4 Lessons from spending a week with Top Creators

Earlier this year we co-hosted the second annual Spotter Summit in Big Sky Montana. We brought a group of top creators together for a week to learn from each other as well as industry leaders and experts like JJ Abrams and Peter Attia.?

The theme this year was all about Sustainability and Longevity.?

Here are 4 takeaways from the event?

1. The Audience is Dying to do Math?

JJ Abrams told us that leaving information from your story out keeps the audience engaged and forces them to fill in the gaps on their own.

2. Healthspan vs Lifespan?

Dr Peter Attia talked to us about longevity and made a distinction between “Lifespan”, how long you will live and “Healthspan” quality of your life while you are living. Health span is not necessarily something we think about, but it is incredibly important. Peter talked about developing hobbies in spaces that we won't be judged for. Although the weekend was filled with sessions on audience and revenue growth, some of the best moments were when we got to do completely different activities together - we bowled, played darts, and played Basketball together.... Fun isn't really a metric we track, even that sentence sounds funny, but it's an important one to prioritize. (Thanks to Rebecca Hesse and the Spotter team for making space for these moments and renting out the court..)

Ben Nemtin said it in his keynote to kick off summit - what would your 80 year old self say about the life you're living today?

3. Scale comes in different forms

"Every good project has a Singular Artistic Voice" - JJ Abrams

This becomes harder when you scale beyond yourself. We’re hearing a lot about creators retiring right now, and lot of that has to do with the fact that creators are very seldom truly just creators anymore. They are building out companies, teams, multiple businesses - and that makes it harder to keep the singular artistic voice in all the work you put out. Almost all creators who have scaled successfully have hired one person on their team that they trust creatively. Think Stevie at GMM, or Tyler at MrBeast - they can drive a project with limited time from the creator being required. A format, or a series of formats is imperative for this to work.?

The other reality is that not all creators need to scale. Some creators can exist in the space of incredibly profitable media businesses. They don’t need to build a product, or a company - they just need to make a great show as long as they can. These creators need help investing their cash, but mostly need to stay focused on making the best content possible, growing the audience and keeping overhead as low as possible.?

4. Successful Creators have consistent daily practices?

Sleep, Diet, Exercise & Brainstorm. Brainstorming comes in many forms, in my career - “brainstorming” has always felt incredibly nebulous, but the easiest way I heard of is just to write 10 ideas a day. It’s much harder than I thought it would be, so I trimmed back to 5, it’s completely changed out Colin and I are thinking about content this year. A lot of the ideas are bad, but so much of the job of being a creator is just thinking about the titles and thumbnails you want to create. Write 5-10 titles every day, treat it like going to the gym.?

A huge thanks to Nic Paul & Aaron DeBevoise and the whole team at Spotter for continuing to invest in creators ????