RC# 008: Creator Renaissance, Lack of Credentials & Creative Constraints
Hi friends,
Greetings from Louisiana!
Yesterday I had the privilege to be a guest on Paul Lecrone's Penguin Latte podcast. It was my first time doing that and I'm proud to say I didn't mess it up. All joking aside, it was a very nice experience. I'm even thinking about starting my own podcast now. We'll see.
This week I'm going to cover:
The Creator Renaissance
You Don't Need Credentials
Creative Constraints
Cathedral Thinking
Let's go!
The Creator Renaissance
We're living super exciting times. During the last two decades, the Internet have massively empowered independent creators. According to Forbes, "90% of the video, audio, photo, and text-based content consumed today by Gen Z is created by individuals, not corporations."
This paradigm shift has big cultural, social and economical implications. One of them is that creators are increasingly becoming media companies.
A couple of months ago, Jarrod Dicker wrote an excellent article about this “hybridization of the individual as both a creator and an entrepreneur”.
If you want to better understand and take advantage of this important trend, you should definitely check it out.
You Don’t Need Credentials
Last week, Venture Capitalist Erik Torenberg found a great philosophy podcast called Philosophize This! He liked the show very much and was curious about the host’s background. So he looked him up and found his LinkedIn profile. Contrary to what he was expecting, this guy has no PhD, no academic background whatsoever and his last job before podcasting full-time was “Grocery Bagging Technician and Toilet Scrubbing Manager”.
The lesson: You. Don’t. Need. Credentials.
You don’t need permission to talk and create content about the things you love and are interested in. As long as you help, entertain and educate people, you can be successful on the Internet.
Creative Constraints
This week Casey Neistat shared on Twitter this message he sent to a young filmmaker who wants to help him edit his videos:
What’s most interesting about Casey’s advice is that it doesn’t only apply to filmmaking, but to all creative endeavors. You can apply it to music, design, painting, cooking, writing... You name it.
And by constraining yourself to using only the “most basic, accesible methods” and elements of your craft, you can create something beautiful, elegant and original.
By substracting the non-essential, you enrich your work:
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication
Cathedral Thinking
Last Wednesday Jamie and I dropped an essay we wrote together called Don’t Lay Bricks. Build a Cathedral. In this piece, we explain a mental model called Cathedral Thinking which was used by many of history’s greatest architects to build temples such as Notre Dame de Paris and La Sagrada Familia.
This mindset, we believe, might be the antidote to one of the biggest problems we face today: short-term thinking.
You can read our full essay here, or the summarized Twitter thread version here.
As always, I hope you found value in this edition of Rational Creatives. If you did and know someone who could also benefit from it, please share this email with them.
If you have any feedback, suggestion or just want to say hi, shoot me a DM on Twitter. I’d love to hear from you.
Cheers,
Daniel ♟🎨