Can art exist without being perceived by consciousness?

Popularity isn’t a prerequisite for quality.

Just because nobody cares about the thing you make, doesn’t mean it’s not great. Just because your product doesn’t earn immediate marketplace adoption, doesn’t take away its inherent value.

Now, the private equity bankers and venture capitalists would disagree, as they rarely invest hundreds of millions of dollars in ideas that aren’t properly validated.

But then again, overpaid white collar gamblers whose job it is to give advice on companies they don’t even work for aren’t always right. People don’t know. They’re guessing.

• Decca, the record label that gained prominence in the early sixties, famously told a quartet of handsome young lads that guitar groups were on the way out. Mop haired rockers had no future in show business. Beatlemania quickly proved that the label made the biggest mistake in the history of music. One that cost billions of dollars.
• Battery is the venture capital firm that had the chance to invest in this exciting new social network back in the early two thousands, but passed on the investment. Facebook later exploded in popularity and eventually became the second largest country in the world. Woops.

And so, who’s to say what is going to be popular, or even good?

Because on the other end of the spectrum, think how many brands instantly gained the attention and adoption of their wildest dreams, but then fizzled out a year later when the house of cards came crashing down? Does that make their product any better or worse?

The lesson for the creator goes back to the great philosophical question.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Can beautiful art even exist without being perceived by public consciousness?

In my experience, it almost has to. If we don’t believe our creative work can count as good, even in the absence of external validation and attention, then we’re going to have a hard time keeping ourselves motivated. Because the temptation to globalize our incompetence will be too strong to resist.

Nobody has bought a copy of my book yet? Not a single download of my new app? Zero subscribers to my software product? Well, I’m a worthless piece of shit. There’s no point. Time to move on.

That’s patently untrue. Just because you don’t have something black and white to hang your hat on, doesn’t mean you have an easy excuse to knock yourself out of the game.

Life is long. Try sticking around for a while and getting your kicks from the process. If you can learn to give up the perfectionistic standard of how your business should be, deleting the word should from your internal narrative, you can feel fulfilled no matter how your work is perceived.

You can achieve satisfaction from the cake alone, even if you don’t have the icing on top of it.

What if popularity wasn’t a prerequisite for quality?