How to care less
Balancing audience feedback within the process of creativity
Happy Monday,
Today we have a re-shared post from 2024, while I prepare my next edition and create the new podcast. I hope you enjoy it.
Wade
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Yesterday I revealed that my father-in-law is a new subscriber to Morning Musely.
Nothing really newsworthy in that, except to say that he is a quite a learned English Teacher and by sheer coincidence I’ve developed a sudden interest in proofreading.
I raise it because for the first time since I created Morning Musely his subscription made me aware of what you - dear reader - might think of what I’m writing here each day.
Then I had to remind myself to care less about what anyone reading this thinks. Yes, even you.
Here’s why.
One of the hardest parts of creating anything of worth, is balancing your own ideas with what your audience might think about whatever it is your creating.
This could be a Powerpoint deck for a meeting, a song for an audience, or dinner for your family.
The act of creation covers all those - and many more - examples.
The best advice I can give you is this.
Care less.
One of the curses of creating things is we can focus too hard on how the audience might respond and therefore dilute the potency of what we produce.
Imagine a songwriter thinking ‘before I write this ballad a to a girl I once loved but have now lost, I’ll run it by the Facebook freaks’.
In his seminal tome, ‘The Creative Act: A Way of Being’ famed music Producer Rick Rubin says:
“In terms of priority, inspiration comes first. You come next. The audience comes last.”
Last.
Dead last in fact.
The challenge with most audiences (be they in a boardroom listening to your presentation, or in a concert hall listening to your performance) is they can only judge your work on what has come before it - what is already familiar to them.
In other words, they don’t know what they think of it until you share it. Applying that logic to the act of creation itself - you don’t know what they are going to think - so why let it stop you?
We can use our best experience, intuition, judgement, or even a ouija board and still get it wrong.
Let what you know be a guide.
Let what you’re passionate about be a guide.
Let what perspective you have to express be a guide.
If I decided to research what topics and subjects you’d like to hear before I wrote this daily piece, it would be based entirely off what you already like. The risk therefore is that I write something you want rather than what I think - diluting either the end product or certainly my interest in creating it.
My creative process for Morning Musely is simple:
Think of a subject that’s interesting to me.
Have a clear point of view about it.
Communicate that point of view to you in a way that I myself would find engaging to read.
The job of this publication then is to find as many people who agree on points 1, 2, and 3.
Then I can tinker with it over time. See what is resonating and what you’d like to hear or read more of from me based on your actual behaviour - rather than any potential creativity-stifling assumptions I made in advance.
So in short (with my newly found proofreading hat on) please care less. Your creativity is relying on you to.
See you next Monday Morning,
Wade