Don't Create Art Unless You Care
How to move from "Have To" to "Get To"
Welcome back to The Workaround. I’m Bob 👋
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“I love writing!”
That shout came from my mouth last Sunday afternoon. I sat in my living room, a fire roaring while snow blew horizontally outside the window. I was not writing at the time. I had just started reading a book about samurai warriors and was halfway through a bottle of Braxton barrel-aged imperial stout.
Alas, my Muse strikes at all hours—and she doesn’t like to be kept waiting. I quickly opened my note-taking app and let her dictate much of what appears in this post below.
My dog didn’t stir at my words. My wife, making turkey soup in the kitchen, replied: “Well, good for you.”
Yes, it is good…But it’s not for everyone.
The Pressure to Push Content
I’ve had a few conversations lately with people who “have to” create content for their work.
Small professional service business owners feel pressure to write monthly emails to clients and prospects to stay top-of-mind. And they worry that they aren’t spending enough time sharing updates on their LinkedIn accounts.
College students majoring in creative arts have always been advised to create a portfolio site to showcase their work. However, marketing and finance majors are now expected to create case study portfolios online, too.
The latest advice for mid-career professionals struggling to stand out in the job search is to “put themselves out there” with written or, better yet, video content.
Meanwhile, those who start publishing often give up before things get interesting. Over half of the writers I subscribe to on Substack haven’t written anything in months. Today, “Everyone has a podcast,” but only 16% record more than 10 episodes, and only 4% release weekly.
I think they realize it’s harder than expected to attract an audience. Writing or recording for a few dozen people—mainly friends and family members—gets pretty demoralizing after a while.
Still, new entrants keep joining the game! 184,000 new podcast shows were launched in 2024.
It’s never been easier to create and share content with the world. Dozens of often free or low-cost programs allow you to write, record, host, email, grammar-check, visualize, animate, translate, track, market, and monetize whatever is on your mind. As a result, there’s a lot of good stuff out there!
But good is the enemy of great.
We’re overwhelmed by Good content. We have too much of a good thing in our inboxes, feeds, and mailboxes. That goodness is unclicked, unread, unheard, unshared, unsubscribed, penalized by Google, and flagged as spam.
Our society is shifting from quantity to quality.
If you want your content creation efforts to be worth your time, they must also be worth your audience’s time—which means it must be GREAT.
I say this with peace and love: Stop now if you’re unwilling to make great content. You can’t half-ass it. Don’t waste your time and money on stuff your intended audience will completely ignore. Stop listening to the hype. Take your saved money and time to your bottom line, or find a more viable growth strategy.
If you still aim to win this game, stick with me. Just remember: Greatness only comes from people who love what they do. I don’t claim to be a great writer (yet), but I love the process and aspire to produce great work, so I keep going with a smile.
Love is the Answer
The first rule of great creativity is this: Don’t call it content.1 What an awful, antiseptic word for something spun from your deep soul. You are not a content marketer, a content creator, or an influencer. Any old AI can make content. Blech.
You are an artist.
You have valuable skills, a unique perspective, and a desire to share your creations—your art—for others’ benefit. You are a writer, comedian, musician, inventor, designer, architect, or entrepreneur. The next time someone at a party asks what you do, tell them you are an artist. Don’t roll your eyes at me, do it.
As any artist knows, you only feel whole when you create something from a place of love.
We know we're doing it wrong if we do not love what we create.
[TBH, everything we do in work or life should come from a place of love…watch this space for more in the months and years ahead.]
Love for the Medium
With so many potential types of art to create, one wonders where to begin. That’s easy: What art do you enjoy experiencing?
Every great writer starts as an insatiable reader. Every great musician starts as a careful listener. Painters spend a lifetime noting colors and scenery long before they pick up a brush.
You’ve probably spent 10,000 hours consuming this art already, so you’re way ahead of the game! Many of the writing, recording, building, and filming rules are already buried in your mind. You’ll even know how to bend or break these rules to improve your work.
