One Sidewalk Barker Needed Per Strip Club

I spend a lot of time in the shop doing monotonous work. Like the 2000 finger tops I need to finish before November. Listening to podcasts is a nice distraction as it keeps the mind sharp processing how others view topics. The best ones will both entertain and infuriate as both keep you thinking. Now as a self-diagnoses teacher (an unidentified disability) there is one mantra in the content creator “maker” community that sends me into a rage induced stupor. “I do this to inspire.” And boy did I go off today.

My deranged mind interprets “My content is to inspire” as an educator cop out. A way of saying you are not responsible for the hard earned influence you exert. Some of the top tier content creators in the maker community have fellowship numbers that rival the largest televangelists with weekly eyeball minutes that turn those same preachers green with envy. But at the end of their makers weekly sermon, after the tithing platters have been passed, they leave on the idea of “take what I say with a grain of salt, I’m only here to inspire” which is a waste of leadership opportunity for everyone but a Kardashian. Yet inspiration seems the dominate backstop of the current maker community.

You inspire to make people want to do something. You educate to empower them to do it. The percentage of proclaimed inspirers vs educators seems all flipped to this warped mind. Everybody trying to inspire is like having a fifty Times Square Street Barkers enticing the public into one club. What you want is one good barker guiding the masses into a club and 50 entertainers inside able to handle an individuals desires.

Now I get that the “film the learning experience” is the most popular troupe in the maker niche. It’s the easiest to create, most relatability to the largest audience (beginners) and thus easiest to grow influence among. Plus quality of result is irrelevant because it’s just there to demonstrate easy attainable levels of skill. It’s also the genre I hear “for inspiration only” the most. We need that continuous flow of beginner if we want our craft to grow. But as illustrated earlier everybody can’t be focused on getting people into the craft and ignore them once inside. Yet if the big guns in content creatorship land model that self-proclaimed inspirational content is the path to follow then everybody will try barking up that ladder to success.

Now when you’re a white belt it’s futile to learn from a black belt through observation only and much in this “learning experience” category is observational education. Watch a yellow belt struggle can inspire because you realize you’re only a little effort away from that same skill level. You understand the yellow belt isn’t Jackie Chan and that later on you’ll likely learn better techniques but still… baby steps. And when that Black Belt steps in front of the class s/he you’ll have a base level skill for the more advanced steps.

But you can’t stay yellow belt forever and black belts can’t pretend to be yellow. Lower belts also don’t have million member dojo’s of their own. So maybe my problem with this whole “inspiration” is time.

Does a content creator that has successfully been in the game for longer than it takes to earn a black belt have any right to fall back on the “for inspirational purpose only” mantra they had at the start? At what level of influence/power does Spiderman’s cliché supersede? If you have 100,000 in your weekly maker congregation do you have a responsibility stop inspiring and start educating? If you’re the leader of a megachurch who routinely instructs other preachers is there a responsibility to help mold the religion?

Yes a content creator can spend a lifetime filming themselves learning new stuff. But every time, they are also drawing upon years of experience. Knowledge does transfer. They aren’t approaching the beginner steps with the same lack of skill and knowledge base they had at the start of their career. They approach the situation with reasonable certainty of success. They might not go at the new niche with the same verve and skill of a master but still….

If the idea of trying to be inspirational was outlawed would content become better? Without that crutch to lean on I believe creators would spend more effort researching and explaining their reasoning for actions which might develop more kinship with the audience. I believe they’d dissect errors more and be a better model for troubleshooting. I have to believe they’d earn more respect from the audience even if they do something “wrong” but still make it all work in the end. The extra mental effort will mean less content overall but I gotta believe the higher quality overall would create better more evergreen content than before.

Telling the audience who is an inspiration is an irresponsible waste of power. I’m quite confident they can decide that on their own. Then again, my teacher brain is dysfunctional and this might be a macro vs micro debate of the benefits of effort types.

[coda: I write better with an editor.]