Christin's Behind-the-Scenes Sunday 🎥
Originality as an axis of the creator conundrum, comfort with ambiguous ideas
Dear Ones,
This week I noticed a creator conundrum variant. (Should I give them Greek letters?) Instead of yucky-not yucky, this one has an axis of low originality-high originality.
The algorithm gods seem to favor frequency and reward the creator with better discovery when one posts often.
On the surface, this route seems to be aligned with the pottery analogy. Make more small pots. Get more practice in, right?
But the problem is, my pots are starting to look like other people's pots. Because those pots seem to get engagement, I'm incentivized to make similar items.
If we are going to use fancy words, I've accidentally become too mimetic and lost sight of the bigger picture of creating original work.
It's quite a devious trap though! Because we are taught as creators to keep churning, so some lower effort attempts are inevitably needed. It's better to keep the engine warm than to not create anything.
Yet I can see that's how one might stall, because highly original content required a lot of effort, which means it takes longer to get positive reinforcement. It also means a higher risk for fewer people understanding or appreciating the work.
But the pot I want to make is a pot that will surprise myself.
That means I don’t know what shape it will look like yet, or it might even look misshapen at first.
So that means, to get to something that is highly original, I need to be comfortable with ambiguous ideas, that may not resonate with a lot of people at first.
That’s exact opposite of what they teach you in the creator world! It’s making something that doesn’t build an audience at all at first.
It seems like common sense now that I wrote it out (duh, good art takes time and people might not get it.) But it’s easy to lose sight of this because it’s direct conflict with what we’re taught as the path to success as a digital creator, and induces punishment from the algorithm gods.
Warm Wishes,
Christin