3 Lessons from 400 Episodes: How to Stay Committed To Your Creative Project

Allen C. Paul | Founder, God and Gigs (00:02)
So in 2017, after starting the God and Gig Show, just four months in, I almost entirely broke my podcast. And for five excruciating months, I could not get it back online. Like nothing was working. I was dead on arrival as a podcaster. Like many podcasts, started and it seemed like it was not going to go forward. And now I'm speaking to you 400 episodes.

into this podcast. So I want to make sure that you understand this is not just an episode to celebrate 400 episodes and it's not just for podcasters. This is for anyone who has had to build something, get through some obstacles, see that God really wanted you to do it and have the motivation to keep going despite those obstacles.

So this episode is for anyone who's a few years into something you really believe in. You know God gave you the vision for it, but the obstacles and the metrics and all the data doesn't seem to be pointing in your direction. I want to help you. So stick with me for the remainder of this episode. I'm very, very sure it's gonna bless you.

Okay, so 400 episodes. First of all, I have to thank you, the listener, for being a part of one or all of them, however many times you have listened, it's because of you that I've been able to keep this going In God and gigs. And the second part is I want to make sure that I sit in some gratefulness for this, for what God has done and how He has blessed this platform. And I want to again kind of reiterate: this is not just a podcasting episode for people who want to know how to keep a podcast going, how to grow a podcast.

All of that stuff is something that I do share in my own time and my own content production. But this is more about you and how 400 episodes represents.

It's being faithful and sticking with something even when things go wrong. So whether you're building a music career, running an art business, writing a book, whatever you are building, this is an episode and a story that I feel like I need to do and that I need to tell the entire story. Because many times I forget myself what we actually went through to get this started. So if you are new to the show or maybe you haven't heard this story in a while, I can quickly give you my backstory. I started as a music teacher.

Coming out of college, jazz degree, pianist. Didn't really feel like I was going to be able to make it as a full-time musician. So that's why I ended up stepping into full-time teaching and then into full-time ministry and my church because that was another calling, and I feel like I couldn't balance the two. So I stepped out of full-time teaching and full-time ministry, only to then give my resignation to my pastor, just as he was about to promote me, and I stepped out of full-time ministry at the time.

And at that moment I started figuring out or trying to figure out how do you even manage as a creative that has creative tendencies, wants to build a career, but doesn't know how to do so outside of the church. So that's where God and Gigs started. So a year after that is when I started the podcast after writing my book in 2016.

All of this to fast forward to all of the issues that I found when I was trying to build this thing, when I was trying to figure out

So the cool thing is, God did show up. God did show me how to get people onto the podcast. I had these amazing opportunities to interview amazing creators, musicians. This was entirely almost totally focused on musicians, by the way. So if you go back to our original episodes from one to say, I would almost say 100, 101, 105, you're gonna see a lot of amazing musicians, especially around 2020 when COVID was both an entirely, incredibly hard.

season but also a blessing. So so many musicians were at home and I had this pick of all these people who wanted to just share about their careers. So people that have played with Aretha Franklin and been on tour with Prince and everyone else you can imagine in the music industry, I got a chance to interview them in the God and Gig Show podcast. So it was really once again me realizing that hey there is a space for me to share not just to learn about podcasting but to learn

how to share my message, how to connect with other people, how to grow as a creator. But what I didn't see coming was, as I mentioned earlier in the open, the breakdowns, the meltdowns, the shifts, the people that I worked with that had a shift in their career, they were no longer working with me, no longer partnering with me. And then how to keep this going when no one's necessarily buying anything. So it's not a money-making podcast. And I didn't have products. I did have a book and I was sharing my membership that I started

In 2020, God and Gigs 360 So there were products and things that could create generate income, but that wasn't my focus. And it became very, very hard to see a reason why to get to episode 200, 250. Why keep going? So here is where I really want to make sure this sits for this episode. For you, the listeners, the viewer, the person who has decided: hey, I need to know what helped somebody else keep going.

When everything else was breaking down and I didn't see the results. And I have been privileged to be in a church that focuses on this term seed time and harvest. We plant seeds and then we have to wait. And a verse that comes to mind is let patience have its perfect work in James. So I want to talk to you. If you are

Podcasting. You're on episode two, five, twenty, twenty-five. You're on your first book, your first devotional, you're on your first video, or maybe even trickier, you're in the middle, the messy middle. You've got a few years under your belt, but things haven't panned out the way that you wanted. You're st that's

But things haven't panned out the way that you wanted. And you've been at this two, three, four, five years like I was, right around that season, around two hundred, where I was really

So I really want to speak to you if you're around that messy middle. You're at the beginning of the first book, the middle of the first book. The art projects aren't going as well as you thought. The podcast really isn't growing. The YouTube channel, they've just increased as I'm speaking. They're increasing the hours to 8,000 hours per year in order to be monetized. And you're like, it's too high. I'm never going to make it.

I felt that same way in my podcast journey. And now as I'm recording this, I'm going to be speaking on national stages to help other podcasters outside of the faith space to be able to stay faithful to their calling and faithful to what God made them to do. And here's the crazy thing: the 400 episodes is just for God and gigs. God opened up doors for me to be a part of other podcasts where

That number is now into thousands of episodes that I have been a part of, that I've hosted on, that I have been a guest on. Some of my best friends, some of my most treasured people in my life are from the podcasting world. This from a musician, a jazz and gospel musician who started to write a book.

