Practice in Private

“I’m an interior designer and I want to make videos to build an audience, any advice?”

I recently spoke at a conference in Atlanta and was asked this question, my answer was to develop a relationship with creating and to Practice in Private. Let me explain.?

One of the challenges for creatives right now is that the gap between making and sharing has closed. Making and Sharing are 2 different processes, 2 different states of mind, and 2 different completely separate experiences. Being creative, and sharing your creative work have become very intertwined. There’s an immense pressure on the purpose of your creativity to be attracting an audience.

The next chapter of the creative economy will be incredibly saturated with formats, formulas, A.I. generated content and sensational concepts that are made to capture attention. Most of this content can be replicated. To be a successful creator the goal is to make work in your own unique voice, that only you could make.

So how do you do that? Well, you practice.?

The VHS Camera

When I was a kid I picked up my parents Panasonic OmniMovie VHS camera. The camera was big, heavy, awkward to hold and it had a button on the side of it that opened up the VHS tape slot (see below)?

So my brother and I would load in a fresh VHS tape directly into the camera and start filming scenes based on a premise we had come up with earlier that day. The only way to edit was in camera, it had a fade to black button and if you held it down before you stared recording you could have the opposite effect. That meant we could exit a scene in one room and enter in the other. If we just continued filming after one scene, it would pick up where we left off - introducing us to the jump cut.?

When we were done filming, we would take the tape out and sit together to watch back the movie we just made. The audience was us, then eventually our parents and our friends.?

The stakes were low and we got better every time we picked up the camera, watched the footage back and tried again. We learned about editing, on camera performance, what made something funny and the immense impact of holding on a frame for 1 second longer.?

Complexity

This practice of making without sharing gets complicated when you are running a media business. Why would we spend time and resources making something that we aren’t going to share? What’s the ROI on that? When we first started our newsletter, The Publish Press, we decided to run it as an internal newsletter just for our team members, 2 times per week.

We needed to learn about the process of writing a newsletter. We needed time to read it back and understand what makes it good - what makes a newsletter enjoyable to read and more importantly, enjoyable to write. Once we felt comfortable with the it, we opened up the list to close friends and confidants for another month before publicly announcing the project.

The newsletter now has over 100,000 readers… and without that early process I don’t know if it would still exist today. Practicing in private led us to building a format that has become a substantial part of our business.?

Making something, without the intention of sharing publicly, teaches you a lot about your relationship to the craft and more importantly, takes the fear of failure out of the creative process.

There is so much fear wrapped up in low viewership, negative comments, and embarrassment amongst your peers. The reality, is that to be in the career of being a creator, you need to fall in love with the process of making first, and sharing second. If you are in love with the making, you’ll be able to withstand the inevitable emotional ups and downs of sharing.

So the answer, start making videos, watch them back yourself, learn about the process of making, then start sharing.