Are You Making the Thing or Just Teaching It?
On the creator economy trap, the seduction of the blueprint, and whether any of us are actually making the thing anymore. Plus a really fun link treat for you at the bottom.
Everywhere I look, creative people are teaching others their craft instead of practicing it.
Newsletters about newsletter writing. Courses on marketing. Life coaching programs. Notion templates. Notes templates designed to make your content go viral. Content about content about content. It is endless and it is overwhelming.
And before I get too high and mighty about this, I am currently building a course to teach others how to use their body to sing. So.
Though in my defense, that does feel specific enough to justify. Maybe the reason I can actually commit to making that particular thing is precisely because of how specific it is. I’m not selling you a lifestyle. I’m teaching you how to breathe into your diaphragm.
But the larger pattern is real and it’s worth looking at honestly. Book writers teaching others how to write instead of writing books. Actors running workshops instead of performing. I’m a singer and a performer, and yet teaching voice lessons has become my most lucrative work. More profitable than the actual art.
We need teachers. Of course we do. But it feels like we’ve hit a tipping point where creators need to turn inward and ask a genuinely uncomfortable question:
Am I creating something of value that will add to the world? Or am I doing this because the creative, tangible, weird work I actually want to make will take forever to sell?
The Harder Question
I don’t want to say we’re all preying on people’s vulnerabilities. On their deep desire to make something meaningful with their lives. But maybe, if we’re being honest, that’s at least part of what’s happening.
I keep butting up against this: what I’d rather be doing than teaching another voice lesson is creating something that resonates with an audience. The very thing I originally set out to do. The thing I trained for. The thing that keeps me up at night in the best and worst possible way.
The problem is people would rather have a blueprint than engage with the actual work. They want the formula instead of the mystery. They want to learn your process rather than let your art wash over them, sit with them, wrestle with them, and inspire something entirely their own.
And somewhere along the way, we creators got trapped teaching the steps instead of dancing.
I don’t have a clean resolution to this one. I’m in it too. But I think naming it is at least a start.
Are you making the thing? Or are you teaching people how to make the thing?
Both matter. But only one of them is why you started.
Mys Current Obsessions A little treat for making it to the end.
📖 Reading: The Idea (the seven elements of a viable story for screen, stage, or fiction) by Erik Bork
🎧 Listening: I love love love George Saunders who run Story Club with George Saunders. If you haven’t yet, go listen to his graduation speech on kindness and send it to 20 of your closest friends and enemies. Please do that. We need it.
Substack runs on ♥️’s and did you know 90% never press heart. Which I think ts crazy. It helps more people find my work. So if you got something out of this, press the little heart, share it with a human you like, and please subscribe so my post pops up your feed. That way, you’ll never miss a post. I’ll be here either way.