About musicians trying to stay faithful to their calling without compromising their faith. So here's what actually changed. I want to make sure I give you three concrete things that you can take with you as a Christian creative, as a creative Christian who is considering building a project, starting a project, sticking with the project, even when it doesn't seem to be making money yet, when you're gigging or trying to get things going and things do not seem to be moving forward. I want to make sure I help you with three things that helped me.

Here's number one, holding on to the things that are important and letting go of the things that are not.

Now, my why is my importance. Why I share these kinds of concepts with you is because I believe that God has put a seed of creativity in every single person, especially those who feel that calling to step out a little bit more and create a career out of it, but without compromising their faith in the art and entertainment world and the mainstream. So that is my why. Now everything else, colors, logos, I've changed the colors and logos a thousand times. I've changed formats, been on YouTube, haven't been on YouTube, done video, haven't done video, all of the

other things are changeable, but my why doesn't change. And that's what I want to make sure that you think of too in your particular project. Hold on to what's important, what matters, the foundation, but don't shift the things that are not important.

Here's number two, this is huge. Getting connected with people who have been there before, who know what you wanna know and are growing the same way that you wanna grow.

I have to give a huge shout out as a podcaster to Podfest, Chris Commintos, Andrew, Jamie. There's so many people in the PodFest world. If you haven't looked up Podfest, look up Podfest Expo.com in Orlando. We meet every year. It's the greatest, greatest podcasting community. Even if you're not a podcaster, you want to check that out. But

Gotta also shout out PodMatch, Alex Sanfilippo Filippo, Alicia, all the people at PodMatch. So many other communities I could name that are not even podcasting communities that have sewn into me because I was willing to step out of my comfort zone and join them. Find out what they want, find out how I can help, find out what they do, learn about marketing, learn about platform building, learn about SEO, all the things that I didn't want to deal with as a creator. I got around people who could teach me. And staying in those communities, staying active and actually supporting.

Supporting them versus looking for them to support me made all the difference in my life. It's why once again I can now be welcomed into rooms that I really don't feel like I deserve to be in. But because God has been so grateful and faithful and he has been

And because God has been so faithful and allowed me to step into these rooms and given me relationships that I can count on, I've grown so much as a creator, and it helped me keep going when I thought everything was going to go. And it helped me keep going when I thought all hope was lost. And finally, the third thing.

Keeping the long game in mind. And yes, the long game sounds like another one of these things that you probably didn't want to hear. But yes, I entered this knowing, hey, Amazon took, I don't know, 10 years to become profitable before they took over the world. You name the company, you name the thing that again I go back to my see time and harvest comment comment. This is what it's really about, is realizing that I might be sitting on a 10 or 15 year project.

That's going to grow my capacity, grow my character, grow my ability to lead my family, to be able to be more studious, more disciplined. All the things that grow me are also going to grow my business and my creative platform, but it's going to take time.

And I just realized that hey, I'm I'm probably not gonna get this right in the first five years, in the first six years, maybe the first ten years. I'm gonna keep reiterating, I'm gonna keep on building new memberships, kind of creating this hub where people can come in, creators like you can feel comfortable. So that's really what it was all about. It's taking the long journey, the long perspective, playing the long

game.

So if you're asking what actually worked, what worked after 400 episodes, I can tell you this one key thing: it's that I kept showing up. Simple.

But also extremely hard. Because when it's not exciting, when people aren't viewing and not watching, when people aren't giving you the credit, don't seem to care that what you're doing really matters, I had to keep thinking about you. I had to keep thinking about the one person that would be listening, the one person that would be watching, the one person that would be blessed. And Jesus always left the 99 to go to the one. So what worked was I kept thinking about you.

I kept thinking about what does God want to share in the creative calling and the creative arts and the creative motivation.

What does he want to share with you that I have that I don't have the right to sit on? So thank you for listening and watching because you are the reason why God and Gigs made it to 400 episodes. And by the way, if you want to also feel this same kind of synergy with other creators, this is why we have a creator checkup newsletter and a membership. But I would encourage you to just check out the newsletter, God and gigs.com slash newsletter, so you can get an email every week just reminding you of who you are and that you're not alone in this creative journey as you try to.

Become the creator that God created you to be. So it's a just a way that we stay engaged. And then of course, if you'd like to step a little further, we have a membership that you can find out about in the newsletter. But I just wanted to make sure I said thank you. Thank you, God, for giving us this platform. Thank you for listening and watching. If this is the first episode or your 399th, thank you so much for being a part of God and Gigs and helping us to help so many creators just like you. So

If you'd like to hear more about this, I'm thinking about doing a video series, a episode series on building a creative platform from the ground up and keeping it going when industry changes and Spotify and YouTube and Apple and all these other music services keep changing the rules and what do you do with AI? I'm thinking about doing this. So if you'd like me to do that, make sure you comment or share an email with me, guidinggigs.com, Alan at godandgigs.com Just go ahead and let me know because I will definitely do more about.

this particular topic because it's near and dear to my heart. So until next time, continue to become the creator that you were created to be. God bless and we'll see you at episode 401.

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