Create More Than You Consume

Overcoming the obstacles that slow our creation!

Hey everybody! 👋🏽

Noko checking in from Kyoto 🏯

I’ve been struggling to find time to create—not because of any lack of desire or energy!

I’m taking a step back and reflecting on where it makes sense to sink those creative energies!

Create More Than You Consume

Jeff Bezos often gets credit for creating Amazon. Up until a few weeks ago, he was also the company’s CEO. In his final letter to shareholders as CEO, he wrote:

If you want to be successful in business, you have to create more than you consume. Your goal should be to create value for everyone you interact with. Any business that doesn't create value for those it touches, even if it appears successful on the surface, isn't long for this world. It's on the way out.

His point is that creating value for other people allows you to stay relevant and, eventually, get a return on that value, whether that’s in relationships or product sales in business. It’s more than just creating for the joy of creating, but creating to share your value with others.

So why doesn’t everybody just create?

The problem is that the other side of his equation — “consume” — is such a threatening beast, that seems to grow larger and larger with each new creator or creation! 

If creation is a beauty, consumption is a beast. 🐺

Start tabulating the time and money you spend each day, and you quickly realize how almost everyone and everything treats us like consumers, favoring the consumer—even at the expense of creators! Targeted advertising on Facebook, Instagram, and Amazon drive you to products they algorithmically think you’ll consume. Adobe Creative Cloud has the worst rep for starting this trend in software, but now Netflix, Amazon (Prime), Slack, Dropbox, Disney, Spotify, and Apple (Arcade, TV, iCloud) push you to subscribe to their services so you’llpayeach month, whether or not you actually consume! In-app purchases and other pay-now services make it as easy as ever to pay to win. Twitter and news sites & apps adopt infinite scroll, which means you’ll keep consuming content as you scroll, with no end in sight. Everything is a war for your wallet!

Those are just the obvious examples. There’s a more subtle tug-of-war going on behind the scenes, where consumers see much less friction than creators.

 Banks, for example! I recently tried to open a corporate bank account, for example, to take payments for things I create. The process, compared to a personal bank account, was night and day. 🌙 (Night being the corporate bank account!) Some banks don’t even accept new corporate clients because (they say) they’re afraid of money laundering. Other banks have a ridiculously high deposit threshold that they really only attract established players like the Sonys, Googles, and Rakutens of the world., essentially filtering out new creators starting out. The ones that do take newcomers charge exorbitant monthly fees, and/or require minimum daily thresholds, and/or, in many cases, conduct long screening procedures designed to find reasons to reject you. Even if you end up with an account in the end, it’s pretty disheartening that there’s this level of friction.😓

Ironic that I’m writing this newsletter on a platform that will also start charging me if I go for the paid route 😅

All this to say: Creating is much harder than consuming! And it’s not just because of what goes on in your head, or between your hands. There’s a greater societal barrier out there, too, that adds an unhealthy dose of friction whenever you try to do something new. 

Society readily welcomes another consumer, but it doesn’t really welcome a new creator.

Game Time

So what can we do to respond? I’ve started with something simple and stupid, which is to limit how much I consume. A lot of us may be used to this for budgeting money, but I’m also starting to use it to budget my time. For example,

• Credit card purchases: I’ve separated my online spending card from my food & drink card, so I can better track —and limit— how much I buy online, from sites like Amazon. Apple Card helps with this, but it’s even better if you take the steps to create separate physical accounts, with hard limits like cash in bank. (It’s too easy to cheat a mental account!)

• Game time: I used to limit myself to an hour of gaming a day. I found that to be too much! Now it’s 30 minutes.

• Book time: It pains me to write this, but reading is also a form of consumption. As much as we learn from books, we’ll never get to use it if we just spend all our time reading, and not applying it to our creating. So I limit myself to waiting time (in a queue or at the train station) and one hour before bed.

All of this ties back to the idea that in order to create, you have to put yourself in position to create, with enough time to experiment, fail, and try again.

What kinds of limits do you set on consumption, to open up as much time for yourself to create? 

Minor friction aside, having spoken to lots of part-time creators trying to make ends meet, I see another major societal obstacle to creation, especially for those of us tied into life responsibilities like work or parenting.

