Creating Steemit Content For Yourself

Everyone who puts up content on Steemit wants someone else to experience it. To read it. To feel it. To relate with it. To appreciate it.

That’s why we put content on Steemit instead of, say, creating a long essay in Word, saving it, and never showing it to anyone except our future selves (who, oftentimes, are embarrassed that our past selves would even put something like that down onto a permanent medium).

Sure, there are some people who bang out sunstanceless content and post it without even a second thought about people actually reading their swill. These are the people who are doing it purely for the payday, and if that is what gets them going, who am I to judge. This isn’t directed at them.

This is for people who get a little nervous when they hover over that “Post” button.

It’s for the people who have to work really hard not to check back into their post two and a half minutes after sending it out into the world, and who ultimately lose the battle not to refresh every few minutes, to see if someone, anyone has seen and been moved by their work.

It’s for the people who almost ritualize checking their blog in the morning, first thing, before doing the things you used to do in the mornings when you woke up...you know, like brush your teeth, use the bathroom, splash water on your face, make a cup of coffee or tea. Normal people stuff that writers, artists, and creators don't get to until after they’ve salved their neuroses by checking if their work touched someone's heart, even just a little.

This is for the people who truly put an important part of themselves into their work, so that publishing it is truly giving up a part of your very sense of self in the hopes that the piece of your soul traveling out into the world is good enough to be grabbed by someone else and embraced.

For those people, there’s something important you need to know about your intended audience.

I’m not going to do that “pretend-to-leave-them-in-suspense-even-though-the-title-of-the-post-gives-away-the ostensibly-suspenseful-conclusion," thing, because I’m not a local newscaster or writer for Time Magazine. I'll just come out with it:

The only audience you should care about is you.

“Gee thanks I.L.T Yodith,” you should be saying right now. “Way to pass off old advice as some kind of revelation. You got anything else profound? Gonna tell me to chew my food or else I’ll choke and die? Or how about making sure I keep my eyes open while crossing an eight-lane freeway? You’re a real winner Yodith.”

That’s fair. It is old advice. And it’s not profound at all. Everybody already knows this.

But it’s rare for people to truly follow it, because it requires a gargantuan mental balancing act.

Think about it. It truly is important that your only intended audience is the best version of you. The best creations, the ones where you know you've stirred something deep inside the eventual audience, come from work that's authentic and wholly unconcerned with that audience’s needs and wants.

Because human beings are emotionally and mentally complex creatures. People don’t want to be pandered to or flattered. Not really. Sure, they’ll accept flattery and they’re happy to interact with ideas they already agree with.

But, ultimately, every person is searching to connect with a meaningful part of the world.

What could be more meaningful than another, unique human being, inviting another person to take a piece of their mind to do with it what they please?

And the only way you’re guaranteed to be sending out an authentic piece of your mind is to ensure that you're creating for you, and you alone. That you are creating something untouched by worries or cares about how anyone else will react.

It should be easy. Except it’s not.

Because when you finally get to a place where you're truly creating for yourself, then what's to stop you from just keeping a diary for your eyes only. Or creating something, saving it on your computer, and never sharing it with another soul?

You don’t care about anyone but yourself, right? So what purpose is there in sharing your creation at all?

That’s the trick—the seemingly impossible balancing act.

You do care about other people experiencing your work, and that’s not a bad thing, as long as you push that back, out of your mind, until the moment you’ve fully and finally put the last markup on that post, or made the final edit to that, or chipped the very last piece of ice off that sculpture.

The instant after you've completed that work, after it's been crafted and honed solely to meet your own internal judgment and nobody else’s, after you’ve accepted the fact that no one else should ever see this work and that’s ok because it was made for you alone—only after that, when there's nothing else you can do to make it better for you, can you then sit back and say, “I want everyone to experience this and love it. It wasn’t just for me--I was just kidding, lulz!”

The time between the completion of the work and the moment after you share it, that’s the irreconcilable time during which you need to be both fully convinced that the work is for you and you alone, and fully desirous of having it shared with others and affecting their lives for the good.

There’s no way to explain how to make that work. It’s something outside of logic and falling into the realm of paradox.

Yeah, this sounds high faultin’ and overly mystical and I don’t like that it sounds that way. But that’s just how it is.

It’s why so many creators complete thousands of projects, all of which would enhance the world with the sheer magnitude of their beauty, and all of which are destroyed by the creator or languish in obscurity until after their deaths, only published against their explicit wishes.

It’s why creative types are notorious for isolating themselves, only to seem almost manic in their extroversion when they do manage to interact with others about their work.

And it’s why creators frequently modify their work to satisfy the tastes of others. It’s so much easier to do it that way. Then you know it’s not truly a part of you in that creation...it’s something less frightening and it lets you skip all of this absurd “do it for only you, do it so other people will experience it, all at the same time,” craziness.

Yet it’s worth it. For the audience. For the world. For you.

Create only for yourself and then share it with the world.

The process is agonizing.

Do it anyway.

Do it now.