You’re not boring - you’re too close to your own life

The sentence that ends a lot of conversations

I hear a familiar sentence a lot when people talk about content.

Nothing interesting happened this week.

It is usually said casually, almost as a fact. It’s more like a summary rather than a complaint. The week felt full, tiring, repetitive, or quietly functional. There is nothing in it worth sharing.

When that sentence shows up, it often sounds final, like the story ends there, even though the week clearly did not.

What tends to sit underneath it is not a lack of experience. It is proximity.

Familiarity flattens things out

When you are living inside your own life, everything feels ordinary and the moments tend to blur together. The details stop standing out because they are always there.

Familiarity has a way of smoothing things over. Even the moments that involve a bit of discomfort, decision-making, or quiet courage can slip past unnoticed.

This is especially true for creatives.

Many creative business owners spend their days spotting things for other people. You pull threads together. You translate half-formed ideas. You see meaning quickly when it belongs to someone else.

When you turn that attention back towards your own life, there is very little distance. Everything feels obvious. Or worse, unremarkable.

The dots are there. They are simply hard to catch when you are standing in the middle of them.

Stories hide in plain sight

A good example of this lives at the end of Scruff’s lead.

Scruff has a habit of choosing the most dramatic possible locations to do his business. One of his favourites is under the biggest frangipani tree you have ever seen. It requires me to squat, balance, and fully commit to the situation in a way that is not always dignified and definitely not when I try to stand back up hahahaha.

On the surface, it is a dog doing what dogs do. It’s not that special.

However, the story is not about the poo or the tree.

It is about being willing to step into unfamiliar territory, knowing it might be uncomfortable, and trusting that you will work it out as you go. That is something my clients do every day in their businesses, even when they do not recognise it as a story worth telling.

They assume it is too small or obvious. They feel it’s simply life.

Those are usually the ones with the most connection baked in.

We make up stories all the time

Another story lives down the road.

Since moving into our apartment, there has been a phone box nearby that appears to be used exclusively by people who look like they are up to something. Paul and I made up an entire backstory involving drug deals and suspicious behaviour, mainly because the same people would walk from the phone box to the petrol station and linger on the corner. Mmmmmmm if that’s not true then I don’t know what is hehehehe.

It may not even be a story. It was simply a pattern we noticed and filled in.

During a storm recently, the roof of this dodgy phone box was half blown off. It was hanging there, wires exposed, looking genuinely unsafe and it was still blowing in the wind. I took Scruff out and stopped short of it, deciding that was a different kind of adventure than I felt like dealing with that afternoon.

The next day, it was fixed, as if nothing had happened. Whether it was Telstra or the same mysterious phone-box regulars remains unclear.

What stayed with me was how quickly we assign meaning to what we see, and how often that meaning changes once we have more information. Things are rarely what they look like from a distance.

This is why meeting people face to face matters. We notice the tone when they are speaking. We see their eyes and can tell what’s going on. We register pauses and body language. Context fills in what assumptions get wrong.

The same thing happens with our own stories. From the inside, they feel thin. From the outside, they carry layers.

Nothing happened is rarely true

When someone says nothing happened this week, it usually means nothing obvious waved for attention.

Something always happened. Maybe there was a moment that required more confidence than expected. Perhaps there was a situation that meant you had to adapt. Or it could have been a decision you made without announcing it to anyone.

These moments often disappear because they do not fit the neat beginning-middle-end structure people think stories need. They do not arrive labelled as heroic or meaningful.

They still matter.

Most connection does not come from polished arcs. It comes from recognition. From someone reading your words and thinking, I know that feeling.

This is not a creativity problem

This is not about needing better ideas.

It is about being too close to your own life to see what is already there. The closer you are, the easier it is for meaning to blur into the background.

Sometimes all that is needed is a little distance or even a second set of eyes. Someone who can spot the thread while you are busy living the moment.

That is often where the story reveals itself.

A small invitation

If this reflection resonates and you find yourself thinking about the moments you normally dismiss, that is noticing doing its work.

If you would like help catching those dots and turning them into stories your dream clients recognise themselves in, The Dot Catcher is a gentle, done-for-you way to do that. I listen to your week, spot the stories hiding inside it, and hand them back to you ready to use across your business.

This is not about performing or turning your life into content.

You simply need to let someone else see what you are already doing.

What dots are you missing?