If you want to do anything substantial, you’re going to have to do it over time. This is true whether you’re training for a foot race, growing a blog or building a consumer product. Anything that takes time to do is a kind of journey, and journeys are intrinsically interesting. We all like to see someone really go the distance on something. This is part of why you’ll see so many tiktoks and instagram reels captioned “my dance / fitness / entrepreneur / vegan / chef journey” – it’s been overdone to the point that it’s often parodied, but it’s overdone because it works. But you don’t necessarily need to copy the style of the last tiktok you saw. You get to decide how you want to tell your story as you’re living it, and the way you tell the story is itself a reflection of your personality, and it’ll determine what kind of people are interested in you and/or what you do.
I personally like to use the word “expedition” for several reasons. Expeditions are purposeful: you want to go see something, do something, find something out. Expeditions need funding. And I don’t just mean money. The most important thing an expedition needs, which is so fundamental that people can neglect to mention it or even think about it much, is interest. And you have to be interested in your project yourself. Many of my clients– and this happens to me periodically too– struggle with the reality that they haven’t really taken the time or trouble to rekindle their own interest in their own project. They take it for granted and they started to get jaded and overwhelmed by all the minutiae. It’s roughly the equivalent of busy, tired parents neglecting date night. Your own interest is the singular most critical variable to the life of any of your projects– and interest is contagious.