We write a lot about the importance of creativity in content marketing. Generic, flavorless content has very little chance of getting noticed in the sea of content that’s generated every day.

Pros know that creativity needs to be harnessed to professional discipline. Creative work is work, and it calls for a serious mindset.

And when your creative work is directly tied to a company’s revenue (and the grocery bills and mortgages of everyone who works for that company), there’s no time for self-indulgence.

This week, we offered three posts about the power of creative discipline.

On Monday, Stefanie Flaxman talked about how people perceive the writing life, and what it’s actually like. While from the outside, professional writers sometimes look a little fuzzy, working writers know what it’s like to keep wrestling with a piece when everyone else has gone off to hit Happy Hour.

On Tuesday, Beth Hayden shared 13 favorite insights from advertising legend David Ogilvy, with direct applications to the work we do today. Ogilvy was famous for suggesting that creativity didn’t matter in advertising — and writing some of the most creatively fascinating ads ever.

And on Wednesday, I wrote about one of my all-time favorite content marketing tools, the email autoresponder. Today it’s grown up into a more complex creature, driven by smart automation.

New technology has only made autoresponders more effective, and thoughtful, well-written email sequences remain one of the smartest places to put your writing time and budget.

Overwhelmed? Anxious? Stressed out?

Yeah, there’s a lot of that going around.

Daily life is difficult enough. And when you layer business and marketing challenges on top of that, it can seem really inviting to stay in bed and watch cartoons for, say, about a month.

Since that’s not an option for most of us, we have several solutions for your creative, marketing, and business anxieties. There are a lot of problems we can’t help you with, but we can try to take marketing worries off of your personal “scary” list.

This week I’m switching things up a bit, recapping our posts in reverse order to get more and more specific about how you can Do All the Things even when you’re overwhelmed.

Well, this isn’t going to be easy …

I’ve been working as a copywriter for 40 years now and still haven’t quite figured out how to properly describe what copywriters do.

Or, maybe I’m just traumatized by how people used to react when I told them I was a copywriter.

Scroll way back to the late 1970s in London, England.

I was a middle-class young man, fresh out of a privileged education.

My teachers and parents shared high hopes for me.

A lawyer, perhaps. Or a university professor.

You want to be a writer? Oh dear. Then maybe a respected novelist, or a journalist for The Times newspaper …

A copywriter? Seriously? Is that even a “proper job?”

I’d be at a party thrown by my parents and a friend of theirs might ask me, “And what are you doing these days?”