For my Friends, the Makers of Things

HOWTO: 149 Sur­pris­ing Ways to Tur­bocharge Your Blog with Cred­i­bil­ity! a SxSW ‘09 panel by Mer­lin Mann and John Gru­ber, has been on my repeat play-list for the past few weeks.

Mer­lin Mann and John Gru­ber are wildly suc­cess­ful web authors. They are both amongst my favorite writ­ers; this is their first recorded panel together and it is insanely funny. Despite the tongue-in-cheek title, not only is it full of great advice about how to blog well, but when you replace the word ‘blog’ with any cre­ative endeavor – like ‘pho­tog­ra­phy’ or ‘3D animation’ – the advice trans­lates across dis­ci­plines and gives insight about cre­ativ­ity, own­er­ship and how to make some­thing you can be proud of.

The first time I lis­tened to the end of this one-hour record­ing, I for­warded it to my cre­ative friends, because I knew they would get so much from it. But I was afraid they wouldn’t get the many (hilar­i­ous) Web 2.0 in-jokes and be turned off by the heavy blog­ging overtones.

So this short sum­mary is for my friends; the mak­ers of things.

Note: Quotes in this post are thanks to Jor­dan Cole’s full tran­scrip­tion.

1. Find Your Obses­sion and Your Voice

The core of the panel can be summed up in one sim­ple phrase: find your obses­sion and your voice. Mann says:

So what does that mean? I think almost all of the best non-fiction that has ever been made comes from the result of some­body who can’t stop think­ing about a cer­tain topic  —  a very spe­cific aspect, in some cases, of a cer­tain topic. And sec­ond, they got really good at fig­ur­ing out what they had to say about it.

… Like, you’ve got some­thing that you care a lot about, and you’re obsessed about  —  it’s almost like an intel­lec­tual fetish. And then you’ve got some­thing that’s your angle on that…

2. Make Your Aim Higher than Your Reach

Have a goal about mak­ing a qual­ity prod­uct that’s beyond just becom­ing pop­u­lar or rich. Gru­ber says:

I think it’s so impor­tant to have a goal that’s out there that you know is beyond your reach, so that you’re always improv­ing. I do feel, I feel that I am such a bet­ter writer now than when I started the site six years ago. I mean, there’s just no doubt in my mind that I’m bet­ter at it. And I still feel like I’m nowhere near as good as I wanna be. I can write some­thing and it’ll be the arti­cle that, y’know, when I meet peo­ple at a place like here, and they’ll remind me, they’ll say ‘I love that thing you wrote a cou­ple weeks ago’, and it’s some­thing that I just think, ‘Oh my God, that is so far short of the idea I set out to write, but thank you so much for say­ing it’, but that to me is the whole point, is that you’ve gotta have a goal that is so far out of your reach, and… it seems to me that almost every­body else is set­ting their goal to write…

To which Mann chimes in:

… write on a very broad topic that a lot of other peo­ple cover to a very large audi­ence that they they don’t really care about… if every­thing is what you wanna do, then you’re not really doing a thing.

3. Who do You Want to Delight?

Instead of mak­ing a generic thing for the masses, think about one spe­cific per­son your thing will reach. Mann says:

I think about it in terms, the phrase is, ‘Who do I wanna delight?’. I try to think a lot, less about, like, ‘Is this some­thing that will, y’know, get me this kind of link?’, and more like ‘Is this some­thing that John would think is not a piece of crap?’.

… Do you fol­low me? Can you think about, like, one face behind your mon­i­tor that you see when you’re mak­ing some­thing? Like, can you tell, like, whether you’ve made some­thing that would make somebody’s day? Or are you just think­ing about a big pot of peo­ple who will click on your stuff? Because the truth is, once you fig­ure out who those faces are, it gets a lot eas­ier to make some­thing that you’re really really proud of, regard­less of what it is that you wanna make.

… And again, I’m talk­ing about pho­tog­ra­phy, I’m talk­ing about music; what­ever you make. Like, who are you mak­ing it for? Who’s your ideal reader?

4. Be a First-Rate You, Not a Second-Rate Copy

You can’t re-create some­one else’s suc­cess by copy­ing him. Find your own obses­sion and voice, Mann says:

He goes ‘The thing is, peo­ple go out there, and they’re always try­ing to emu­late the suc­cess of other peo­ple, right? And so you get on TV, and you try to pre­tend you’re Ted Kop­pel. But you know what? They’ve already got a Ted Kop­pel. They don’t need you.’ So y’know, like, your com­pe­ti­tion is some­body who had a unique oppor­tu­nity a long time ago, and now you’re gonna try to, like, trace the shadow of that on a side­walk and hope it’s a career? Right? It’s… we’ve got our Kop­pel, now who are you?

