This is a practice post….no…but really, I’m just practicing

On the ritual of creative practice in a time of metrics and measurement

Sketch representing the idea of practice and of creating.

It’s been 6 months since I started sending out Micromoments – my essay newsletter. I’ve felt tepid about it and it also brings me a slow-moving personal contentment. To create something from start to finish while learning to listen less to the critic and more to creative curiosity has asked me to step up. To commit, to show up, and to focus less on an outcome and more on process. This self motivation had become a challenge over the past several years of my life.

After a series of personal and professional challenges I am keenly aware of a strange contradiction in today’s economy of attention and worth.

When faced with rejection (in work and life) we are surrounded by self-care messaging and philosophies that soothe us by saying "do not let others determine your worth". We are told we each hold intrinsic worth for our own merit and in the web of interconnection of which we are part. So the struggle after rejections and pitfalls in career and in life is to build a sense of internal worth that is steady.

Many of us intellectually understand we have intrinsic worth. Yet our daily experiences put us in positions where we must constantly audition -dare I say – to survive.  An audition for worth is based on whether you can be hired out of a pool of competitors and deemed deserving of a salary for example.

It is duplicitous to be told we have intrinsic worth in an economic model that joins our survival - our paychecks and by extension our ability to afford rent, groceries, time, health, and the mental space to breathe - to money which is by default an external concept of worth.

The contradiction and the double standard itself is a drain.

Why can't our work speak for itself?

 Why can't who one is speak for itself?

Why must one need to prove anything to be chosen?

For a job, for a relationship, for a community.

We are here...isn't that enough?

These questions don’t have answers in the current design of supply and demand economics. However, in an age of AI, of automation, questions of work and intrinsic worth – where human effort is traded for efficiency - become more salient as we realize our efforts aren’t going to lead to status or monetary results in the market the way we once assumed.

When it comes to the essay newsletter I started, I am constantly grappling with the measure of external worth. Each time I prepare a post I wonder whether the effort – and the risk I take in putting this work out there – is worth it.

The newsletter has a handful of subscribers, a few of whom are truly supportive and know me more wholistically. I struggle to promote the project because the skillset feels uncomfortable – once again it feels like asking for validation during a time in life where I am tired of seeking it from others.

Even with that clarity I question its worth based on metrics.

What is the point if there is no increase in subscriber count? What needs to be done for more traction?

However… the metrics, and growth, and recognition were never the point. What I wanted to do with this project was to build a practice because I wanted to know I could follow through.

Practice is a process.

It is a commitment.

It is a choice to struggle through something.

To build a relationship with something.

It is about showing up – one day you have a great practice session on your piano. The next day it sucks. But you do it.

It is about consistency, repetition, and is often incredibly private.

The point is that you build an anchor in the doing of it, not in the payoff.

The metrics of subscriber counts and views, shares etc. is completely besides the point. I am caught up in it because doing well in an attention economy – specially for creatives – is predicated on those metric. There may also still be the allure to prove some kind of capability.  This project was to build a space, a collection of pieces that lets me build trust my process and style.

It’s been half a year of posting, building out and editing essays I began writing almost two years ago, pairing them with photos and silly sketches. Now I have a process that fees like me.

The practice taking shape is less daunting, sustainable, and replicable. Most importantly, I am learning to show up to create the work I want to make. Posting is simply a tool for accountability, not the goal.

All of this – writing, posting, sharing, trying different things on social media vs. a website, these LinkedIn posts – is practice.

Whether professional or creative, I would like all the work I do to be part of a practice to return to regularly, not a product to rate.  

That, I believe, is where the script starts to flip where we can show up with our sense of immutable worth intact.

How do you manage expectations of productivity and success in a field where your creative output is constantly measured?

How do you practice?