Welcome to the Bipolar Excellence Podcast Episode 14: I’ve Created Tons Of Material No One Wants. This is part of the Life Of An Outsider series. You’ll find a link to it in the footer of the website, bipolarexcellence.com.

I think this is a pretty common experience for bipolar people. Our minds are busy. Depending on what aspect of the illness or remnants of it are in charge. We have a greater depth, at times, to our thinking than most around us. And I know at least some of us, myself included have a, I call it a 3D way of thinking. We see far and wide and up and down. And inside and out.

I don’t have it so much like that anymore.

I have a very minor leftover version of it. But whenever I tackled a problem or just had an interesting thought that appealed to me, I could make connections in other industries, other sources of content, things going on in life. The news. Stuff that happened in my childhood. Stuff that I see coming in the future. I could link all of that together and come up with a cohesive idea that was actionable, if necessary.

I could turn it into something useful for myself or when helping other people. And, I was even impressed with it back then. Like I said, I don’t have it anymore. Not like that. It has its moments. I have moments where I feel it at work, but I walked out of active, bipolar back in 2004 and this went with that. But I still create a ton of material.

And I’ve created a ton of material nobody seemed to have wanted. Now is time for some disclaimers. Did nobody want it? Or did I not do a good job of getting it out to the world? I want you to remember that. The reason I say this is if you’re bipolar in any way, your brain is going to be firing along.

It’s going to be cooking, cooking out quite a lot of thoughts and ideas and processes and systems type thinking. And you’ve probably said a lot about something or written a lot about it. And if it doesn’t get acted on by anybody, you can take that personal or simply feel like you picked the wrong mission or nobody cares. That’s not always the case.

The world is huge and people are absolutely bombarded with information on a minute by minute basis. It’s insane how much, how many things get pitched to a person just in one minute of being on their computer or the TV or in some cases, even just driving down the road.

You’re up against all of that. And you have to be very scientific, very business-like in how you go about finding a way to get through all that chatter to find the right people, to listen to what it is you say. All of this is my attempt to do the very same.

Now in the past, I’ve had a handful of websites, all dedicated to wherever I was at at that time of my life and how it was I wanted to help people the most.

And when I would write down all of this stuff, that in itself is a form of therapy. It’s like journaling and it helps you also, it’s a type of thinking. One of my coaches long time back used to say writing is the thinking part of doing. Sorry. He said writing is the doing part of thinking.

When you think something, it doesn’t really go anywhere.

When you write it out, the mechanical connection between your brain and your hand writing something out, firms it up in some way, solidifies it so that it means more to you. You remember it longer and you can actually do something with it. But there’s something in your brain that takes place on a deeper level that increases your comprehension, your understanding of what it is you even just wrote.

It doesn’t happen if you don’t write it out. It doesn’t even happen that well if you type it out on your keyboard. Now, honestly, I don’t write anything out by hand anymore like I used to. I’m all keyboard. I don’t know how much that’s hurting things or not, but I’m not really concerned about it anymore.

But I did create a ton of material over the years and some of it found an audience, most of it didn’t. But again, I’ve had to learn the hard way, how to find that audience. Hopefully I’m doing that with you right now.

What I’m telling you, as the bipolar person is create it anyway. Create it any way, cause you never know how it might come in handy. At least it’s there to be pulled from whenever you want. And that’s another huge tip.

Don’t throw anything away. Don’t delete anything of any content you’ve created.

My God, have I shot myself in the foot on that one more times than I can count. You’ll create a bunch of stuff. You either can’t figure out what to do with it, or you do something with it and it falls flat. Nothing happens, regardless of all your energy and efforts. And so you throw that stuff away thinking it was no good.

In relation, possibly, to that 3D thinking, or just the way the mind works with the passage of time, particularly if you’re on a mission, like we are, you stand a great chance of finding a proper or better use for that material later, in some cases, years later. It needs to be there for that eventuality.

Don’t delete anything. The pain that that has put me through… the only way I was able to save myself with that was, back when mania was more prevalent in my head, I could recreate a lot of stuff from memory or something that was close enough to it, and I could keep going.

But man, that is stressful. So hang on to everything. Don’t throw out anything. Because, this is your mind and your experience laid out on paper, so to speak, probably on a computer screen, and the right people are going to find value in it when you find the way to find them and pitch it to them correctly.

So I’m going to leave it at that. Create the material. Hang on to it. You’re either going to nail it right away or it’s going to take a minute. It’s going to take iterations of attempts to get it out to the world, whoever, whatever chunk of the world that is, that needs to hear it most. But just do those things. Keep the work.

And on a final note, you want to look up the author, Steven Pressfield. He’s a former Marine. He wrote the screenplay for the Legend Of Bagger Vance. I’ve never seen it, but I read all of his books.

He struggled, from dead broke to a lot of dead end jobs, to decent jobs, but that he didn’t really want and doing well at them, until he finally made it big with Bagger Vance. He made like, I don’t know, a million dollars or something when he sold that screenplay.

Prior to that million dollars, he made whatever his paycheck was at work. And he’d make a hundred here, 50 there selling some kind of writing to whoever buys writing out in the world. He just hung in there, but it took 17 years of zero results as an artist, as a writer, until he landed Bagger Vance.

Read all of his books. They’re all, I don’t know if it’s a hundred percent all, but damn close to it. Every lesson is, is just a handful of paragraphs on one page. They’re small books, highly focused. You can burn right through them pretty quickly, and you’re going to want to review them every so often.

That’s all about doing the work. In my case as I’ve called creating tons of material. And I think that will firm up how you should proceed with anything you’ve built from there. He’s a master, listen to him on how to do it rather than me. And I feel pretty happy sending ya to that guy. All right, guys, onto the next episode.