This week I have been busy with a silly project called “The Creator Cart” which is a way to make it easy to record videos around my place using a… cart. Ideally this cart not only holds the computer but also the camera and microphone and anything else.
I don’t often look at furniture online but this project has me sifting through all sorts of printer carts and side tables (on wheels) now that I’ve done two trips to Ikea and haven’t found what I need there.
After a while it dawned on me what the main spec is that I need for my cart: the load-bearing weight. A cart that’s meant to hold a cup of coffee and a few magazines is not going to hold up when I put a podcasting mic boom on the side of it.
And once I knew to look at that number, I feel like the process is going to be a lot easier to figure out. Or if I go with something custom, the furniture maker will understand how to build accordingly.
It had me thinking: What is the weight you are able to bear as a creative person?
I have come to learn that the creative side of the mind is sensitive and introspective. Therefore its load weight can be low when we look at how our society prizes the alpha figure.
By other standards, the load weight of a creative person is infinitely high to be able to take ideas from the void, complete nothingness, and get them out onto paper or in video, and share them with the world.
My Silly Pandemic Experiment
On a granular level, we all have a load weight when it comes to producing work. In 2020 I played with the possibility that the pandemic could kill me, so I started recording a lot more music. I had fun with the idea of dying, that I could make double the amount of music so that for every week after I was gone there would be a new release on spotify scheduled to go out.
While this was a great motivator in the beginning, eventually I realized that as a fairly young person, I would in fact survive, and eventually the pace of writing music became too much for me to bear. I felt like I was phoning songs in just to put them out and send them to my email list.
Now I am on the other side of the problem, working through the stress of not finishing enough music. No way of living is better than the other because it’s a marathon and not a sprint. We are constantly dialling in what’s the right fit for us.
What’s Your Rate of Production?
Creator burnout is a reality for the young stars of YouTube who are making a living cranking out videos every day. While they were able to make some good income doing what they love, very soon it becomes a treadmill as they are working for a hungry algorithm that wants new content for everyone to chew up.
If you decided to start a podcast, would you put out an episode every week, every month or four times a year? The last option might sound wimpy to you but look how quickly a few months go by. If you recorded one episode in that time you’d have many weeks to grab snippets from it and share it on social media.
Recording once a month is pretty good too because you’d get a bit more practice with a more frequent rate of production. And weekly will test you to the limits of what’s possible. It might be tempting to think that you won’t be able to keep up, but you can also come up with ways to simplify your workflow so that it’s possible.
You’ll only know what sort of weight you can bear by getting out and trying things. You probably have to push yourself a bit harder than you think when starting out, and then dial it back.
Have you experienced Creator Burnout even on a smaller scale than mentioned above? Did you go through the opposite experience where you wanted to make more and post more?
Thanks for reading!
Elliott