i’m an aspiring creative. as someone constantly gravitating towards my right-brain instincts but pigeon-holed into a left-brain industry, I want to cultivate a creative 5-9 to fight burnout from my 9-5. Creative technologists inspire me, especially to work on my technical skills and creative experience, so I can create my own lil cozy part of the Internet. want to cultivate a creative 5-9 to fight burnout from my 9-5. Content creators, specifically the cinematic ones, have also incited my own desire to story telling. and I’m experimenting with creative tools, asides from the obvious gen-AI ones my dad keeps linking me to, and thinking about ways technology can impact the creative process in a productive way. I’ve thought about creativity and elucidated some takeaways I’ll keep in mind moving forward.
- og sources: making it from the source, e.g. taking the photo/writing the song/making the painting
- reflective vs generative
- writing is an easy reflective one
- creatives feed off of each others’ energies
- even if not in the same discipline. I get so excited on calls with my friend from college, as we share whatever creative side quests we’ve embarked on. I text my friend about new photo series ideas and we send each other the pictures that hit hard. *
- creative hobbies tend to be solitary.
- so many times over the summer I did rock climbing just so I could do a hobby and hang out with fellow techies at the same time. I felt like when I chose to stay in — read, draw, write — I was shutting others out and had major FOMO. I like the idea of parallel play: being in the same room, working on your own art projects, but still comforted by each other’s presence. We study together — why don’t we create together?
- creative disciplines feed off of each other
- from photographer, doodler, writer, poet, curator — I’m a jack of all trades, master of none, & maybe that’s ok. Different mediums help me explore the same concept from different angles—universal truths on love, growing up, nostalgia, guilt, all dissected in some way. I see each different creative pursuit as different steps in a creative workflow where the end goal is to ponder some question:
- curation is creation
- “why do you have so many bookmarking sites?” Curious, Pinterest, cosmos — i love these sites where I can accumulate the little nuggets I pass on the internet, I feel like I’m collecting trinkets of shiny rocks. While collecting these things via research & brainstorm is the start of a creative process, curation requires creativity as well — to compare to sculpture, its the first round of sculpting the rock so it can eventually be transformed into a man. Curation is a process of taste — finding patterns in a selection of images, making connections between a Tumblr post and a poem and a picture. Through curation I elucidate a core concept I want to carry through creation.
- you can’t remove the art from the artist.
- “voice is why you draw — style is how you manifest it. Style changes, voice stays the same.” Everything I do is tinged with my fingerprints, immature as they may be. My style changes drastically because I’m always hopping mediums — but I’m always orbiting some locus about identity, growing up, community, etc.
- low-effort creative acts fuel momentum.
- I’d love to wake up and paint my Magnus opus, but that’s not sustainable. My habits are: doodling people in my notebook, capturing runaway thoughts in my notes app, screenshooting cinematic stills for later.
- you are what you consume.
- you are what you eat — if all you consume is shit — all you produce is shit. i engage with what I know what will be productive to me — cinematic reels on TIK TOK, startup news on twitter, poetry updates on substack. A large part of content is meant to sell you something, especially lifestyle content on TIK TOK — a creator pointed out when comparing her feed vs her husband’s, her husband’s was genuine crackhead funny content, while her’s was lifestyle reels of pretty girls with pretty bags going to pretty places. No explicit ads, but selling a lifestyle. these reels are addicting because I want to be them, to command jealousy the way they do.
- we don’t just need more content — we need better content.
- I think my distaste for gen-AI products is that the appeal is how we can scale up content-creation — we’ve removed the friction of picking up a pen to draw a picture, or cursing out Lightroom to edit out the noise in the background. But I feel like there’s already an overflow of low-quality content
- your initial output will be cringe.
- this point may be counterproductive to the former, but I think authoring “bad” content is also necessary for the learning process. in fact, my current output can be considered cringe. creating anything in a medium is like learning a new language, and like new borns, we will babble and drool and stumble. but while a passerby may judge, fellow creative people will life you up, because they’ve been there before, and you only get better by pushing through your first 100 bad pictures.
- good creations should be inspirational.
- I know content is great when I think — I want to make this.
this year, I had another strike of inspiration to create more content. this is not a new desire—I am constantly starting new blogs, new instagram accounts, in a manner that’s almost comical. I am overflowing with feelings and thoughts and I want to share it with the world. right now, I’m thinking about finding creative communities in nyc, and how I can find others to motivate me and work with. i’m going to try cinematic-style videos, because I react so strongly to them.