Pushing the creative snowball down the hill

Communication only becomes influential when others are willing to take action on your message.

It doesn’t matter how cleverly written or flawlessly performed your work is, it’s whether it induces audiences to convince themselves of something.

This is a helpful metric for success, as it’s easy for creators to obsess over trivial nuances of their work. We paralyze ourselves sweating the smallest things that most people won’t even notice.

Should we center the logo? Is the headline optimized for search engines? What about getting a better stock photography picture for the hero image? How much traffic do we need to consider this to be a success?

None of that matters.

If someone tells you that their behavior has changed as a result of seeing you work, then it’s a win. For you and for them. You don’t need people to stand up and slow clap, you need them to march out of the room and actually do something.

Who’s taking action on your ideas? Are you willing to take a risk and push your snowball over the threshold?

Hopefully so. Because the bigger and faster that snowball gets, the more internal cohesiveness, collective gravity and apparent momentum it possesses.

And once that icy little bugger gets going, the experiment itself becomes smarter than its creator. It begins to take on a life of its own.

Steering itself onto a new and better course than originally planned.

Growing into something we never could have imagined.

Do you need standing ovations, or march out of the room actions?