I was scrolling through Twitter the other night and saw a tweet that talked about how as a creative, sometimes your work won’t resonate with certain people. Sometimes your work may not even be that moving for you and that’s okay because creativity isn’t linear and the right people find their way to the right things.
This is what stemmed my question on if social media has made the “success” of creativity too heavily dependent on being liked by others. Hobbies that use to be considered a relaxed creative outlet, now have the ability to become passive income or even a career path ( I'm always tempted to start pulling my "hey guys " voice together for a Youtube check). When companies are looking at those likes and engagements to see how much they are going to pay you, how can that not add pressure to your definition of success?
Influencer vs celebrity, to me, seems like a line that was blurred thousands of Youtube channels and aesthetic posts ago. The once known tiers of A-D list celebrity has now turned into Nano vs Macro influencer. We now have access to heavier set guidelines to measure impact and categorize your tier and that makes impact become more of a numbers thing than it is a feeling thing.
If a viral video is deemed as “success” then how do we make sure to not fall into a sea of sameness within the trends?
Trend: “trends exist through a constant cycle of innovation and emulation. It's the way people embrace one another and interact with each other. People are obsessed with trends because joining a trend means you're part of a group; you are in, you belong. “Some changes are short-lived and they are normally called fads.”
Innovation is scary when it’s weighed on metrics and this isn’t the first time we’ve seen this. Feel Familiar? Think childhood. The word standardized testing sends a shot of anxiety through me honestly, but public school in general was a place where success heavily weighed on metrics.
Even Art class had a grade.
So, the answer to my question above is confidence. Looking beyond what numbers may say about you and feeling confident in your strides to your version of success. That starts as young as you learning to walk.
I looked up an article from the Child Mind Institute because I wondered what keeps a child confident and creative in a world that heavily relies on numbers to categorize you and it listed 12 things to raise a confident child:
Model confidence yourself
Don’t get upset about mistakes
Encourage them to try new things
Allow kids to fail
Praise perseverance
Help kids find their passion
Set goals
Celebrate effort
Expect them to pitch in
Embrace imperfection
Set them up for success
Show your love
I’m coming back full circle here because reading these 12 points with my question of “if social media has made the “success” of creativity too heavily dependent on being liked by others” in mind, has given me my answer. Yes. Those points above are also what I expect a supportive viewer to give. Recognizing effort, leaving room for someone to mess up, and understanding that what we envision for the creative may not align with what they choose to do for themselves. Social media isn't a safe space for confidence.
It has made us entitled. It gives us too much access to seeing just how much our like can do for someone who has to live off of it. The downside to this is that people are scared to start and practice. Creativity should never be looked at through a lens of perfection. It should never be expected to feel linear. We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that there’s a way to dislike something respectfully.
All in all. It’s going to take a supportive community. Creatives have to show up for other creatives because people who have never experienced public “failure” or pressures won’t understand the fear you have to overcome at times to keep putting your work out. It’s seriously like public speaking X10000.
Likes don’t define your content.
Engagement doesn’t define your content.
All the metrics we have access to now are nice to knows, over a label of success to your work.
Keep creating because your content will be someone else’s reason they started. You’re making an impact.