The Biggest Obstacle To Scaling Creativity
It's not external; it's internal
The past week has been eye-opening for me. I expected it would be; I didn’t expect the way it would be. But, in my experience, that’s more common than not.
That’s why it’s important to simultaneously aim for things and not worry whether or not you hit them. The obsession has to be with doing things, not with having done them.
I’ve been struggling with this lately, because I can’t seem to get certain things to happen. I’ve been doing the work, but not seeing the results. And I’m getting to the point where I need to start seeing said results, because effort doesn’t pay the bills, does it?
I’ve started working with a couple of coaches, because if there’s anything I believe in, it’s that every failure is my fault and it’s up to me to fix those failures. That might sound harsh, but in fact, it’s incredibly freeing. If it’s my fault, I’ve got the ability to fix it. If it’s somebody else’s fault, I don’t. That’s part of the agency I wrote about in The Optimist’s Manifesto.
Creativity isn’t the issue for me. When presented with a problem, I can see an infinite number of solutions. It’s just a matter of trying them until I find the one that works. Half the battle of problem solving is identifying possible solutions; the other half is working through the possible solutions until you find one that actually works.
As I’ve studied the creator economy and how it works, I’ve focused a lot on the power dynamics between creators and the platforms they use to distribute their work. I want to shift the power back to the creators, because they are the ones doing the work. Lately, my focus has been on how creators can use chat bots to scale their businesses and connect on a deeper level with their audience. That’s where I’ve hit a roadblock I didn’t see coming: creators don’t necessarily want to scale their business, because they don’t think about business the same way traditional businesses do.
In business, money is a tool to be invested in things that will have some kind of return. Because we’ve focused so much on businesses as the center of the economy (growth-focused economic organisms, if you will), we have ended up creating a weird dynamic where businesses make money and individuals spend it.
Most individuals don’t look at the money they spend as investments in their future that can grow their future results. Except, all money spent is some kind of investment in a future state. Maybe it’s an investment in your happiness, your health, your time, or your children. Those are things that are harder to measure, and most businesses don’t give the majority of their employees the ability to spend the company’s money on things that could increase the company’s profitability, so most people don’t think about spending as investment.
That’s had an interesting effect on creators - they’ve embodied this mindset. I have too; it’s something I’ve struggled quite a bit with. But after a conversation I had this week, I realized that I might need to change the audience I’m marketing to. I was talking to the owners of an agency that used to work with creators, but they had the same issue I did: creators don’t necessarily have the entrepreneurial mindset and want to scale up what they are doing. They’d rather focus on their specific thing and then get sucked into existing systems because they aren’t worried about trying to learn about the negative effects of those systems.
So when I’m trying to sell creators on building a chatbot that can help them connect with their audience, I’ve got to overcome their tendency to not want to spend the upfront money, even with the huge potential upside.
That’s when I stumbled on something that felt extremely insightful: creators are to individuals what agencies are to businesses.
Agencies are the creators of the business world - they typically create content to educate the market on why their services are needed, create inbound interest, and look to offer expertise around their given service. They scale by training others to do the same work they do. Then they can bring in more clients, and grow the business by scaling the capacity of available experts.
Some creators create agencies, because that’s the scaleable creator business model right now, and it’s what I’m trying to help creators do. Except, instead of hiring and training new employees, it’s training a chatbot that can do the same thing. I’ll scale their ability to help people learn about the topics they are talking about, and I’ll handle the “training” aspect. This actually potentially helps bring in other people as well, because you can give a new “employee” the chatbot and help them offer similar services to the ones to the creator.
One of the tricks of scale is to be able to take the next step up. The further away the next step feels, the less likely someone is to take it. So if you want to enable larger scale for more people, you’ve got to shrink the distance between steps.
I’m not sure how I’m going to approach things, honestly. I can go a lot of different ways. I might end up focusing on agencies, or maybe I’ll find some creators who are interested in trying to scale their offerings.
But I didn’t expect the hardest part to be the creator’s mindset. There’s just so much there that we default to, like the cultural meme of the “starving artist”. If I want to help creators scale, I’ve got to help them break out of that mindset first. Then they’ll be able to see the possibilities I present. And only then, when they are ready, will I be able to help them scale.
I’m testing ideas on how to help creators see the possibility of abundance, and I’ve created a free 5 day email course that focuses on the things specific to your knowledge, audience, and goals.
I’d love any feedback you have on it. You can find it here.
Also, if you don’t want to do it via email over multiple days, I also have the whole thing available here.
As part of each day, I include a prompt. You can do the prompt yourself, or you can submit the prompt via the linked form. If you fill out the prompts for all 5 lessons, I’ll put together a personalized report for you.
These are all things that have helped me, so I’d love to know if they helped you! Please let me know.