Creativity

In a world with seemingly unlimited choices, trying to create something for everyone doesn't work anymore. The internet has made it easy to both create and find the best solution in every niche. There are so many great options out there, no one will passionately share what you make if it's only good enough.

If you constantly shave off every rough edge of your work that might turn someone away, the result will be so bland, no one will care about it.

Instead of trying to infinitely maximize the number of people you're trying to please, consider this question instead: What's the smallest audience you need to make your work worthwhile?

In academia, your writing might have a global audience of less than a hundred people, depending on how specific your research niche is. The market for someone making sweaters for people who are 6'10 is also very limited. And picking out an engagement ring has an audience of one.

In all of these examples, expanding the audience for your efforts would undermine your ability to help the people you originally sought to serve.

This means that facing rejection is baked into the process of making something that matters.

It means having the confidence to tell most people "this is not for you," so that you can focus on ensuring that the people you are trying to serve will love your work.

And if you succeed, they'll love it so much they'll turn to their friend and say, "This is for you."

See also: Work Designed to Be Shared

Theseus' paradox poses a simple thought experiment: If you systematically replace every single part of a ship over an extended period of time, is it still the same ship? Looking at it, we might know that none of the original ship still exists. But it still has the same essence from when it was first constructed, right?

This paradox applies to our bodies as well: Though some of our cells are with us for life, our skeleton gets fully replaced every 10 years. Every cell in your bones is less than a decade old, but you probably don't think of your skeleton as being particularly younger than the rest of you. It's essentially the same one you've always had — it just got larger with the rest of your body as you grew up.

Reflecting on our cells' transience reminds us that we are an expression of the universe, both physically and spiritually. For a brief period of time, matter flows through us, and every time we wake up, we face the blank page of a new day.

So, how do we best fill that page?

Dancer and choreographer Martha Graham suggests that we should simply "keep the channel open":

There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique.

If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium. It will be lost. The world will not have it.

It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it open clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.

In other words, by concentrating on your universal expression, you can ship your work each day with greater ease.

All knowledge is self taught, because learning anything requires us to actively engage in the educational process.

Learning cannot be done to us or for us.

Our culture likes to confuse education with learning. The former is a certificate — a stamp of approval from an accredited institution. It's a way of branding ourselves to prospective employers.

Learning requires us to lean in and ask questions. It asks us to do more than simply memorize information — we must also synthesize that new information with what we already know.

So when someone says they're self-taught, maybe they don't have a relevant school transcript to point to. But they've read books, watched YouTube videos, done tutorials, asked questions in forums, failed over and over, and built up enough confidence in their knowledge to say, "I am capable of this."

You don't arrive at that point just by attending a class lecture.

One way to get over the resistance to starting things before you're ready is to approach new things like they're experiments. It allows you to say "this might not work," without worrying about the potential for failure.

By adopting an experimental attitude, you reframe failure as an opportunity to learn something. And if what you're making is on track to be successful, just keep experimenting until it's good enough.

Hat tip to Paul Graham for the insight.

When I started violin lessons in first grade, I refused to play a recital. The prospect of sharing my work with an audience terrified me.

Eventually, my mom and teacher convinced me to set a goal of working towards a recital by the end of second grade.

I’ve been performing ever since.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always preferred to observe new things before participating. It’s a way to get a feel for the activity or experience — to make the unfamiliar familiar — before jumping in the deep end.

But observation is ultimately an incredibly limited way to learn. You can’t really excel at something until you’ve raised the stakes and done it for real.

Coding a website, for example, will accelerate your skills faster than watching someone else do it.

Teaching a concept to a friend will help you understand it better than just reading about it.

And working towards performing a piece of music forces you to internalize it in a way than practicing alone never will.

You can spend your whole life observing and preparing to do something. But at some point, you have to start before you’re ready.

Might as well start now.

Any worthwhile accomplishment is likely to take a long time.

Maybe a brilliant idea comes to you in an instant and takes minutes to implement. But it's likely the product of years of prep — of honing your craft and immersing yourself in an environment that provides inspiration and stimulation.

Earl Nightingale said, "Never give up on a dream because of the time it will take to achieve it. The time will pass anyway.”

A mantra to live by whenever the biggest obstacle is how long something will take:

The time will pass anyway.

Failure is always a possibility when we embark on a new endeavor. As humans, we're hardwired to want to reduce or eliminate risk. But the fact that something might not work is a poor excuse for not doing it.

In fact, many things worth going after are more likely to fail than not.

So how do we decide what to pursue? Start by comparing the potential downside with the upside. If the downside is minimal and the upside is high, you should probably do it, even if failure is likely.

Embrace the risk, then take the leap.

When you keep your eyes open to the chances you're taking, it frees you to live without regret, content with the knowledge that you made the best decision you could with the information you had.

See also: Set Out to Be Wrecked

There's a difference between work designed to go viral and work designed to be shared.

Work designed to go viral is based on the lowest common denominator. It's often unsubstantial, even though the number of people who experience it may not be.

Work designed to be shared inspires us to tell our friends about it. Not because everyone will like it, but because we hope that those around us will be similarly impacted by it.

When we create something for others, we have a choice about who it's for and the impact we want it to have. It's easy to confuse audience size with impact because the latter is harder to measure.

But impact is more important than virality, if we choose.