Welcome to Edit Your Life, a podcast to help you edit the unnecessary from your life so you have more room to enjoy the awesome.

Through episodes with me, Christine Coe, and a range of smart, compassionate guests, you will come away with insights and tactics to help you find the agency and space to simplify and declutter your home, time, mental space, and more.

Hello, friends. I am just excited beyond compare about today's guest. We are talking to Dan Blank, who is the creative force behind We Grow Media and writes the wonderful substack,

The Creative Shift by Dan Blank. And in addition to being one of the most grounded and lovely

voices on the internet, I so appreciate how Dan helps people reorient in this very, very

noisy world to focus on centering creativity at an individual level

and how to foster human connection. It had been on my mind for some time to invite Dan

onto the show for a conversation and then two things happened. First, in my Edit Your Life survey,

there were a number of requests for how to get into writing or build creative practices and also how to foster human connection. And second, one of his recent

substack updates popped into my feed and it resonated so deeply with me. Here's what he wrote.

I encourage you to stop worrying about how many likes your posts receive. Instead, focus on real engagement,

conversations, and connections with readers. In 10 years, you won't remember how many likes

a post received, but you will remember conversations you had, what readers said about your writing,

and how they shared with you that your words improved their lives. I mean, aren't those words

a bomb? Welcome, Dan Blank. I'm so delighted you're here with me today. I'm totally playing that

intro for my mom. Thank you. You're very generous. I'm so glad. Well, I have so many questions for

you. So I would love to just jump right in. I've received, as I mentioned, a number of listener requests about getting into writing and more generally also just making space for creativity. I know that one of your core beliefs is that people should give themselves the permission to create. So what advice would you give to people who are struggling to center themselves creatively,

particularly when there are so many other demands pulling at them in life?

Yeah, two big things.

The first is I know that we all have these narratives in our head about why we shouldn't do this.

I don't have credentials. So many other people have written this before. I'm not a writer.

There's all these different things. Usually when I'm talking to a writer, actually have them

...