00:03
This is Reinamoto's Podcast, The Creative Mindset.
Welcome to The Intersection, a new segment and audio version of my essays exploring what the
future holds at the intersection of creativity and technology. I am Reinamoto, the founding
partner of I&CO, a global innovation firm based in New York and Tokyo. Based on the conversations
that I have with the top creative practitioners from various industries, I write a weekly essay
to dig deeper and analyze where we may be headed as creative and business professionals.
Although we talk a lot about AI and technology, we'll be asking a human voice actor to record
these episodes. We'll be bringing this segment as a bonus episode to you. So let's get started.
The Cult of Productivity
Do you think that the importance of creativity is declining?
I recently posed this question to my wife. She spent most of her career in HR and doesn't
think about creativity or creative endeavors like I do. At the beginning of the pandemic,
she left her cushy corporate job and decided to pursue being a life and career coach. Now,
as an independent professional, she creates way more content on various platforms than I do.
Yet she wouldn't identify herself as a creative or a creator.
I've spent more than two decades as a creative. Quality over quantity has always been the mantra
for us, the so-called creative class. Producing less but better stuff was what we were taught.
Mediocrity or settling for good enough was the enemy. We worshipped the cult of perfectionism.
I've been sensing for a while now that in the modern technology-driven and efficiency-obsessed
society we live in today, we put less value on creativity and increasingly more on productivity.
Producing more but good enough stuff seems to have become the new mantra.
Countless creators sing the gospel of consistency, frequency, and productivity.
In just the last 24 months, the number of self-proclaimed social media growth coaches
and personal branding gurus seems to have exploded on Instagram, LinkedIn,
and the platform formerly known as Twitter. The pandemic accelerated this trend. While the
cost of and the demand for elite colleges' higher education didn't get disrupted as much
as some experts thought they would be, the popularity of online courses did rise significantly.
03:02
From the elite end of the spectrum to the opposite end. Yet another way for Ivy League schools to
make even more money. In addition, many creators have now figured out how the algorithms of various
platforms work. The platforms benefit when more people are posting more content more frequently.
Creators desperate for irrational emotional affirmations in the form of followers and likes
are willingly uploading stuff en masse and for free. Furthermore, the format of content,
in other words, reels on Instagram, is now overshadowing the substance of content.
Posts that tout, use trending audio for your reel and watch your account grow,
or post x times a week to gain more followers, or those strangely quick and short clips that
you have to watch and stop several times to see what's going on, proliferate the explore feeds.
We see numerous posts that have the same formats and techniques. Sure, they may have a large number
of likes and followers, but are they truly memorable? Probably not, because there are so many.
These formulas are providing these creators with shortcuts for reach and growth. Everyone loves a
good shortcut. One thing that is common among them, however, is that only a fraction of them
encourage people to be original or creative. Put another way, algorithms of the online world
are pushing creators and creatives towards quantity and formulas and away from quality
or creativity. The great thing about formulas is that they work, especially in the age of
algorithms, while they work. The problem is that platforms and their algorithms are a moving target
and change frequently and unpredictably. In a few years, 90% of these creators who
chase formulas will either get tired of chasing them and or algorithms will render them irrelevant.
The sense or worry, I should admit, that productivity is overtaking creativity occurred
to me as I was listening to Hard Fork, a podcast in which the two hosts discuss the topic of
productivity and specifically note-taking rather enthusiastically. This conversation fascinated me.
To begin with, I didn't realize that there was a passionate cohort of note-taking aficionados
06:03
out there. For Casey Newton, one of the hosts, a tech journalist who runs Platformer,
note-taking is a professional obsession. He seems to organize his notes meticulously and
even mercilessly and takes the task to a level that I never really thought about.
