Earlier this week, I came across this quote from Merlin Mann:
Some days, the web feels like 5 people trying to make something; 5k people turning it into a list; and 500MM people saying, “FAIL.”
It’s stuck with me. Of course, it’s always been easier to criticize than to create, but the internet makes it tremendously easy to anonymously heckle creators, and the “social news” sites are full of hecklers.
It’s a shame because creating is hard. It comes as no surprise to a creator that parts of his work suck. As Ira Glass mentioned in a recent video, creative people tend to have above average taste in their field. They know that their early work doesn’t meet their own standards. But successful creative people create anyway. You have to do terrible work before you can do good work.
Hecklers can short-circuit that process. If a talented, creative person puts something out there for everyone to see, and all he hears a chorus of people telling him how terrible it is, he will think “I am a terrible artist.” He may throw away a life-long career before it’s even begun.
And then there are the listers. The internet needs no more lists of the Top 25 $Noun. Most of these lists exist solely for the purpose of generating ad traffic; websites like Cracked survive on them. They’re the junk food of thought: simple and appealing, but over-marketed and nearly devoid of nutritional value.
My goal is to be a creator rather than a heckler or a mere lister. I may not be one of the shining lights yet, but I’m just getting started.
