Over the years, I’ve come to appreciate the joys of being non-famous. It may not seem like it, but operating at a level where not everyone knows your name can be very freeing. The main reason being: you get to explore without everyone around you being disappointed.

People get overly invested in having big splashy launches—“Here’s my new book!” and “I’m working as a freelance developmental editor now—hire me!”

They want to sell ten million books on launch day and they want their editorial calendar booked months in advance. But that’s now how this works and it’s particularly not how this works when you’re first starting out.

Besides, you probably don’t want to have massive success the first step out of the gate. Because that boxes you in.

For example, if you look at my career versus Lee Child’s, you’ll see that we’ve published around the same number of novels over the years. Lee Child is fantastically more successful than I am, if success is about the number of copies a book has sold.

But here’s his career:

• Jack Reacher novel
• Another Jack Reacher novel
• Another Jack Reacher novel
• Oh, a change-up! A Jack Reacher short story!
• Another Jack Reacher novel
• Another Jack Reacher novel
• Another Jack Reac….

I enjoy the Jack Reacher novels and have read all of them, and I’ve met Lee Child and he strikes me as a decent, hard-working person who has a sense of humor about himself. So I admire him and I’m not making fun of him. I’m just saying if that was my writing life, I would have put a stop to it twenty years ago out of sheer, stultifying boredom.

Writing the Jack Reacher novels is just another job. It’s a perfectly fine job but it’s not appreciably different from ringing up shoes at the local Skechers shop.

It would never satisfy my desire to explore different genres, different themes, different characters, different worlds.

I write to make sense of the world, to work out philosophical problems, to think about who I am and what I believe. I also believe the pursuit of mastery (which I know I’ll never achieve) is a fine way to spend a life; you learn a great deal about yourself and the world around you if you spend your life focusing on developing a complex skill.

With all due respect to Lee Child, there’s no significant difference in skill between Jack Reacher #1 and Jack Reacher #23.

That’s okay—in fact, that’s necessary—for his purposes. But not for mine.

So it’s A-OK to focus more on the process than the results. To give yourself time and space to explore. To stop worrying about numbers on a spreadsheet and more about the joy this process is bringing you.

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Jennifer Lawler has been a writer-editor for more than twenty-five years and has published more than forty novels and nonfiction books. She is the founder of the online education company Club Ed LLC