If you’re still feeling the pain and your art feels like a chore, don’t give up until you make it work. Maybe a different medium would make it more energizing for you. Carol writes poetry with a hint of business. Paul interviews people who deserve more attention. Joe geeks out on bringing data science to the real world. Rick shares deeply personal stories.
Maybe you’ll write Dad jokes on your company’s sign. Or come up with a daily stick figure series—whatever! You get to just do stuff that you love! And the more unique it is—the more you it is—the more we will find and follow you.
Love your Self
Every person has a lifetime of unique and interesting stories. Your life and voice bring something to the table. We are programmed to figure each other out and learn from others’ successes and failures.
So why would you hold back from sharing your full self in your art? Are you afraid? Well, love is the opposite of fear, so keep it real and let us love you.
The more you pour your true self into your art, the more people are changed by it—including, and especially, yourself.
“In my 4 years of writing online, the one thing I've discovered is that the harder it is for you to write a piece, the less likely it is to resonate with the audience. The inverse of this is almost always true.”—Alice Lemee
The “How-To” business stuff I’ve written over the years usually gets much lower engagement than when I veer off into life topics. Maybe it’s because we can Google those topics, and increasingly, AI will answer all our questions.
But personal stories of challenge, struggle, and self-discovery don’t fit nicely into a search or prompt box.
People feel when you feel, they stick with you and root for you. Positive karma is real.
Pick a niche you know and love and combine it with your unique personality and life history. Turn You up three or four notches. This will attract attention and build trust better than any growth hack or paid campaign. It’s also fun finding your self in the process.
Love your Audience
Whenever I can’t figure out how to use software, reduce my sodium intake, or start my 25-year-old motorboat, I go to YouTube. Within seconds, I find step-by-step solutions from the unsung heroes of the Internet. They save us countless dollars and hours of frustration. Their work is rarely monetized, and a Thumbs-up is a paltry thank you.
Why do we create? Because we love helping people.
Great art starts with what is in your mind but is guided by what your reader, viewer, or listener values. Put your business strategies and dreams of sponsorship aside and focus fully on adding value to others’ lives.
Each time I sit down to write, I close my eyes and say a little message to the Universe: May I create something that finds and helps people in need. This intention enlivens my work and helps keep you from hitting the unsubscribe button.
Love the Struggle
A friend of mine took up writing here about a year ago. He’s a very interesting person with many valuable stories and lessons to share. He wrote regularly for a few months. At one point, I asked how it was going. He replied:
“Writing is easy. I crank out a post in about 45 minutes. But it’s impossible to get my subscriber count up.”
His posts were very good, but they fell just short of greatness. I believe that a lack of time investment prevented them from standing out, which hindered subscribers from discovering and engaging with his work. He stopped posting a few months after he started…and that’s perfectly fine! When he’s ready to double down and write again, we’ll be eager to read.
If it were easy, anyone could do it. The struggle is part of the process. Resistance is real. The obstacle is the way. Lines like this are repeated because they’re true.
“Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.”—Pablo Picasso
Consciously and unconsciously, your potential audience is waiting to see if you’re committed before they do the same. We’ve been burned by people who bail after a few posts or episodes. We look for total post and episode numbers before we click that subscribe button.
Our love of the struggle drives us to invest more time and creative energy in marketing. We know our work is good, but we need more people to see it. So, we ask for advice, dissect the algorithms, and A/B test our work.
We realize that the best way to grow is to improve our craft. We watch the top names and personal favorites in our field and copy their successful styles with tiny tweaks. The more we practice and love our art, the more we notice the details of what they’re doing that works. We steal like an artist.
And we continue to let our curiosity, creative energy, and love for the game guide us. I started a podcast last year and have found it brings my audience closer by allowing them to hear who I am. I spent a few hours this weekend learning how to use Final Cut Pro for the first time to up my YouTube channel. I’ve become the old fart that hates learning new software. But the chance to touch more people with my art gets me off my ass and leaning in, on my off hours, without complaint.
Find Your Muse
Anyone who creates art regularly—and has their ego in check—will admit that the ideas that spawn their work arrive from what seems like another realm. For me, it’s usually halfway into my first cup of coffee. Like the ancient Greeks, I call this my Muse.
