It is 1:34am and I am still awake offloading footage, charging batteries, and repacking my backpack for another day of filming. I’ve seen every sunrise and sunset for the past two days and have slept just as much as most would consider a nap. This is my life when I am on production.

I’m not asking for sympathy at all. In fact, I’m oddly in my creative zone where I thrive. It is this weird gear I shift into when it comes to filming that I somehow have developed over the years. And while my process isn’t entirely unique, because it is the story for most that are on production crew, I’ve refined my process to be the most efficient and effective for myself. And that is one of the most important parts, it’s MY process. I think a lot of people come across content on the internet and it usually begins with the title similar to this — “I growth hacked my life and now I’m super successful. And you can be too!” The other one I particularly enjoy is, “Do these 5 things and you will be rich.” Don’t feel bad if you have read these click bait filled articles because I have to. Some of them actually have some good suggestions. But where they all fall short is they think it will work for everybody.

I like to believe that every single one of us are truly unique people. Sure, you could take the snowflake analogy but I’ve always been a bit of a car person. You could have a similar make and model, seemingly exactly the same from the outside. But every person who has a car definitely builds their own relationship with it that makes it their own. And that is how I approach the creative process. So this isn’t a recipe for success, more just a framework that I have set for myself and it might just provide some help for finding your own process of creating.

Preparation is something I think we all do. Athletes prepare for the big game, the chef prepares for dinner service, so why wouldn’t I prepare for my work as well? And this isn’t just the process of packing the gear and making a checklist, it is about the mental preparation for the task ahead. When I was in high school, pursuing the Naval Academy, I was in the Navy Sea Cadet Corps. Think of it as JROTC but not at a school. I would spend many Saturdays and most of my summers immersed in this program. The marching, the inspections, and the attention to detail. It basically became a standard in my life that I applied across the board. But one of the things that stuck with me the most was a saying that an officer told me when details were missed — he called it the six “Ps.” Every time that I think about maybe just winging it, or taking any type of shortcut, this saying seems to pop into my head…

Proper prior planning prevents piss poor performance.

My preparation, for what it is worth, is actually more about allowing myself to settle into the goal and begin to visualize the outcome. This is pretty common for a lot of athletes but, much like the car analogy, I’ve made it more my own. So as I am charging my batteries, packing gear, and making sure I don’t forget the camera (did that one time), I just try to relax. I don’t sit and meditate, although I do meditate and do breath work, I just do whatever feels right in the moment. It is always accompanied by music, usually followed by some time in nature, and then finished off with doing absolutely nothing related to the creative work. I found this to be the most important, and it goes back to when I did triathlon. When you show up for the big race, all the hard work is done. There is literally nothing more you can do to improve your fitness so just enjoy the process of the moment. But one thing I end up not doing is sleeping.

I still haven’t been able to quite figure it out but I usually am awake until around 2am the night before I film. And as hard as I try, it hasn’t really ever changed. I used to get quite frustrated. Sleep is something that I know is really important for the body and it is also proven that sleep deprivation can have massive side effects on performance. I tried everything in order to get the proper amount of sleep. I would go to bed incredibly early, thinking that I just needed more time to prepare for sleep and wind down. I would wake up in the middle of the night and not fall back asleep (I usually always sleep through the night). I then just tried every process to put my body to sleep — tea, bath, breathing, meditation, cbd, and nothing worked. So I began to just accept it. When I finally accepted it and embraced it, something pretty amazing happened. I would be laying there, not really thinking about anything in particular, and I would suddenly have this moment of seeing how I was going to create the following day. It would hit me like a train and suddenly I had this internal, instinctual feeling that I knew exactly what to do. I would get stoked, excited, and then I would immediately be asleep. It was like magic.

I don’t think that there is any particular right or wrong answer to why this is happening. But I also don’t think that it is unique to me. You hear of those moments where people have the big idea in the middle of the night or they had a dream and suddenly they knew exactly what they needed to do in life. Whether asleep or awake, this moment happens when we allow our bodies and minds to just enjoy the process. And that would probably be my biggest lesson from all of the sleepless nights, including tonight. I prepare for what is to come, in a very real way, and then I find the way that I can just remain as present as possible with the people and the world around me. However, unlike those secret hack articles, I think it is something that might actually work for people. At least, I hope so.