The World Needs What You Make
Is there an oversupply of creative work? Yes. But suggesting the world needs less of what you create, is exactly how creativity suffers.
Too often I see people shooting for a headline hook; proclaiming the death of the next medium, that the world doesn’t need another “______”.
As if we have reached the end of the road, no more could a new book, podcast, film or album benefit humanity.
It’s an easy reach, when you’re desperate for a click. But completely misses the point of creativity, creative work and what consumers want.
There is an oversupply of creative work, yes. And that is increasing at an exponential rate. But with that increase, comes a growing undersupply.
I’m here to make the case that high quality, human made, creative work, made by humans, is going to grow in demand, because it’s going to be harder to find.
Let’s dive in!
In this article:
Why the “oversupply of creative work” proclamation is flat out wrong
Why there is an undersupply of one type of creative work
Why it’s key to think about the creative journey, more than the work itself
Why creativity is never a race and how to stay in the game
The world doesn’t need another “_______”.
“The world doesn’t need another podcast.”
“The world doesn’t need another album.”
“The world doesn’t need another book.”
“The world doesn’t need another film, blog, photograph…” You get the point.
I hear versions of this all the time. And look, I get it. People are desperate for a click. Spouting the death of the next medium and the rise of another is a great way to do that.
And yeah look, there is a supply problem in the creative industries. There is significantly more creative work being brought into the world every day than can be consumed by humanity. The quantity, it’s growing.
But this proclamation misses the whole point of creativity.
Of the things we as consumers of creativity yearn for.
We yearn for work that means something to us.
And the only way to get more of that, is if creative people keep creating, and keep pushing the limits of their own creativity.
The world might not need everything you make…
And that’s ok. That is part of the process. Being a creative person does not mean you are guaranteed success, a career or that people will like your work.
You are not guaranteed that all your work will be good. In fact, if anything, if you are to truly pursue this as your vocation, you are guaranteed that the vast majority of your work will be average.
Because it is through the process of creating average, the hard-won determination of showing up over and over again. Iterating and experimenting and combining and moulding. That the creative process has a way of creating those hidden gems.
Making incredible creative work is as hard a goal as there is, because there’s no destination you are really seeking. You have to be able to produce and produce and produce, no-matter the quality.
And without this? You may find yourself the proud owner of ‘just another podcast’ or ‘just another album’.
This is an article not about the supply and demand economics of the creative industries, but really about grit, determination, belief and persistance.
And in a world that is making things easier and easer to produce at our fingertips. I think the thing that will become more scarce, is the thing noboidy can ever take from you.
Your persistance to create and to push the boundaries of what’s possible is always in your hands.
The world absolutely does need what you make.
Whenever it looks like something has already been done 100 times over, you need to show up anyway.
That voice that says “that’s been done better than I could do” doesn’t help you.
That voice that says “the world is too saturated, I may as well try something else” is just throwing you off course.
And some version of this voice has shown up for me across the last 20 years or so of me trying to work out how to be a creative person (which I’m still figuring out, mind you).
It shows up in the creative work itself, just as easily as the marketing work we must do to prove our relevance.
That voice that says “gosh, maybe I do kind of suck at this” is the same voice that also bothers people who proclaim we don’t need more creative work.
Because there’s a voice telling them their creative work sucks. They’ve already decided they’re not going to do it, so they’re annoyed when somebody else goes and does it anyway.
What the inner monologue is really trying to tell us
It’s not all bad; that voice has a purpose. And shutting it down I don’t think helps. Acknowledging it, does. And acknowledging and heeding it’s not-so-wise words are very different things.
Our internal quality checks, the parts of our intelect that determine taste is trying to move us forward. As artists, creators, makers, in developing our skills, craft and practice, of course we are going to be discerning. We are going to find nuance in our understanding of what is good and great work.
It’s hard when you know your work isn’t the best. It’s hard when you know it’s perhaps not getting the recognition that other people seem to be able to get.
But that voice is just egging you on; to keep challenging yourself.
To keep being the best creative you can be.
That part of ourselves that critiques our work should, in theory, help us keep striving to make better work. It should ring alarm bells when we’re cutting corners, when we’re trying to optimise for attention instead of quality. That voice becomes a useful guardrail.
