Your Sauce is Hiding in Your HOW... Not Someone Else's 'What'.
If your brilliance feels instantly useful, that is not creativity.
There was a time years ago when I would not shut the fck up about Ex Machina. It’s still one of my top fav movies. Many of you were following me on X back then. You probably remember the way I kept circling back to one specific scene with the Pollock painting. The one I visited in NYC after I got my heart broken & threw my epic art show… I was obsessed with that movie. In hindsight, the reason must’ve been bc it was kind of a homage to creativity itself. I didn’t really clarify with myself why I loved it so much, I just knew I did.
At the time, it might’ve felt like I was over-fixating but here we are, AI is everywhere & suddenly what counts as REAL creativity feels like the most important thing in the world of online business. You see it all over the discourse. That old Pollock scene might land differently now. For me, it lands the same, but is even more important. Like it has more purpose, bigger than me just knowing what moves me.
It was never just about art. It was justifying the impossibility of demanding things the world demands before creative value can even be gifted. It’s something I’m dropping a billion pounds of shame over… One of those things you’ve always known is true but for some reason you’ve needed to collect endless piles of proof it’s okay to honor that.
If Pollock had waited til he had a business case for every drip, he would’ve made 0.
Now everyone is confronting what I was fortunate to naturally feel drawn to pointing to years ago, which is the irreplaceable value of human experience as the raw material of creativity. Not curated feeds. Not AI slop. Lived details.
I wrote about this here bc I’ve been fortunate enough to live as this walking testimony to the power of tuning into your own sensory reality, as the only way to generate work that feels ALIVE… Alchemy is just how I naturally process my experiences, good & bad. Now I've accidentally become a walking testimony to one of the most important & profitable embodied understandings on the internet bc nothing is more valuable now than what makes you money that ALSO makes you feel alive… it applies to products, services, paid ads, offline experiences, everything. & everything is merging. Everyone is trying to understand how to generate work that carries life in it… & I didn’t even mean to become this. At least not for this big of a purpose. But there’s a lifetime of receipts that I know what I’m doing when it comes to this because it just so happens to be how I live… writing this out, the magnitude of this natural fluency is actually getting even more insane.
The initial intentions of this piece was to write to thinkers whom I can sense repress shame over "not being creative”… I need to you understand: input & output simply complete in your psyche for the same bandwidth. You don't get to have infinite bandwidth... That’s the first thing you need to accept about yourself.
When your psyche is backed up with what's happening in other people's realities through curated feeds & AI outputs, ofc the raw SAUCE of your own senses feels boring. Ofc describing your actual life feels lame. That’s the real problem. The sauce isn't the "big ideas" or trying to force anything. It’s tuning into the little details that are so easy to overlook. It’s retraining awareness. Just like people who know 'how to think' have way more sauce than people who only know 'what to think'… HOW you pay attention has way more sauce than 'what to pay attention to'.
As the value of taste, sense, human creativity etc go up…
We're all watching the how become the what.
When I throw together half baked sentences describing the details of my immediate physical reality, those aren't profound insights, it's just me narrating what I’m sensing but bc my attention is immersed & I’m feeling awe or whatever, it carries that same energy.
You pass hundreds of these little opportunities in your own day to day life, but you miss them bc they feel boring as fck to you so if you try to write about them or infuse them in your work, they inherently don't carry that energy... You also clearly try to apply how you think of productivity, to how you think of creativity.
Those are completely different gears.
The fuel of your creative mind can't run on "if this doesn't gain me approval, or can't be measured or monetized, wtf is the point?" ... A creative state is a state of PLAY. Not productivity.
Strategy drowns creativity. Ideas flow when they're free to not be applicable, or have any strategic value or ROI. Creativity can't require justifying its own existence before it exists...
The most brilliant creative sparks ALWAYS feel useless or accidental when they happen. They only prove themselves or find alignment with value in hindsight… or retroactively… or in some other separated way with plenty of space.
So if you feel creatively blocked or ashamed that you lean on AI, please know AI is not the problem & you're not broken. You’re just confused. Take some space. Go notice raw details. Play with them for no reason. Drop the weight of approval, metrics & money just for a little experimental while, so you can stop pretending you know how to innovate & actually tap into your ability to innovate.
Pollock didn’t wait for a one-liner offer before he started painting. He moved & the meaning revealed itself later. You literally have so much raw material dormant inside you already, the only thing you need to do is give yourself permission to use it.
You do NOT need to “become more creative” or be a knock off of someone whose creativity or thinking you admire… Learn from others & get inspired ofc but YOU are your most potent sauce.
You already have everything you need.