I’m not trying to write cozy aphorisms to make you comfortable in your creative pursuits. I want you to squirm a little when I tell you that your skills might not actually be as important as you think they are, that gates are not meant for keeping and that responding to market forces, meme-culture and focus groups are at best vapid and hollow, and at worse patronage to a soulless master.

I want you to object. I want you to rethink. And then I want you to adjust your perspective a little bit even if you roll your eyes at my presumptive arrogance on the topic of your skill.

If you take away anything from reading these posts or listening to my podcasts you should be a little irked that some random guy could have the gall to call your boardroom-style pursuit of personal brand and textbook-grade art and commercially viable chord progressions anything but magical. 

Comfortable is complacent. 

Clean is boring. 

Perfection is the pursuit of the placid and flaccid.

Following the rules is the domain of algorithms and what AIs now seem to do best. Not you, tho, do you?

Wrong is more right than you want to admit, and I’m willing to punch you in the creative gut if it helps you realize that simple notion for even a few moments.

I was going to try not to stray beyond 200 words in any given post.

If I couldn’t get the idea out in two hundred, maybe it wasn’t honed enough. Maybe I was babbling. Maybe it should have been something bigger than a blurb herein.

But the problem? Every post last week was well over two hundred, the last one creeping up to nearly 300 words. 

Is that a bad thing?

Guardrails, even self-imposed ones can be important for the simple reason that creative restrictions often create a better product. In this particular case, volume was not my challenge. I know I can sit down any day and type-type-type out an essay-length post if I am so inclined. My challenge to myself and for the focus of this project was rather honing ideas to a sharp point, not muddling around in a big vat of chocolate-pudding-flavoured ideas.

What are your guardrails? Do you step over them?  And does it ultimately, honestly, make the result better? Or not.