But sometimes it stops us from starting. And when other people who hold some kind of positional authority say it, it can be way more dangerous.
So I’m here today, with the very limited positional authority I have to say this:
F#&% what anyone else thinks, and what the inner monologue might say. The world needs you to create anyway.
Saturation assumes that all work is the same and equal.
Back to the supply and demand of creativity for a moment.
Because yes, there is an oversupply of creative work. Factually, that’s true. There is an insane amount of content uploaded to every distribution platform, every day; more than is consumable by the people on the planet, and of course not everyone is going to be able to make a career from it.
But I’m here to make the case that there is an undersupply of high quality, human made creative work; of new work, with meaning; and that that’s unlikely in my opinion to change.
As the barrier to entry for easy, average, fast-food creativity grows. The time, skill, patience, exploration and long-road required to produce standout creative work will become less palatable for many.
The oversupply of average work is going to continue, if not increase. So more than ever, I think we need to work slower. To put creativity and the creative process first again.
Putting the effort in, the energy in, over a long period of time is actually the whole game. It’s always been the point. And yes some who take shortcuts have won and will continue to win. But overall humanity does not.
We only win when artists are brave and determined and resilient and go forth challenging and bettering themselves over the long-run.
And I think it’s unfair that this question is asked of creatives, when we don’t ask the same question when there’s an oversupply in other industries in the same way.
You rarely hear someone say “the world doesn’t need another investment banker”. But we don’t criticise them in the same way we do creative people.
We don’t stop that person and say “no, we’ve got more than enough of those, how about you don’t do it.”
But for some reason in the creative industries, we say “there are too many creative people, so please everyone stop.”
If I had to choose a future world where everybody was an investment banker or everybody was an artist, I’m choosing the creative world every time.
This was first published as a video essay; you might like to watch it on YouTube →
The people who deserve more support
I think anybody who wants to be an artist should be able to be one. And I think the people who are willing to do the really hard work that it requires, to wrestle with ideas, fight against self doubt, create in obscurity for as long as it takes, and realise that it doesn’t work out in two years and it might not work out in ten but if you keep going maybe in 30 things will pan out; those people deserve more support than they’re getting.
Because it’s really easy to look and say “oh creative people just get to write music every day.” But creative people who are genuinely building real creative skills and making really deep creative work spend an enormous amount of their time and energy and resources on this thing.
And that determination is going to become more valuable.
At the same time, creative people cannot live with expectation that they are somehow owed something by society. Not everybody will produce work that demands a career. And not everybody will build the audience that funds the career. We are not owed anything and feeling sorry for ourselves or expecting parts of our job (like marketing) to magically not be there is mythical at best.
No career on the planet comes without hard work and doing hard things. A creative person who just wants to be creative but complains about how hard the rest of it is; that’s missing the point of being a creative.
The whole point is the ongoing challenge.
Creative people who choose this path and life, knowing full-well the odds of success are stacked against them. We choose this path because we know no other and want no other.
And with that path comes a whole range of very hard things we’re going to have to do. To make our creative work the best it can be and to find the people that can help us to sustain our creativity.
How AI is actually helping every creative
The more I reflect on where the world is heading with AI, there are moments where I think things are going to get worse for creative people. And then I think, no, this might be the moment people needed to realise something important.
If you can just manufacture “art”, then suddenly there’s a massive differentiation. AI generated work is predictive and there are already studies showing it’s significant limitations that will persist even as the models get “smarter” because they homogenise ideas.
People that don’t use AI for creative work, create more ideas, not less. So let others go and AI generate their work, and skip the years, decades even of craft and practice.
But know this is your differentation; the unique combination of perspectives, experiences, trials, challenges and findings is what makes your work unique and original. Your creative practice is your fingerprint and therefore your differentation.
And people are going to want more of this, from real creative people, not less.
And that doesn’t mean you have to be a creative person for 30 years before anybody takes you seriously. I just mean that if you have this drive and desire to be creative for the longer term, for the purpose and pursuit of being creative, knowing that your creativity is more than just making a thing.
You’re actually making a thing that people can interact with and experience a story or connection with. That is a massive advantage. And that is what’s going to help you to stand out in an oversupplied world.
