I hosted a Twitter spaces session last week. While our focus was on " How to post effective content on social media if you're a working professional or entrepreneur ", the over 2-hour long session went in many directions and drew out some incredible insights. One question, in particular, stuck with me,
"In today's world, is the Content bigger than the content creator or is the creator bigger than the content?"
While this might seem like a loaded question and can be deciphered and interpreted in so many ways, it made me question a few things in my head and derive how this question can give every creator a way to balance her or his creation graph.
Think of a creation graph as a graph that shows your progress between the time since you started creating content and the success rate of each of your content pieces during that time ( your success parameter is something only you can set individually for yourself).
The mistake we make is that we expect we'll end up with
a) a big hit at the start, and that will lead to an ever-growing series of hits
or
b) mediocre levels of success which leads to long term mediocrity.
What I've come to believe ( especially in the modern context of content creation) is that in most cases, you will have one of the following two graphs,
c) you have an early hit when you start, and then over time, it tapers off as the novelty wears off, and you aren't able to beat that one big hit you had
d) you create for an extended period of time with minimal success, and then finally you have a big hit, and you end up being able to sustain that level with an eventual mild taper, but because of all the content of the past, you're able to understand what worked and keep yourself at a decent level of success
Of these two, while C) might seem like the better way to go with early success, it might just not lead to as much satisfaction as d) in the long term, and that's why I believe d) is what most of us should aspire to.
Because the beauty of having a period of low Audience numbers teaches you so much about honing your craft, understanding the mediums, truly gauging the audience and evolving over time. So, when we finally have that one piece that blows up we can use all we've learnt in being consistent and go back to the same process we've been following all along to learn and stick with our flow.
Building our creator balance graph for success means we need to learn what can bring about that balance, and while its amazing to let the content win in the short term, in the long term, the Content Creator winning is what will make both content and creator shine more.
Weekly recommendations
On “Decoder” this week Nilay patel speaks to the head of product at Twitter Kayvon Beykpour about all the recent product announcements and how he sees the platform evolve in the future.
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I Cannot get over Shaan Puri’s Thread on Clubhouse, part satirical and part forecast driven. It made me smile and think at the same time.
The Creator balance graph or What's bigger, The Content or the Content Creator