Each of us starts from zero – zero composed melodies, zero written poems, zero painted pictures, zero successes, zero failures, zero experience, zero attention, and zero followers.
We glance at our creative role models and the massive community they’ve built over the years. They have so much recognition in the form of likes, retweets, and comments. We wish we had that, too.
But not having attention can be a creative blessing. We will never be as free and at ease to create as we are today with zero followers. We can experiment, play, and do whatever we like. After all, we don’t have to be accountable to anyone or meet any expectations of others.
As soon as we share our work with the world, we must remember that it will be influenced. Whether positive or negative is not relevant. The fact is, the comments and number of likes will inevitably trigger something within most of us. Some work will get more attention than others. That will influence us, even if it’s just a little bit. That one nasty comment, among dozens of compliments, stays with us for weeks, maybe forever. That influences us, too, and with that, our work, focus, motivation, and creative development.
Feedback and followers will come with consistent social media channel maintenance. At a certain point, this is also beneficial for our further development and maybe even necessary. However, we have it in our own hands when that point in time is. And until then, let’s relish and enjoy our creative independence and freedom.
