If you were you, would you be excited to use this new thing?

If you’re not emotionally engaged, your project is toast.

If you’re not building more and more momentum each day that you work on this new thing, then it’s going to be an uphill battle every step of the way. Natural forces like resistance like gravity and entropy and inertia will be the end of you.

That’s why it’s imperative to choose your creative investments based on where you have the highest level of energetic capital. When you treat your personal energy as the organizing principle for the work, you are immune to the inevitable delays, discouragements, disruptions and derailments of the journey.

Now, the injection of energetic capital doesn’t guarantee success, but failure is almost certain without it. Here’s a question you can ask during the ideation, organization and execution stages of your project.

If you were you, would you be excited to use this new thing?

Let me share a case study from my own career.

I’ve made a few forays software development over the years, and this concept of energetic capital has been quite useful. It first crystallized when I launched a suite of simple, single serving web applications that helped me become a more effective writer.

One tool was a database of inspiring sentences I collected, another was a compendium of brain sparking questions, just to name a few. Anyway, all these apps were low tech, free to the public and earned exactly zero revenue for my company. And I’m convinced nobody on the planet used them but me.

But the valuable process of building them taught me how to scratch my own itch. And years later, when we launched my software as a service platform, the same principle applied. Building the world’s first personal creativity management system energized me more than anything I’d ever done before.

Because having studied my own creative needs as a writer for so many years, our functionality and design now had a direct line to at least one user. We figured, hey, if this thing is good enough for someone like me to want to use every day, then there must be others out there who will feel the same.

That’s the whole philosophy of being a good writer in the first place. The more personal your message, the more universal your appeal.

Twitter’s founder wrote about energy quite a bit in his memoir. Stone said:

You don’t love what you’re building, if you’re not an avid user yourself, then you will most likely fail, even if you’re doing everything else right. My faith in my idea kept me going. I could bear any struggling if my work was bringing me joy. And my passion for the project made me immune to all the things people thought were stupid and useless about it.

Remember, if the energy immediately drains from your body when you think about your project, it might not be the best investment.

Ask yourself if you would be excited to use this new thing. If so, then full steam ahead.

How might energetic capital make you immune to the resistance of your creative journey?