Vol. 5, Issue 6: The Creator Economy
Momentum, Making and the Difference Between Creating and Being a Creator
What am I doing right now? I’m glad you asked*
*I love when people ask me what I’m doing, because you can interpret that question so many different ways. Occasionally, I’ll answer with a Nietzsche quote, but most of the time I just say “Nothing much, what are you doing?”
Right now, I’m sitting in a coffee shop staring at this screen and thinking about the next set of newsletters that I want to push out the door. I’ve got a whole lot of ideas and I just dump them into Substack drafts and then when the mood strikes, I just look at the list and pick away at the one that seems most interesting in the moment.
And I never write any of them all at once. I get one of them part of the way there and then I put it down. And when I’m ready again, I’ll pick another and I’ll get that one moving some of the way through and then put it down. If you’re wondering why one thing is about mourning and then the next one is about Skynet and then the next one is about movies, that’s why. I don’t ever do them in order.*
*As it turns out, I do everything this way. My work, cleaning up, putting things away, etc. etc., which isn’t at all annoying to the people around me. I literally stopped writing this to check my email and there were emails I needed for my taxes, so I read those and logged them. To restate that, I did part of my taxes in the middle of writing this.
That’s my process.
And process is the thing that got me thinking about what I’m writing now. We all have different processes because we’re all different people.* The same way we all have different affinities, desires and talents because we all have different ideas of what we want to get out of the things we experience. To paraphrase Alexis Rose, I love this for us.**
*Not to state the obvious
**Schitt’s Creek did a lot of things for the world, but the best one is the gift of “I love that for you”
However, as you may have figured out, there’s a big, hairy BUT there. This isn’t the end.
We talk a lot about “creators” today. And that’s thing I want to talk about now: how rise of the creator has shifted our focus from the process of creating to the performance of output through algorithms and eyeballs. And I think that when we optimize for algorithms instead of actual attention, the risk is that we trade creativity for consistency.
And my sense is that to recover actual creativity, we probably need to rediscover the discipline of process and the necessity of silence.
30 years ago, if you asked anyone on the street what it meant to be a creator, they’d have had a wildly different answer than if you asked someone the same question today. Before, they might have said “someone who makes things” or “someone who follows their curiosity” or “someone who takes something out of their head and makes it real” or something else that pointed to what people do when they take time to pull something from the head and put it out into the world.
Now it means publishing on schedule, feeding the algorithm, maintaining engagement and building an audience, which has shifted the focus from “what am I exploring?” to “what increasingly inflammatory take should I post next?” And that sometimes subtle, sometimes not-so-subtle shift changes the entire enterprise.
That’s the creator economy. It shifts the mindset of creation from “ars gratia artis” to “ars gratia pecuniae.”* It’s not malicious; it’s structural. The incentive to create for the sake of creating is misaligned with platforms that reward consistency independent of quality, volume and predictability. Creativity requires time to foment in a potentially non-linear way. It favors incubation and iteration.
*”Art for art’s sake” and “art for money’s sake” respectively. I’d love to say I constructed that Latin from my head, but I had to look it up
This has all been bouncing around my head for a while, but what crystallized it for me was listening to Rick Rubin’s book The Creative Act: A Way of Being. It’s a good book, but not a perfect one. Given Rick Rubin’s career*, it would have been super interesting to hear how working with some of the acts he worked with informed or reinforced the worldview that he’s discussing. But the book really focuses on the how of creation, not the what. And that’s super interesting to me.
*I find it nearly impossible to believe that anyone reading this doesn’t know who Rick Rubin is, but he’s a hip-hop pioneer who produced early work by LL Cool J, the Beastie Boys, Run-DMC and Public Enemy, to name a few.
At a high level, Rubin’s argument is that creativity is not about productivity; it’s about attention. I’m gonna bring up Rumi again, because this wouldn’t be a newsletter if I didn’t. Rubin’s version of that famous Rumi quote is “The work reveals itself as you go.” But that means working against the algorithm. It means you have to protect things like silence, space, unfinished ideas and your own intuition.
His perspective is that you shouldn’t optimize for frequency. You should optimize for signal. When you have to constantly produce in order to create relevance in an algorithmic construct, you stop experimenting and taking risks and you start just repeating what works. Your output becomes safer, your perspective narrows and you lose the uniqueness of your voice.
In other words, you don’t feel less creative because you lack ideas. You feel less creative because you lack the space to pursue things that are interesting at the expense of things that will be amplified by the platforms. The result is confusing visibility with creation.
It’s time to recapture the process.
First, we need to separate creating from publishing. The goal should be to create things you’re proud of and want to share, but not everything needs to be shared, in the same way that not everything needs to be optimized for consumption. Creation can be the goal, with publishing the byproduct. If the focus is on the output, the consumption will come naturally.
It’s also important to allow for incubation. Meaningful work needs time. It takes patience. It requires a tolerance for uncertainty. It takes courage. And those aren’t fungible assets. I mentioned this above in the context of how I write, but there is work that has sat in my drafts for very extended periods of time. I’ve been working on a piece called “Healthy, Wealthy and Wise” based on a study I read in 2023. It’s unfinished. It’s pushing back against resolution. And so it sits where it is, not as a personal failure, but as something still coming together.
Protect the silence. Gaps are not failures. Gaps are gestation periods. It takes time to create. What outwardly appears as inactivity is often the inward assembling of something more substantial.
Create things that no one is asking for. Innovation typically doesn’t emerge from demand. The ideas that resonate most often begin as private curiosities, pursued without any certainty that they will find an audience at all.
Let your outcomes surprise you. If you already know how a piece will perform: how it will be received, how it will circulate, you’re falling back on creative safety. Your authentic creativity carries the possibility of discovery, and discovery requires letting go of control over how the work will land (or how it will be amplified). It also carries the possibility of failure, which in turn creates personal growth. The point is not to engineer a reaction; it’s to uncover something that didn’t exist before you began.
The creator economy gave us access, which has in many ways given us democratization of distribution channels. But the platforms that control those channels require delivery on a certain cadence to bring consumption of our creations.
But Rick Rubin reminds us that creativity isn’t production; it’s perception. And my great hope is that the future of creativity won’t belong to the fastest, most optimized or most consistent. My great hope is that it will belong to the most attentive, the most patient and the most willing to sit with something until it’s ready to appear.
That’s my hope for the great return to creation.
My intent was the publish my 2nd AI piece this week, but that’s another super heavy one and in the spirit of this piece, I don’t think it’s quite ready yet. That will ideally come next week, but perhaps not.
Some other news:
I’ve found myself with some open utilization at JPEG in March, so if you’re in the need of a few hours of consulting in the operational, GTM or sales and marketing spaces, please reach out to me here
Greg and I will be recording Leadership In Season 2 in mid-March! If you have ideas for guests, feel free to email us here
Finally, I’ll be in NYC for the week of 3/16 for meetings. Let’s hang!
That’s all for this week. Until next time, friends.