The Upspiral: Why Recovery is the Key to Unlocking Your Creative Potential

Tracking patterns: the first step toward change

So far, nothing has changed in your life except that we are tracking your patterns.

Therefore, everything has changed.

Like most readers, you may have hesitated to start tracking your creative patterns—I know I did. It took me days to log my first few sessions. But that simple act of tracking began a powerful transformation.

What gets measured gets done.

By understanding your creativity and recovery cycles, we begin making the first positive changes in areas that truly matter. If you haven’t started this process, I encourage you to do so.

Where you should be at this point:

1. Read the introduction chapter in the book and workbook here.
2. Tracked your progress in the Creative Oscillations Spreadsheet for a week.
3. Run the data through a large language model using the prompt to help assess your data.

Before we get into this week’s work, let’s unpack the concept of the Upspiral.

The myth of constant growth

Through my research into creative and commercial enterprises, I’ve observed that creative businesses “scale” differently from other businesses.

This creates a predicament for creatives, as most advice focuses on conventional scaling—the belief that if you work hard and reinvest time and money, your business will naturally grow.

My book Advantage shows that formulaic scaling is nonsense. Nothing to date has changed the power-law curve of popularity.

What do I mean by this?

If you look at any particular practice or course, such as learning how to sell direct or mastering a specific advertising method, the results never uniformly move all practitioners to the top of the power law curve.

For example, you might learn a new advertising methodology and see book sales increase from a book a month to a book a week or even a day. From your perspective, you’ve found the magic beans. There is value in this process because it has delivered a change in results. Next stop: number one bestseller.

However, if we look at the results of all the other students, we would likely see (because I’ve yet to see different) that although individual practitioners may have moved slightly within the curve, they still fall within a steep distribution, similar to the overall market.

Why does this matter?

While the reality of the power law curve can be deeply demotivating, it is a truth you must face.

When you find a new marketing technique or business approach that seems to boost your results, it’s tempting to think you’ve found the secret to unlimited success. However, these methods don’t change the fundamental distribution—they just temporarily reposition some participants. The underlying reality remains: most creators will still find themselves at the lower end of the curve, some in the middle, and very few at the top.

No course, strategy, or system has ever managed to place all its students at the top of the distribution. The power law is not something to be “escaped”—it’s a fundamental characteristic of creative markets.

So, what do you have control of?

Cycles of creativity and recovery

Underlying your entire business process is the natural cyclical undulation of your creativity. If we visualize this in two dimensions, we would see ups and downs with some type of trend, hopefully upward over time.

This oscillation is natural. The ups and downs correlate to your audience’s content consumption, production cycles, seasonality, and market expansion and contraction. While these ups and downs are logical, hustle culture perpetuates the belief that everything should always be up and to the right. Any dip is your failure.

It’s not just about your output but also how your existing audience reacts to it.

They, too, need time to recover.

This applies to new customers as well. While we’d love for someone to discover us and immediately buy everything we offer, that’s naive. When we understand the ebbs and flows in customer nurturing, we can see how these dynamics influence the orbit or Upspiral, which in turn affects our business output.

When we honor this third dimension—the uptick and corresponding recovery—as a natural spiral, we no longer view downturns as bad—instead, we see them as necessary periods for recharging before the next larger orbit.

So what?

Here’s the big idea: Your business will perform better if you establish a practice that honors these cycles. Equal focus should be placed on the corresponding recovery and regathering for the next launch push.

If you incorporate this understanding in every facet, including deep within your creative process, you can sustain higher performance for longer periods with shorter, more effective recovery times.

This is the winning strategy—not the mantra of “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” but rather, “I honor peak performance and peak recovery.”

That’s reality.

While the science and research around peak physical performance are extensive, all bets are off when it comes to peak creativity. You get stupid tips like, “Write drunk, edit sober.”

With most natural processes, variability is a good indication of health. Take heart rate variability as an example. High HRV, the interval between heartbeats, indicates cardiovascular fitness and the body’s ability to adapt to situations.

What impacts a good HRV?

A multitude of things and those practitioners of good mental and physical health can influence and improve their HRV.

This is what the Upspiral is about: The idea that we take control to improve the natural creative cycle and let those improvements drive your creative and business output.

Now, on to this week’s work.

Your most precious resource: attention

Attention is finite and fleeting.

With a week of monitoring your output, you can now assess how much actual work time you have available.

If you are getting 6-8 hours of sleep each night, that leaves you with 16-18 hours of time in a day.

If we split that time between work and personal or family time, that would be 8 to 9 hours for each. Now, your time for your creativity could fall across both. It could be part of what you do for yourself, and/or it is part of your work time. Let’s assume you have four hours dedicated to creativity daily.

How much of that is used effectively?

What if we could find more free time?

Enter the digital detox

This week, give up all social media, YouTube, Netflix, and any other distractions that consume your attention. If you must use social media to drive your business, pre-plan and batch your content to eliminate your need to touch it daily.

If you find yourself feeling bored, go write—even if it is a few words. If you don’t feel like writing, try deliberate daydreaming. If that doesn’t work, get caught up with your reading of Oscillations.

Continue tracking your activities on the sheet. This practice will take some time to habitualize.

Remember, this process isn’t just about how you use your time but how the use of that time impacts your well-being. If you want to learn more, read Chapter 1 of Oscillations.