Conversation Pit 002: The Creative Feedback Loop

Why putting out work is crucial

I’m a creative. I have friends who are creatives. I have mentors who are creatives.

My goal for 2024 was to focus more time and energy on putting out creative projects. Living Room, this newsletter and community project, is one of them. I didn’t care how often I put out a post or planned an event, I just knew my main goal was to take myself from zero to one as soon as possible.

A running start begins slowly.

I was Facetiming a friend of mine and this topic was brought up. We have a group of creative friends who we’ll call “the Wegmans.”

I’m literally staring at a bottle of Wegmans laundry detergent in front of me lol.

Anyways, the Wegmans are a talented group of video editors, content creators, and founders who started one of those TikTok-native shows. They had one page dedicated to dating, another to gaming, and several misses in various niches.

They recently stepped away from that company after its acquisition, and they’re building out their next ‘thing.’

The issue though, is they don’t know what it is.

They’ve launched a few pages across Instagram and TikTok, and they’re putting out cinematic vlogs documenting their journey doing so.

But in their industry, they’re not putting out enough. They’re stagnant.

Directionless.

It’s hard to figure out exactly which direction you should take when you don’t have enough feedback from the ‘market.’

Should they start another dating show? Another game show? I don’t have the answer.

But I do have the directive—they should be putting out as much content as they can.

As creatives, we often feel like we need some master plan to get started.

The opposite is true. We need no plan.

But what we do need is output.

Output begets feedback, and feedback begets better output.

The most crucial aspect of the ‘Creative Act’ is creating sub-par work.

A mentor always used to tell me, “Done is better than perfect.”

Striving for perfectionism is useless. Perfect doesn’t exist. Finished does.