The 9-to-5 Problem

School and work often require us to be at a certain place at a certain time, and outside Silicon Valley, this could include early morning classes or meetings. This can really hurt creation, and many  schoolteachers and company managers fail to see why, because they’re used to waking up early and going to bed before midnight. Many of them don’t even value the importance of sleep to the creative mind. As Matthew Walker writes in Why We Sleep,

But insufficient sleep — another harmful, potentially deadly factor — is commonly tolerated and even woefully encouraged. This mentality has persisted, in part, because certain business leaders mistakenly believe that time on-task equates with task completion and productivity. Even in the industrial era of rote factory work, this was untrue. It is a misguided fallacy, and an expensive one, too. (298)

Combine this with the fact that many creatives work late into the night when the world is quiet, and you get a daily life that combats your flow of creative juices:

An adult’s owlness or larkness, also known as their chronotype, is strongly determined by genetics. If you are a night owl, it’s likely that one (or both) of your parents is a night owl.

However, night owls are not owls by choice. They are bound to a delayed schedule by unavoidable DNA hardwiring. It is not their conscious fault, but rather their genetic fate.

The truth is that creation doesn’t happen on a predetermined schedule. Sometimes, you get a flash of inspiration, and that momentum carries you into a productive deep dive into your creation, be it writing or programming. Other times, you get into a zone late at night, and your best work happens while you’re in the zone, feeling it.

And get this: Sleep is essential to maximizing our creativity! 😴

The second evolutionary contribution that the REM-sleep dreaming state fuels is creativity. NREM sleep helps transfer and make safe newly learned information into long-term storage sites of the brain. But it is REM sleep that takes these freshly minted memories and begins colliding them with the entire back catalog of your life’s autobiography. These mnemonic collisions during REM sleep spark new creative insights as novel links are forged between unrelated pieces of information. (75)

When society steals your sleep, they are also robbing you of creativity.

It’s up to you to defend your sleep!

Write a Book, or Code an App?

In the 21st century, part of the dilemma is choosing how best to create. There are many forms: physical product, or digital good? I get into arguments with people all the time about whether it’s more worthwhile from a time-profit ratio to write a book, or code an app?

Not having any published book to my name, I didn’t have any data from the book part, so I searched around on the internet:

https://hannahholt.com/blog/2017/10/4/writing-middle-grade-a-look-at-the-numbers

https://makealivinginkidlit.com/how-much-middle-grade-authors-make/

A $30000 average — Wow! 😨 Granted, an advance isn’t that much of the final sales, but coming from software engineering salaries, these figures seemed woefully low! Of course, it’s top-heavy: the big hitters pocketed more than $100,000 from one of the Big Six publishing houses. However, this is still low, which leads me to conclude that

If you have skills and interest in both — app development and writing — app development is more likely to provide sustainable income. I don’t say that because I’m some kind of master programmer that has a top-grossing app in the store. Nor am I oblivious to the fact that there is a notoriously long tail of app developers that never break even. I’m just saying that, as both markets stand right now, there are a lot more writers than app developers fighting for a much smaller pie.

Podcast with Author Jason Parks

I recently spoke with author Jason Parks, a writer who started his own publishing company: https://parkswrites.com. He is a middle grade author behind the Wondercurrent series, a fantasy world of Rella’s creation. We talked about his approach to writing, why he chose to self-publish, and how he finds inspiration for his stories. If you or your kids like to hear how writers think, give it a listen!

https://share.transistor.fm/s/efe460e7

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The Branding of Kentucky Fried Chicken🍗

I leave you with a fun observation about how branding can change from country to country: in the USA, Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) calls to mind greasy, finger-lickin’ fast food, that you probably wouldn’t want to eat every day for your health’s sake.

However, in Japan, people don’t eat KFC for entirely different reasons: it has a connotation with holidays, like Christmas and Thanksgiving! People here eat KFC on special occasions, as it has become associated with family gatherings and holiday feasts. The chicken is the same—albeit sometimes on white rice. But the brand image is much higher-class than it has reached in the United States!

Keep creating, but every time you consume something, think about it like eating a bucket of KFC! 🍗

‘Till next time 👋🏽

-Noko