Last week I took a vacation, and something interesting happened.

I broke my creative streak. I could ship most of the work for the week by producing it the week before and scheduling the launch for the appropriate time. I missed doing so here, only posting a small note. I completely missed doing so on the newsletter version of this post.

I’m having a hard time getting going again. Moving forward on a lot of projects has been slower than ever before. This is where resistance is the strongest for me. When I have momentum, I barrel through any resistance. But once I stop, it is hard to get going again.

When you hit a dip in the road of creativity, the best you can do is keep doing stuff, even if it is not your best work.

Dips also create opportunities, and I got to see the answer to a question we should ask ourselves one I learned from Seth Godin:

What would people say if you were no longer there?

Sadly I have my answer from the newsletter. It was an answer I should have been expecting.

It was silence.

Here are my June 1 stats for the newsletter:

While that is an incredible open rate, the number of clicks tells me this isn’t doing what I’m paying MailChimp to get done, drawing the audience to the other content I make. I rarely get one click if you go back in history.

The open rate does tell me you are reading this, or at least starting to. It also tells me for those on this list, what I wrote is the valuable stuff, not the video or other content I’m including. I’m wasting valuable time and money to get things together that this audience doesn’t find interesting enough to act on. I’m not serving this audience in the best way for both of us.

This is an important lesson. Sometimes you need to know when to quit, and dips are an excellent point to think about that.

I’ve come to a conclusion. I’m going to continue to write, just not in a newsletter. I’ll finish the newsletter through June, then shut it down.

However, I love writing, and that 62% open rate means many like reading me. Therefore, I’m moving my new work to this blog, where I’ll continue writing. You can subscribe to get notifications of new posts here

This has been a great experience for me, and the continuation on the website will also be a great experience. I hope you keep reading me here for much more about creativity and business.