands of hours of unseen work, cultivating your practice, receiving zero engagement with your posts or articles, struggling to learn a skill at your job, and a tiny dribble of new clients.

The first choice comes with high stakes. You better deliver or you’ll lose those new fans.

The second choice — the less flashy option — comes with a long-term gain. You can’t lose what you’ve learned.

Which will you choose?

This Halloween, I’m going as Girl Who Looks Up at Trees.

Photo by Immortal shots from Pexels

“Think of how liberating it would be to free yourself from the role of being your own harshest critic. What might you achieve? What work would you put out there for the world to see?

What might happen if you took all the energy that goes in to judging your work and put it right back into the wellspring of creating the work instead?”

A classic one from my friend Carl Richards. 

Fall theater season is in full swing — we saw four shows just last week! But when I put one in this newsletter, that means I really loved it. Is This a Room is one of those plays. Currently at the Vineyard Theatre, it’s the true story of Reality Winner, the 25-year-old Air Force linguist who was charged with leaking documents related to Russian interference in the 2016 election. The play is told entirely through a transcript of her FBI interrogation.

Sounds dry? Sounds intense? Actually, it’s one of the most humanistic piece of theater I’ve seen in a long time. Conversation captured in all its elisions, asides, halting jokes. Marvelous performances. Tickets are available from the Vineyard, and on TDF (if you’re a student, teacher, retiree, freelancer, arts professional, etc, you can get cheap Broadway and Off-Broadway tickets with a $40 annual membership). There are also $25 rush tickets every morning on the TodayTix app (also where I get lots of tickets!).

Also, another takeaway for everyone, not just theatergoers, is…what can you find in something that no one else can? This text was a transcript found in a court document linked in a NY Mag profile, yet it became a harrowing work of art. Director Tina Satter said when she read the document she saw it as a piece of theater.

There is potential everywhere. So how can we change our perspective to find all that potential in the unfamiliar? I’ll be keeping my eyes open—and hope you will, too.

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Thanks, as always, for reading.

Love, Kara