When Success Kills Creativity
Professional creative success comes with a cruel tradeoff. Just when you begin to breathe a sigh of relief because the plan is working, you’re winning, success has found you, the further your time with actual creation moves in the rearview mirror. Your calendar fills with the machinery of business, the emails, networking calls, social media management, while the deep work that made you a creator in the first place gets pushed to "someday."
You got what you wanted, but it came with an exhausting irony. You can't remember the last time you disappeared into your work, chased an idea until dawn or felt your mind manic with new connections. Those late nights of exhilarating exploration, when you had nothing to lose, feel like a luxury you can no longer afford.
Now you craft predictable Instagram captions instead of diving deep into profound material. You churn out half-hearted TikToks and call it a day over losing sleep spiralling down inspirational rabbit holes. You make “sensible concessions” and walk away thinking “good enough”.
Every creator plays these two games simultaneously:
The Now Game: Daily content, engagement metrics, paying bills, optimization.
The Long Game: Developing ideas that actually matter, creating work that transcends the trends, building something that represents who you truly are. Feeling, living, evolving!
The Now Game always feels more urgent, so the Long Game gets postponed, oftentimes indefinitely. But without deep work, your ideas become thin and shallow. You go numb. You start recycling your own material and watching other creators explore territories you meant to map but never found time to visit.
The solution isn't finding more time, or waiting for next month, or next season or next year, it's engineering depth into your day without watching your life fall apart.
So join me in realignment. I've been coasting on medium-fine professional returns lately, completely cut off from the wild creative whimsy that used to drive me, I’ve been burnt out, and it’s time to shake it up.
Trim the Fat
Unsubscribe from newsletters that inform but don't inspire
Unfollow accounts that make you feel behind, or icky
Unfollow accounts that were only obligatory / polite follows in the first place
Find and focus on what makes your brain light up with connections
Feed Real Curiosity
Keep a list of ideas that genuinely fascinate you, not because they're trendy but because they spark intrigue and curiosity.
When something catches your attention, ask three immediate follow-up questions:
Why does this matter?
What if the opposite were true?
Who would disagree and why?
Find Friction
Read things that challenge your assumptions. Follow creators whose work makes you squirmy because it's better than yours. Comfort is the enemy of meaningful work.
Create Transition Rituals
You can't jump from checking Instagram to exploring consciousness in thirty seconds. Context switching depletes energy and disorients momentum. Light a candle, put a record on, make some tea, send a signal to your nervous system that you're shifting from surface-mode to depth-mode.
Batch the Shallow Work
Designate specific times for maintenance tasks like social media, emails, admin work. Protect the rest of your day. Shallow work expands to fill whatever time you give it.
Use Dead Time Deliberately
Instead of firing up podcasts during your commutes, sit with a single question. Instead of scrolling while the morning coffee brews, stare out the window and let your mind meander. Really watch the weather patterns of your mind in these moments, be curious (not critical) about what comes up.
Questions for Diving Deep
Keep these nearby for when you need to drop in deeper:
What am I pretending not to know?
What would my work look like if I stopped trying to be understood by everyone?
What would I create if I trusted my audience to be smarter?
What truth feels too dangerous to share?
What would happen if I made this weirder, stranger, more me?
Don't answer immediately. Let them cook.
Taking time to go deep isn't selfish or counterproductive, it's the entire fucking point. The world doesn't need another perfectly optimized and sterile content strategy. It needs your weird, wonderful thoughts granted real time to elevate, to get richer, to become extraordinary.
Your audience didn't follow you for consistent posting schedules. They followed you for your ideas, your perspective, for the way your mind works. Your real audience - the people who matter - didn't follow you for your impressive performance of “productivity”. They're here for the silly / crazy / disgusting / insane nuggets nestled deep in your brain’s crunchiest crinkles, the connections only you can make, the truths only you can tell.
The fragment of an idea knocking around in your head right now, the one you keep putting off investing in until you have “more time”? It might very well be the work that changes everything. Not just for your career, but for the people who desperately need to connect with it.
So disappear if you need to. Take a day off, take a lunch hour, follow the rabbit hole. Feed the part of you that became a creator in the first place. Ideally, find a rhythm where disappearing routinely is a season in your creative cycle.
Whatever you stand to lose by stepping away, the opportunities that evaporate, the momentum that stalls, the income that dips, wasn't meant for you anyway. If your success depends on never hopping off the hamster wheel, it was never sustainable, it was never yours. Consider this your chance to optimize differently: not for algorithmic approval, but for the work that will outlast the fickle platforms. Not for everyone's comfort, but for your own.
Photo by Tate Lohmiller on Unsplash