Intention is all we’ll have left soon
It boils down to this word: intention. A word that every creative person has a choice over.
What are you making and why?
What world are you building for others and why?
What experiences are you creating to share your work, and stories and experience with all of us and why?
I think without the right intention, it’s too easy to take shortcuts, ignore our values, and settle. Instead of listening to the voice of pride that says “take the time to make your best work” we too easily succumb to voice of fear that says “your work isn’t worth it, may as well take that shortcut, everyone else is.”
Our intention allows us to either keep building our craft and practice the right way. Or to take the easy way out and say “it was never gonna work out for me anyway.”
Your next step is this: keep exploring
If I was to think of an analogy to describe this, maybe it’s like a video game where you’re at the beginning with an unexplored map surrounding you.
Think Age of Empires esque. The world is there but you can’t see it, and the only way to figure out the objective is to walk around, start to explore, uncover sections of the map.
I think our creative journey is very much like that. You have a sense of “I’ve got to go over here” but you don’t really know how big the map is in each direction. And the only way to uncover parts of it is to chip away over time.
Each time you chip away, you find something else that informs your creativity. And over time, more and more of this revealing of the terrain helps you see the things that don’t matter to you and the things that do.
We meet people on the journey. We get feedback and data. Some of it we listen to, some we don’t. But we have to uncover all of these things ourselves.
The error I see is that too many people uncover a bit of the map, realise it’s difficult, hear a voice from someone else saying there’s already too many podcasts, and then stay in this tiny little bit of their map because it’s safe. They set out just enough but got just enough negative feedback to stop moving. I’ve been this person. And it doesn’t feel good, nor does it help you make better creative work.
The only way to really uncover the map is to make stuff on your terms. To make things that are interesting to you, combine those things, find other people to create with. Even when someone rocks up and says “we don’t need your stuff,” you’ve got to go anyway.
We have to do this because creativity is not a race. A lot of the economic and distribution systems in the creative industries are set up to make you think it is, but they’re not set up that way because it’s true.
The platforms we spend our time on, the ones we think we depend on to get our creative work out there, they are seeking advertising revenue so that their shareholders can make money. So they reward fast-food style creativity with attention. That’s why it feels like a race. Because they are in a race to extract more money from human attention before another platform does first.
So these platforms feel more competitive which in turn incentivises more fast-food creativity. “If you don’t create now, it’s game over.” When you think about it like that, everything just points back to coming back to where you are on your own map (not everybody else’s).
We cannot be afraid of missing out. Of missing that next bandwagon. Or opportunity like it’ll never come back. We cannot simply start injecting AI into our work, like its a performance enhancing drug, just because everyone else must be.
We must stay true to ourselves and our craft. I know for me, every creative project I’ve enjoyed working on the most, or loved consuming or experiencing, it’s always the projects that clearly put creativity first; in its rightful place.
And I have a hunch that this is the secret of all the artists that have these lifelong careers. They keep creating regardless of that voice and regardless of nonsense proclamations.
The world might say it doesn’t need your creativity anymore, but that’s just someone else’s story. The artists that really make a difference keep creating regardless. And we know that the best creative work only appears because people are determined to keep making better work over a long period of time.
So keep making your work.
Keep trying to uncover that map.
Share your work with the world knowing what it’s for and why it’s entering the world, knowing that the big picture is always making better work.
If you’re always doing that, you are slowly but surely contributing to the undersupply of high quality, awesome, creative, independent, made by human work that people need now and are going to need way more in the future, not less.
You may pause when that that inner voice is tempting you to take shortcuts in your creativity. But ignore the noise from outside that’s telling you to stop.
A few questions to sit with:
When you hear “the world doesn’t need another _____” what does that voice actually sound like? Is it yours, or someone else’s?
If you stopped measuring your creative work and against others, how would you approach your work differently?
Where are you on your own map right now, and what’s the next section you want to uncover?
Ready for more?
Read next: Meaning: The one thing AI will always struggle to create.
The essay you just read was initially inspired from another person’s foolish proclamation on LinkedIn; but also intertwines with the last essay I wrote on meaning and how it’s the only thing that AI can never recreate.
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