Some quick backstory:
Three weeks ago, I launched the Pandemigram project. By then, I’d been home in Iowa for exactly one month, sheltering from the COVID-19 crisis in NYC. I was restless, listless, and probably some version of any other “-less” you can think of.
Mostly, I was desperate to find a way to do something with my time. Not just something to keep myself busy, but also something to give back to a world in which I felt like a giant freeloader.
I came up with several ideas during that first month of being home. For various reasons, none of them panned out. Some were genuinely good ideas that just weren’t what the world needed at the time. Some were truly bad ideas that I’m very glad got halted before they really began.
And then, on April 14th, while I was out on a run, the Pandemigram idea came to me in an Elizabeth Gilbert-style inspiration flash. As soon as I got home from the run, I created the Pandemigram page on my website, sent out a MailChimp announcement to my email subscribers, and began the project.
Today, I recorded and sent the 49th Pandemigram. To date, people who have requested Pandemigrams have donated a total of $5,741 to 32 different organizations. (It is completely optional for requesters to report their donation amount and/or recipient to me, so these numbers only take into account those who have opted to inform me of their donation. And this isn’t counting those who have chosen to contribute through an act of kindness instead of a monetary donation—these are, of course, immeasurable.)
My plan is to keep this project going as long as the COVID-19 shutdowns and stay-at-home orders are in place. So my question is…
Who will receive the 50th Pandemigram?
While y’all fill out that request form, I want to share three lessons I’ve learned so far while launching this project.
Lesson 1: Start small. Ask, “Who’s it for?”
Upon launching the Pandemigram page on my website, my initial instinct (like most millennials) was to immediately post it EVERYWHERE. Facebook, Instagram, shouting my idea from the rooftops.
Thank god I was reading Seth Godin’s This Is Marketing at the time.
One of Seth’s core principles, in all creative endeavors, is asking, “Who’s it for?” This question caused me to pump the breaks on the social media sharing. The answer was actually pretty clear to me: “It’s for the people who already know me.” Really know me, or at the very least, those who genuinely want to hear from me. Not in a scroll-through-Instagram kind of way, but in a one-on-one email sort of way.
And there before me were the 84 people on my MailChimp mailing list. My “early adopters,” my “beta test group.” At least for starters, this project was going to be for them.
I’m grateful to those 84 people for several reasons. One, they gave me the chance to figure out my system in a relatively safe, controlled environment. For the first 5-10 requests, I didn’t really know what I was doing, and so it took me, on average, 1.5 hours to complete a single Pandemigram. I didn’t yet have a system in place, and so the going was sluggish.
Who knows what would have happened if I’d immediately posted this project to all of you on social media? Knowing me, I probably would have gotten super overwhelmed, causing my perfectionist imposter syndrome to kick in, and the whole thing would’ve tanked before it had the chance to start.
Two, those “early adopters” spread the word organically. Some shared the Pandemigrams they received on their own social media. Some requested Pandemigrams for friends, who in turn requested Pandemigrams of their own. The point is, the ones who believed in the project claimed ownership of it and shared their experience with their own circles. About a week ago, I received my first Pandemigram request from someone I didn’t know. News had reached them through the grapevine, planted and watered by those first 84 people.
Lesson 2: Refill the well.
This is an old Julia Cameron concept. In The Artist’s Way, she lauds the importance of “refilling the well,” or revitalizing your creative energies through fun, self-nurturing activities (she calls them “artist dates”). The idea is that you can’t continue to create if your artistic “well” is depleted.
I’m an introvert. You’d think that recording songs, by myself, from the comfort of my home, would be a perfect introvert activity. And in many ways, it suits my preferences wonderfully. But the individualized nature of each recording creates the illusion of having someone in the room with me, someone with whom I am communicating directly. This draws on my limited social energy reserves.
So even though I’d like to believe that this project is easy and that I can do it ad nauseam at any time of day, that’s simply not the case. It does get exhausting. And so I am very intentional to take days off. At least one day a week, I don’t touch the Pandemigrams. I “refill the well” on those days.
Incidentally, it’s often on these days off that I’ve come up with new ideas for how to make the project better. Funny how that works.
Along these lines, I also have “office hours” for the project. Generally, I don’t start recording before 1:00pm, and I don’t go past 5:00pm. It would be easy for this project to consume my quarantine life, so I’ve found that having these unspoken (now spoken) hours helps manufacture structure during an otherwise unstructured time. See my post on my Social Distancing Daily Routine for more ideas on structure.
Lesson 3: Don’t measure too much.
This is a tricky one that I struggle with every day. On one hand, I am measuring as much as possible about this project. I’m tracking donation amounts and recipients, and counting the number of requests I get (see the title of this blog post).
It feels good to see the dollar amount climb, to see the number of beneficiaries increase, and to realize that I’ve made 49 (soon-to-be 50) recordings in three weeks. That all feels great.
And then I remember that thousands upon thousands of people are dying from this pandemic. Millions upon millions of people are suffering from the economic impact of the shutdowns. And at this point, there’s no end in sight.
It’s during these times that I recall a story from Rosamund & Benjamin Zander’s book The Art of Possibility. I’m just going to go ahead and copy the whole story here for you:
Strolling along the edge of the sea, a man catches sight of a young woman who appears to be engaged in a ritual dance. She stoops down, then straightens to her full height, casting her arm out in an arc. Drawing closer, he sees that the beach around her is littered with starfish, and she is throwing them one by one into the sea. He lightly mocks her: “There are stranded starfish as far as the eye can see, for miles up the beach. What difference can saving a few of them possibly make?” Smiling, she bends down and once more tosses a starfish out over the water, saying serenely, “It certainly makes a difference to this one.”
There is a deep pressure these days to save the world. To do the thing that will fix the whole problem (pick whatever problem you like). And when you realize that you can’t fix the problem, you get discouraged and feel that your efforts are worthless. There are just too many damn starfish on the beach.
Measuring positive impact in the face of a global crisis can be extremely discouraging. And so, in those moments of discouragement, when I wonder if any of this is enough, I release all the measurements and numbers, and instead ask the simple question that the Zanders ask: “How will I be a contribution today?”