500 days of summer and 50/50 are two of my favourite movies and because of that, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is one of my favourite actors… and this week I stumbled across a Ted talk he gave titled “How craving attention makes you less creative.”
I need to open this with a disclaimer – I am not a red pill, blue pill, matrix guy and I don’t wear a tin foil hat about anything. I don’t think social media is inherently evil, and I try not to pine for the past. Ok? Ok.
So the premise of JGL’s Ted talk is that there are two ways to think about attention… two feelings around attention… getting attention and paying attention.
I love the concept even though I don’t necessarily think his talk explores that concept as deeply as I wish it did – he kinda goes off on an Instagram bashing rant which spoils the message of the talk.
Anyway, I’ve watched it 10 times now in 2 days (I’m kinda obsessive like that) and I’m gonna tell you what I think the cool messages are in his talk.
So… what he says is that getting attention is an addiction. And as with any addiction, it’ll never be enough. And if you chase the feeling that comes from getting attention, your creativity will suffer because you’re chasing the addictive feeling.
Chasing the feeling that comes from getting attention, he says, also turns everyone into competition.
Why are they getting more likes when what they posted is worse than what I posted?
Why do they have more followers? They’re not even funny.
Why do they have more money, more awards, better jobs than me?
So chasing the feeling of getting attention means you become bitter, and that won’t change if you get the attention you’re chasing, because then you’ll chase more. He talks about having millions of followers, but he’ll still feel a pang of shame or like a failure when he sees another actor has more than him.
So whatever happens, your attention being focused on getting attention means you’re not, or rarely, paying attention to what you’re actually creating. And it’s never enough.
JGL says: “If your creativity is driven by a desire to get attention, you’re never going to be creatively fulfilled.“
So then he goes onto what he calls the opposite, and that’s to chase the feeling of paying attention instead.
His analogy is when he’s filming a scene for a movie, if he’s trying to make sure his performance is better than the other actors, he’s focusing on the wrong thing.
Just like with us, as wedding creatives, if we see our photos etc as just a means to hopefully achieve some attention it’s very hard to pay attention to our enjoyment of the process of making it
I think that’s the real message in the talk, as opposed to Instagram being an evil behemoth who sells our attention (true, yes, but not the point).
I love taking photos. I really do. I always have. I love everything involved in taking a photo – from buying a camera, picking a lens, choosing my settings, finding a composition, clicking the shutter… I love all that. That’s all the stuff that pulled me into photography and gave me this career.
I love writing. But truthfully, the reason this newsletter fell away is that I wasn’t getting enough attention – not enough replies, not enough new subscribers.
I loved making my old podcast. The reason I cancelled it – not enough instagram followers… for real… I had loads of listeners but nobody could see that number but me – the number everyone could see… the 500ish Instagram followers was an embarrassment to me.
I love coding and making websites do stuff, and creating apps and software when I have time. What holds me back from pushing this side of my creative life, is that Instagram and Tiktok are full of coders and programmers who are younger, cooler and cleverer than me so what’s the point?
But I don’t know if you’re seeing the problem here… I love all those things but I don’t write as much, and I don’t podcast any more, and I don’t code every day despite loving those things because maybe, possibly, probably… ok definitely… I wasn’t paying attention to the process, I was chasing the attention that may or may not (most likely not) exist at the end of the bit that I actually enjoy, the creating of the thing.
The detachment for me from Joseph Gordon-Levitt is that he’s in a performance art and taking it back to the wedding photography, we aren’t. But that should be amazing, because it should mean we’re fully able to pay attention to the creative act, because we’re making it for people who couldn’t give a shit about who we are.
I’m not talking about Instagram… Imagine a future conversation…
“Wow mummy is that you?”
“Yes that was me on my wedding day!”
“You look so beautiful! Who’s that?”
“Oh that’s your great grandma, she’d have loved you so much.”
Follow that conversation through in your mind… do you think at any point you’re going to be mentioned? No. Exactly. But you did that. You created that photo, those photos, those memories, that conversation is fuelled by the thing we’re creating.
Embrace that. Enjoy that.
I’m talking to myself here, just as much as I’m talking to you. And I’ll leave you with the last line of the JGL Ted talk, because I’m going to adopt it as a personal mantra.
“Regardless of how much attention I do or don’t get as a result, I’m happy I did it.”
Thanks for reading,
Adam