People with a spiritual bent will credit their God or some greater consciousness that we all have the potential to tap into.
More rational types see their ideas as an output of a vast network of subconscious processes within us that toil away while our conscious selves are asleep or otherwise occupied with the day-to-day.
“Your Muse is you, the best part of yourself, where your finest and only true work comes from. The Muse is watching. When she sees the numbers pile up day after day, she smiles. Ah, she thinks, this gal or guy is for real.”—Steven Pressfield
No matter the “truth” of where these gifts come from, we who receive them agree that the great stuff only comes when our minds are open and these factors of Love are aligned.
And when they arrive—Whew!—you’ll be doing a lot of dictation. It makes the “work” of creating feel much more like play. Pro Tip: Always keep spare notepads lying around.
Love and Robots
No, I’m not going to close this with some future perspective on the impact of AI on our creative lives. Instead, I will tell you a story about my daughter, Ella.
Ella is a senior in college studying animation—actually, illustration, as she has to remind me. She picked up a crayon early and never seemed to let go of it. Of course, crayons and scrap paper eventually became styluses and computers.
Her school assigns her many projects to build skills and ensure that graduates are ready for the hard work of a career in such an intense, competitive profession. She and her friends hardly party and can’t go to ChatGPT for help.
But she loves the grind. As a result, her portfolio is incredible.
Yet…over the summers and in spare pockets of time here and there, she and a group of her friends tear themselves away from “normal” student distractions to work on costumes for an annual Sci-Fi Convention. Many months ago, they chose to be Star Wars characters.
Ella—being Ella—chose to create a 6-foot-tall battle droid puppet from the Prequel movies. She scrounged scraps of cardboard and worked from a dozen different sources to design something that no one on the whole World Wide Web seems to have created this way before. While I spent the summer on a lounge chair along the lake, Ella sat cutting cardboard in a tiny guest room. All. Day. Long.
This work had nothing to do with animation and probably won’t help in her job search. But she just had to do it.
The result in the photo above was the brightest smile I’ve ever seen on this kid’s face. Countless fellow fans—and even a few B-list celebrities—stopped for a photo with her creation.
After two days of walking the convention floor, Roger the Droid is back in his box, and Ella is back to work on her senior thesis. She’s gearing up to make a run at the big time with an animation studio this summer. Making it on Broadway is probably easier, but she’s committed to going for it.
I think she’ll figure something out. After all, she’s got Love on her side.
If you like my writing, feel free to click the ❤️ or 🔄 button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏
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BONUS: Cool Content of the Week
A little something I found meaningful. You might agree…
Bob Gilbreath & Andrew Tarvin on Content VS Marketing
The P&G Alumni Network has kindly re-shared some of my past posts and podcast episodes from last year. Recently, I got to sit down with one of its hosts, (An)Drew Tarvin, to discuss our experiences balancing the time between creating content art and marketing it.
We were both triggered by a recent NYTimes piece about an up-and-coming comedian who feels she must spend more time creating viral TikTok content than honing her act. After his stint at P&G, Drew built his comedy career with a business angle. He helps companies bring humor into the workplace and publishes a weekly Substack, The Funny Thing About That.
Drew and I agreed that the tug-of-war between creating and marketing is real. There are no easy ways to do either—and both come at the expense of our day jobs and family time. You’ll hear us discuss some strategies for trying to balance, along with very specific tools and tactics we’ve tried—some of them actually worked!
Props to my friend Raman Sehgal, another creator of the P&G Alumni Podcast and the Modern Minorities Podcast, for reminding me of this lesson!
The “great rich quick” stories of turning content into $$$ has to be one of the most seductive, yet unrealistic schemes I’ve ever come across.
If The Rock came and told everyone how they TOO could easily make millions in movies… we’d all say “get-the-fuck-outta-here!”
But with Content: “yeah, this is going to be easy!”
Gosh yes! What an encouraging and loving reframe! And thanks for the shout out Bob. This post could have been titled, "Beyond Content" - a new approach and perspective that we all desperately need.