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Most artists would love an audience. But it’s all too easy to fall into the trap of putting audience before our art. This is not always the wrong choice, but it is a choice that we need to consciously make.

I create music, both professionally and as a passion project. I’m very fortunate to have had the opportunities that I have had to create music, and if I get my way, I’ll be creating it for the rest of my life. While finding stable income has historically always been one of the banes of the artist, I still find that one of the other big obstacles to creating what excites me is actually my own internal dialogues. Hopefully if you have ever tried something creative, you can relate to the relentless internal questioning of whether the creation is any “good”, or if anyone will engage with it. In my experience, giving in to those questions can be the death of the creative process.

Now I am acutely aware that writing about the inner experiences of being an artist (or even calling yourself an artist) always risks sounding profoundly pretentious. But as with all real experiences, these are real experiences. And if you are someone who finds you can relate to any of them, I want you to know you are definitely not alone. I was having a chat with a pretty successful author recently (NY Times best-seller and having-your-own-Wikipedia-page kind of successful), and we were discussing these same kinds of creative obstacles that we all face at any point in the journey. It is too easy to throw your ideas into the trash too early because you are worried that it won’t help you become über-famous.

Now if you are expecting me to say “just follow your heart and the rest will work out, and soon you will become über-famous,” then I am sorry to disappoint. In my experience, and what I’ve gathered from many experiences across artistic industries, doing so won’t make you über-famous. And if you’re (un)fortunate enough to enjoy creating stuff that is quite far from the mainstream, then you probably won’t become the next Taytay. But this doesn’t mean it is wasted.

Definitely not to say that mainstream art isn’t innovative. With its reach and influence, mainstream creations can have huge cultural ripples if they are, in fact, innovative at their core. But for the 99.9% of us who haven’t had the right cocktail of fortune to put us in the spotlight, there’s no reason we can’t be innovative too. By absorbing all the art that inspires you, and then making decisions in new creative directions that excite you, you can be building out new kinds of art. These creations go out into the flowing stream that is culture, and they might inspire the next one or two people to take things even further.

This is obviously not the only way to approach making art, and if you are creating it for a collaborative commercial product, then taking the “design” approach before the “artistic expression” approach may be the better option. But I suspect you might find, as I have, that allowing myself to follow my kind of creativity has done wonders for my artistic health in the long-game — regardless of whether an audience stumbles upon it or not.