He keeps a highly organized record of every link his articles on Platformer have referenced
in Notion and uses a newly discovered note-taking tool called Capacities.io that helps create
network thoughts. His co-host, Kevin Roos, a technology columnist for the New York Times,
is on the opposite end of the spectrum. His method, he reveals, is surprisingly low-tech
for a tech journalist, emailing himself or taking voice notes in the voice memo app
whenever ideas occur. He admits, self-deprecatingly, that his method, particularly the voice notes,
makes searching for those ideas later almost impossible, ironically defeating the purpose
of taking notes. He says he experimented with various note-taking tools only to find himself
getting frustrated with them 12 to 24 hours later and reverting to his archaic method
of keeping a record of his ideas. To be honest, I'm much closer to Roos than Newton on the spectrum
of productivity savviness. For years, I've tried different means of taking notes, jotting ideas
down, making to-do lists, and I'm yet to find a system that I'm satisfied with. I did sign up for
Capacities.io, opened it, but was immediately intimidated and went back to notes. While Newton
advocates for productivity tools, he argues that note-taking apps don't make us smarter in his
article on Platformer titled, Why Note-Taking Apps Don't Make Us Smarter. I spoke at an event
in Croatia last year and met Chris Do, the self-proclaimed loud introvert helping left-brainers
think right. On Instagram alone, he has close to a million followers and on LinkedIn, close to
half a million. He's a household name in the design community. Although I didn't get to know
him directly until last year, I remember his firm Blind, a motion graphics company, more than a
decade if not two ago in my 20s. Only a few years older than me and a designer like myself, I was
09:00
very impressed with Chris running an Emmy-winning design company at a relatively young age. In the
last decade, he shifted his work focus towards coaching and educating other designers to build
businesses. At a breakfast table at the event, we started chatting. My wife was with me and
complimented Chris on his talk the day earlier. She mentioned how useful it was to her and wished
that she could build her online presence more. He in return asked her what she did, a life career
coach. When I bring my partner to an industry event where I'm speaking, people are usually
more interested in talking to me, so it was rare and refreshing that a high-caliber speaker like
Chris showed an interest in what my wife did. The next question he asked her surprised both of us.
Can I help you? Here's someone who has more than a million followers on social media,
gets approached all the time for advice, and charges $5,000 an hour for a one-on-one
coaching session for personal branding. With this question, he wasn't selling his service to her.
He sounded genuinely interested in what my wife did and helping her on the spot.
There was no agenda beyond that. It was authentic. Creative and design industries
are filled with big personalities and egos. In fact, regardless of the industry,
anyone who is as successful and as well-known as Chris would have a big personality and be
self-obsessed and not be interested in talking about others. Before meeting him, I admired Chris
for his ability and tenacity to produce high-quality content on such frequency.
During my two-decade-plus career, I don't think I've ever met anyone who cared enough about a
random stranger who wasn't even in the same industry and offered to help. This personal
encounter with him made me realize that it's his authenticity that put him in a whole different
class. Towards the end of the Hard Fork podcast, Newton provides a few practical tips for staying
organized and being productive. While he comments Greece's basic use of technology is horrible,
his last advice to his co-host is simple and refreshingly technology-independent.
Keep a daily journal as a bullet list in the morning. Drake supposedly put out 80 songs in
12:02
one year alone. That's more than one track a week. Even at his level of fame, when one's descent from
fame is as quick as someone else sending and replacing them, he is savvy enough to understand
that aiming for a stroke of genius every few years could be dangerous for his career.
Instead, he is producing more in the attention economy we now live in to engage his audience
more effectively, frequently, and consistently. Statistically speaking, in baseball, a player who
hits a single consistently has a higher chance of becoming a Hall of Famer than a player who
becomes a home-run winner in a few seasons. It now seems that to be creative, we first need to
produce more with consistency. Creatives need not be the hostages of quality, at least to begin with.
While we should try to understand algorithms and need to produce more to stay relevant,
that doesn't mean we need to be subservient to algorithms. In fact, we should resist tricks and
gimmicks to truly break away and stand out. Sure, we can chase algorithms in an effort to grow our
audience. In the long run, however, authenticity will prevail. I started writing this newsletter
last summer in 2023 as a way to organize my thoughts that come from various conversations
with many creative practitioners. Over the course of several months, I see and notice new patterns
and new insights gained from multiple people, and I take the time to organize and write them
down so that they can be useful and hopefully helpful to you as listeners and readers.
If you're listening to this on Spotify, there's a Q&A field, so please do send us your questions
and comments. And if you like our podcast, please leave us a 5-star rating. We'll be so grateful.
I'm Rei Inamoto, and this is The Creative Mindset. See you next time.
