THERE ARE TWO THINGS THAT ARE HARD ABOUT DOING CREATIVE WORK. First, doing the work, and second, getting people to care about it. This book deals primarily with the second part. It does this by also dealing with the first.
It’s easy to see why doing the work is hard. Whether you’re writing a book, producing a film, building a business, making music, developing software,designing an experience, or any other creative pursuit, we all share this struggle. There are distractions, we’d rather be watching television, we’re tired, there’s no time, we’re not good enough, we’ll never be good enough. Eventually, we must find ways to solve these problems if we are even to begin work as creators.
But as hard as that is, most of us struggle even more with the“getting people to care” side of things. Doing the work is difficult, but then what? How can we be sure our work reaches its potential as a catalyst for others to do, be, or experience something new? How can our work provide us with what we need to keep doing it — a roof over our heads, food on the table, and provision for our families(and/or employees) at the very least? How can we realize the impact we want to have with our big vision?
Usually, we’re told the answer falls somewhere between two spectrums. On the one end, we believe we just need to make great work. After all, the secret to getting people to care is to make something worth caring about, right? If they don’t care, it’s because we didn’t do a good enough job. On the other end of the spectrum, we believe we just need better marketing, or maybe more of it. If we’re loud enough and we have the right message, people will eventually buy whatever we’re selling.
Both of these lines of thinking are destructive for creative people. Although they seem perfectly rational and full of good sense, they lead us to behaviors that don’t actually solve our problems(and often make them worse).
If you build it, they will come…maybe
We’re often told we live in a meritocracy, where the best work gains the most traction and is ultimately the most successful. Sadly, I know this isn’t true. Take a stroll through any big box store, and look at the products that made it onto the shelves. Are they the best designed? The most innovative? The highest quality? Not even close.
At the same time, there’s no way of knowing how many brilliant, well-executed endeavors have gotten lost in obscurity. But we do know artists whose work almost died with them — Emily Dickinson, Vincent van Gogh, Franz Kafka, Henry David Thoreau, Stieg Larsson — there are countless examples of great work that nearly missed being known, much less celebrated.(If you were reading a Serious Business Book, right here’s where you’d see the story of BetaMax losing even though VHS was inferior technology.)
Of course, most of us aren’t attempting to be a world-renowned artist or competing for shelf space at Walmart. But there are other consequences to that way of thinking.
Ironically, when we believe we must produce fantastic work in order to be successful, it diminishes our chances for doing so. Our vision becomes muddied with the pressure to make something not only we think is great, but that other people think is great. This may have nothing to do with ego — our survival suddenly hinges on it. If our work isn’t great, people won’t care about it, and then where will we be?
Julianne, one of the first people I ever hired, helped sear this lesson into my brain. We’d get together for a brainstorming session, and because I was so aware of the financial and other practical needs of the project, I would discard any idea that would threaten those needs. I was so focused on survival that I couldn’t brainstorm. I ended up earning the nickname“the bus” because I was always running over our ideas before they even had a chance to breathe.
Because of this, Julianne would start any brainstorming session by declaring that we were now in the“brainstorm bubble”. Inside the bubble, we would celebrate terrible ideas, crazy ideas, and ideas that would never work. Until she popped the bubble, I wasn’t allowed to drive my bus over any of them.
It’s been said over and over, but it’s still worth repeating because it’s so hard to learn: we have to be willing to fail if we’re to take the creative risks necessary to produce our best work. And that means taking“great” work(or even“financially viable” work) off the table in order to consider innovative ideas that are more likely to lead to its eventual success.
The biggest issue though, isn’t that we risk not making something great. It’s what this way of thinking does to ourselves as people. When we attach the value of our work too closely to the reactions and opinions of others, our vision becomes co-dependent on feedback that is as variable as the people who give it. Whatever people think, no matter their experience or level of expertise, there is going to be another person with the exact opposite point of view.
Although making work that is widely adopted and lovedrequires collaboration, it withers in conditions of co-dependency. We cannot rely on other people to be the source of validation for us and our work. Our work is what it is, regardless of the malleable opinions of others, and we must learn to know the truth of what it is for ourselves. Feedback helps make our work better, but the final truth is in our bones, and we have to learn to trust it.
Good marketing will save us…maybe
Even while we wonder if we just need to make better work to gain the traction we're seeking, some part of us believes better marketing will save us. Ever since the Internet gave everyone equal access to the free publication of ideas, and social media gave us a way to broadcast those ideas to our networks, the possibility of“going viral” has shimmered like a mirage. We spend heaps of time on the Internet trying to get attention focused our direction, but it never seems to be enough. It reminds me of the scene in the Phantom Tollbooth where the Mathemagician serves his guests Subtraction Stew. The more everyone eats, the hungrier they get.
Even when we get some scraps of attention thrown our way, those sudden bursts often do less for the long-term success of our work than we expected. We may get a lot of website visitors one day, but do those visitors stick around long enough to buy our work? A small percentage of them might, but it’s not sustainable.
Not to mention that the pursuit of that kind of recognition and reach can be toxic, both to our work and to ourselves. The Subtraction Stew feeds a hunger, not just for sales to make our work sustainable, but for constant likes and favorites to validate who we are. When our security becomes attached to these metrics, we are insecure indeed. I like to think that I have the character to resist that kind of siren call, but it’s a regular struggle. I have to be vigilant about the source of my self-worth.
When we’re not spending too much time on the Internet, we often spend too much time creating the assets that make us and our work look legitimate, hoping it will help people to understand and care about our work. We might spend months agonizing over our brand, thinking if we just get that perfect name and/or tagline, we’ll be set. A thoughtful, well-designed identity will give us instant clarity and credibility, and we won’t have to try so hard. We might spend half a year on our website, only to discover in the end that no one comes to it. We might spend hours re-packaging and re-positioning everything we have to offer, writing new sales pages and adjusting the countless variables that could possibly influence our success.
But those things, while valuable, are not the main thing. They can even take us away from the main thing if we let them.
The real problem with making people care
If the problem with making people care lies within the quality of the work or the quality and quantity of the marketing(or maybe a little of both), that means we just have to keep working harder at what we’ve been doing. And sure, that’ll probably get us where we want to go, eventually. But I believe there’s another solution.
When I first became an employer, I was frustrated that I couldn’t get people on my team to adopt my ideas and run with them. I had to explain(a lot) and delegate(a lot) and follow up(a lot). I felt like the team cheerleader. Go team, go! Here’s where I want you to go! Please, please go! I hadn’t yet developed the maturity to understand that(a) my ideas weren’t necessarily the best ideas and(b) people are committed to the ideas they help create.
It wasn’t until I started working with my business partner, Adam Brault, that I started to understand what I had been doing wrong. One of the first things I noticed about his approach was that he never started by announcing“this is what we’re going to do”. Instead, he had a vague notion of what he thought we might do, and then he started having conversations with people about it, genuinely curious about what they thought about it and how their ideas might improve it. Every person he’d talk to would help shape the idea in some way until it was concrete enough to share with everyone and officially get started.
Through watching this process, I learned that shared ownership is powerful. People are committed to what they help create, and they often come up with creative solutions that work far better than anything we would have tried. Then we’re not trying to push our ideas onto other people; instead, people are working to solve a problem that matters to them, and they themselves are pushing it through and making it a success.
If you build it, they will come…maybe
Good marketing will save us…maybe
The real problem with making people care