5. You are Not Your Work, You are Your Creativity

Don’t con­fuse your work for your cre­ative abil­ity. Mann again:

And if you don’t have the con­fi­dence to go, like, ‘My ideas, and the things that I have to say are so valu­able that, like, I’m not wor­ried that I’ll run out of them. I’m not wor­ried that there’s any scarcity to what I have to say about this.’ So yeah, peo­ple scrape my RSS feed hun­dreds of times a day. But that’s not me; I’m not my RSS feed. I’m the ideas that went into the RSS feed.

6. Embrace Ambiguity

Don’t be in a rush to fig­ure out exactly how what you do is going to make you a mil­lion­aire. Have a tol­er­ance for explo­ration, dis­cov­ery, change and growth. Mann says:

The biggest tol­er­ance that you’ve gotta have  —  and I’m as thin-skinned as any­body; I don’t like peo­ple say­ing mean things about me  —  but, I think what we’re say­ing, in some ways, is, you need a tol­er­ance  —  this is gonna sound so unhelp­ful  —  you need a tol­er­ance for hav­ing no idea where your thing is going. Y’know? ’Cause if you have too much of an idea of what it is, like, you may be acci­den­tally mak­ing the wrong thing.

7. Awe­some­ness First, Bling Second

At the begin­ning of the panel, Gru­ber asks if you’re craft­ing for money, or are you craft­ing so you can cre­ate even more?

And so there’s this quote that I’ve sort of hung this whole thing on, right from the out­set, from Walt Dis­ney, and it’s, to me, it’s the thing that made me wanna do this talk. And he said: ‘We don’t make movies to make money. We make money to make more movies.’ And I think that’s so pro­found, and to me, it’s not about a sub­tle dif­fer­ence in strat­egy; it’s a fun­da­men­tal, you’re either going this way, or you’re going that way.

Mann says that it’s not just about mak­ing money, it’s about doing awe­some work, and that oppor­tu­ni­ties can come out of that:

Because the real oppor­tu­ni­ties of this stuff  —  this sounds like bull­shit, but I am dead seri­ous  —  the giant oppor­tu­ni­ties in this are not short-term gains… I’m giv­ing you an opin­ion here, which I don’t usu­ally do. But the real long-term gains for you are not pageviews and CPMs; it’s the oppor­tu­ni­ties that come out of being awe­some at what you do. And if you think that’s BS then, like, I can’t help you.

But I swear to God, if you look at the peo­ple around who seem like they were born on third base, yeah, it’s good tim­ing; yeah, it’s hard work; but I think a lot of it is they had a tol­er­ance for the ambi­gu­ity about where it was gonna go, they had a tol­er­ance for the fact they were not gonna take short-term money that got in the way of what they really wanted to do. And the ancil­lary rev­enue streams and oppor­tu­ni­ties that come up as a result of mak­ing extremely-high-quality content…

Gru­ber adds that there are more ways to get paid in than money, and while these ways might not pay the bills, they also have value:

But a lot of times they’re very true, they’re totally true; and there are things that money can­not buy that have tremen­dous value.

And one of them  —  I mean, you’re (Mann) prac­ti­cally mak­ing a career on it  —  is that atten­tion, human atten­tion, is valu­able and it is lim­ited. There is noth­ing you can pos­si­bly do give one per­son more atten­tion in a day. You wake up; you have eigh­teen hours; and then you go to sleep. And in that time, you only have so much atten­tion. It’s a lim­ited resource. You can’t directly buy it. You can’t… there’s no dol­lar value on it.

… But it is incred­i­bly valu­able. And so that is the one thing that when you give stuff away in the Inter­net, it’s like, well then how am I gonna get paid for it? Well, you’re gonna get paid in atten­tion. And I know you can­not pay your rent, I mean, I know…

… Hon­estly, you can­not pay your rent with atten­tion. I mean, I’ve tried. You can’t buy fast cars; there’s all sorts of stuff you can’t buy with it. But it has value, and you’d be sur­prised at what hap­pens when it builds up.

And Gru­ber quot­ing Mann, sum­ming this point up:

Don’t do stuff that seems prof­itable, but poten­tially messes up the rea­son peo­ple like you.