Although counterintuitive to creativity, sometimes we need mass output to push ourselves to the next stage.
Have you noticed how something is being sold to us every second of being on the internet? Recipe filled with pop-up ads every 2 seconds, amusing shorts between pseudo-informative videos.
Innocent people broadcast their lives, maybe trying to organically incorporate their sponsor’s products.
We don’t need any of it.
In the crowd of similar personalities there are genuine hobbyists and experts from whom you can actually learn new things. You can tell they are in it for the love, and not for material gratification.
Some of the people I follow do pottery, farm, sew, and forage wild edibles. Some have a quirky personality or just like to have fun with their viewers—like exercising on a bike machine while painting, making daily cucumber hats to stop suffering, raising rescue opossums as a character (or real?) psychic.
They usually do their thing for years with a small, but loyal, following. They sell some things casually—like paintings, the best fertilizer, a kit. But their existence is not a money-making venture; they don’t care about gaining as many followers and having high paying sponsors. You can tell—the popular entertainment personal brands have similar styles in their presentation, editing, and sounds.
I used to let my days meander and melt into one another as I experimented– because that’s creativity. Factory like output is for commercial artists. But making doesn’t always have to be sacred. Just because you care deeply about something doesn’t mean you have to manifest that always, immediately, and in every project as proof.
You’ve been told to separate art that you make for you and art that you make for everyone. It is not a betrayal of yourself to create for different audiences. It’s not like it’ll affect your admittance to the pearly gates.
The purpose of this post is that we can learn something from even the popular content creators. I noticed that people will have the same clothes for many videos. They bulk film content in a few days or weeks that they can spread out and publish over the course of months, possibly the whole year.
This has inspired me to try doing this for my work. Writing and painting in mass consolidation. Writing flows best in long dedicated time blocks anyway. Although counterintuitive to creativity, sometimes we need mass output to push ourselves to the next stage.
So for the months that I’m back in my studio, I’m using up my supplies to paint, draw, and film. Painting supplies are abundant, so I’ll do the most simple thing I know how to do– universally humorous animal paintings that I can produce at high output. I’ll edit and post a few videos (to hold myself accountable), scheduling publication as far out as ~2 months. Since the remaining footage can be edited from anywhere (post-production), having all the content already done eliminates the heavy production side.
Then of course there are always days we refuse to do any of it, so reducing friction by reducing steps is good life maintenance.
Noon Mul 