Stumbling into the meta-creator trap

You know that feeling when a piece of writing punches you in the gut, forcing you to confront a truth you were avoiding? That's how I felt when I read Swyx's post, The Meta-Creator Ceiling.

In chasing the creator dream, I've spent thousands of hours and dollars on courses, communities and content. I've taken David Perell's Write of Passage course. I've read (and implemented) everything Tiago Forte's written about building a second brain. I've summarised books, and I've deconstructed Twitter threads. 

I thought I was being productive when in fact, I'd fallen into the meta-creator trap. In wanting to publish lots of interesting content, I put energy into reporting what interesting people were thinking or doing, rather than doing interesting work myself.

The meta-creator trap is real, and it sneaks up on you. Reasonably intelligent people stumble into the trap. Why? It's because they're told that the thing that matters above all else is to ship interesting content often. Don't have interesting things to ship? No problem, just post content about someone else's interesting stuff.

I'm aware of all of the counter-arguments. A popular one is that quantity has a quality of its own. The only way to develop your skill and taste as a content creator is to create a lot of content on a consistent schedule.

But if you have to resort mainly to repackaging others' ideas to achieve that consistency, how helpful is that really in developing your creative skill and taste? Here's the insidious part: you feel like you're being productive. Rather than just consuming content, you are now producing it. What's so wrong with that?

As a thought experiment, turn up the dial and imagine what meta-creation would look like in extremis. Would you have 1,000 ‘creators’ passing recycled content and cloned opinions back and forth between each other? To what extent are we already there?

To be clear, you could use the meta-creator approach to build a range of valuable and transferable skills, such as writing, marketing and building your network.

And yes, it's better to meta-create than it is to consume. Recognise, though, that it is only a step or two better.

There’s an easy way to go beyond those initial steps: take action. Don't just summarise the takeaways from the last book you read; experiment with applying the things that resonated with you in the real world and report back. 

Aim to be interesting not because you write about interesting people, but because you do interesting things yourself. Cedric Chin is a master of this. He deconstructs lessons from great books, turns them into action plans and shares his experience. Through this process, he creates new insights and knowledge.

Be intentional about which game you're playing. I've learnt this lesson first-hand. 

It's easy to get swept up in the meta-creator game while thinking that you're playing the skills-building game. The measures of success are vastly different. While the meta-creator game is about optimising external engagement, the skill-building game is about optimising personal growth.

Here's the paradox: you're much more likely to get that external validation, especially on a sustained basis, if you focus on your personal growth, and you optimise for doing things that interest you.

Ultimately what matters most is picking the right game. How you play is important but secondary. Choose wisely.