One quirk – among many – of human nature is that we love to be loved. Not just by people we are close to, but the community at large.
This must have helped ancient humans form and live in societies and obviously has its advantages.
In the digital age, we seek this love, this validation, in Likes, Shares, and Subscribes.
This presents a problem to the aspiring, and I’d argue even the established, creator.
To aspiring creators it might seem like they are putting their soul on the line only to create paper boats and sending them to sail across a vast and rough ocean – with little to no response from digital denizens.
On the other hand, established creators often find themselves saddled with this massive steamer held together by past successes that no longer reflects who they are today. But they feel like the only way to move ahead is to feed the engine more of what has worked for them in the past.
Anchoring your measure of success (I promise that’s the last of nautical references) solely to reach and engagement metrics isn’t helpful for:
- Sustained creation when you are starting off.
- Experimentation and growth when you already have a sizeable audience.
As the essayist Lawrence Yeo once observed: “If you base the quality of your work on its performance – and not how you felt while creating it – then you will never be confident in your own judgment.”
Tell me if this sounds familiar. We set out to create something > It feels good to create it > The result doesn’t get enough of a reaction > The dejection supersedes the joy of creation > We stop creating
But if we put Yeo’s advice to practice then we reflect on how the act of creation feels – and crucially give that feeling its due importance.
Let’s call this an intrinsic metric and requires us to observe and value what feels good to us. This may not show up on any analytics dashboard, but as the author and humourist William Bruce Cameron puts it “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
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