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As a Newer Creator, I Was Moved by the Last 5 Minutes of the SXSW Keynote
The Impact of “Death of the Follower & the Future of Creativity on the Web with Jack Conte”
I’ve been a content creator for almost two years, but I’ve been struggling to find my voice, my niche, my purpose, and my audience.
There’s a fire inside to share my message with the world and make an impact, but I’m still working on the elevator pitch. I’m a multi-passionate generalist; of course I find it hard to describe myself in a soundbite. I’ve never fit into a box — I’m not meant to.
Today, I watched Patreon CEO Jack Conte’s keynote from SXSW 2024 titled “Death of the Follower & Future of Creativity on the Web” and I got goosebumps. Then I told my husband about it, and he told me that Jack is in Scary Pockets, this cool funk band. Hang on, where do I know that name from? Oh yeah, we played one of their songs at our WEDDING!!!
Call it fate or kismet, but I knew I was meant to find this video. Maybe you were meant to find it too.
The whole 47-minute recording is a masterclass in storytelling and includes fascinating predictions about the creator economy, but the last 5 minutes are an absolute must-watch for creators (video link below starts at 41:53)
Prefer text? Here are the most important bits, along with my reaction.
Chapter 12: Make for Yourself
“The gravity everywhere we look as creators today, the gravity is just pushing us, it’s just pushing us toward making for other reasons than why we set out to make things in the first place.”
“It’s so important to remember to make beautiful things, to make things that light you up and to make things that you care about.”
I’m swooning at the phrase “make things that light you up”!
Chapter 13: Know What You Want
“Know what you want. The hardest lesson I have learned as a creative person, and as an operator and CEO over the last 10 years, is to know and trust what I want, and to be true to that over time. It’s easier said than done.”
“Don’t let somebody else tell you what you want. Because then you’ll end up with what they want instead of what you want.”
Then Jack talks about focusing on dashboards full of “success metrics” that other people have told you are important.
“If you went back in time and asked Ella Fitzgerald or David Bowie or Prince, what do you want? What’s your goal as an artist, what matters to you? Do you think Bowie would have said my goal as an artist is to maximize the amount of human hours spent consuming my work?”
“I don’t know what Bowie wanted, and I’m not going to pretend to. But I can tell you what I want as an artist, I can tell you what matters to me as a creative person, and what I know will matter to me 10 years ago, now, and 10 years from now.”
“I want to say something that matters to somebody.”
This is when the goosebumps appeared!
Gif by agt on Giphy
“I want to say something that only I can say because of whatever experience I’ve had and my lived experience, something that is uniquely pointed to me. I want to say that, I want to figure out how to say that.”
“I want to find that core of human truth in my experience and communicate it eloquently and clearly and have it be true and feel true and have someone else see that and have that person think . . . YES! That feels true!”
At this point I was shouting in my office, “YES! That feels true!”
“and it feels true to them and then I want that person to feel connected to me even though we’ve never met before in our lives but I said a thing that resonated with them and made them feel a little bit less alone because they felt like there was another person who had that same experience . . . That’s what I want as an artist, and that’s a very different goal than watch time”
At this point I was speechless. That’s it exactly. I want to connect with people I’ve never met (and maybe never will!) and help them feel seen and heard, even if I’m not actually seeing or hearing them.
“That may not be what you want as an artist and that’s ok, but the point is to know what YOU want, what matters to YOU, what are YOU trying to achieve as a creative person.“
“We have this tendency to look outside for those answers, I do it too, this advice is honestly more for me than it is for anybody else in this room. We want there to be a Yoda, we want there to be a leader or a manager, or a voice of authority that can tell us what we want because it’s a scary thing to ask. But that does not exist, what we want comes intrinsically, not extrinsically. It comes from in here, that’s where we find it.”
Still from the Keynote on YouTube, when Jack says “It comes from in here”
I still have some reflection and soul-searching to do, but I feel more confident in being my own Yoda now.
If you’re a newer creator like me, did this resonate with you? I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
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