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Hi friends, I came across this interview with Jerry Seinfeld the other day about his creative process, and one section stood out.
Q: You and Larry David wrote Seinfeld together, without a traditional writers’ room, and burnout was one reason you stopped. Was there a more sustainable way to do it? Could McKinsey or someone have helped you find a better model? JS: Who’s McKinsey? Q: It’s a consulting firm. JS: Are they funny? Q: No. JS: Then I don’t need them. If you’re efficient, you’re doing it the wrong way. The right way is the hard way. The show was successful because I micromanaged it—every word, every line, every take, every edit, every casting. That’s my way of life. As a creator, there are a few ways to read this. The first and most obvious is that if you want to do great work, you need to be intimately involved in the creation of it. When it comes to content creation, personally, I can’t think of a single example of a person who’s been successful who doesn’t have a deep understanding of, opinions on, and minute involvement with their craft. This is especially true in the AI era with the premium on direct-from-founder, human-to-human content. Of course, you could argue that as mainstream entertainment (if not outright art), there’s a higher bar for Seinfeld than for the content marketing you and I are doing for our businesses. But I don’t think that’s true. Sure, once Seinfeld was up and running, with each episode costing millions of dollars to produce, the stakes were high. But are they any higher than the stakes each of us is up against—our livelihoods? In the end, you, me, and Seinfeld are playing the same game: Create stuff that is good enough that once people try it, they keep coming back. If Seinfeld failed to hold people’s attention, it would lose its TV deal (and perhaps its business). If we fail to hold people’s attention, we lose our lead flow (and perhaps our business). Same game. Different medium. What’s more, while on the surface it might seem like Seinfeld was playing the game on a harder mode—competing in the arena of primetime, network TV, I suspect it’s you and me who are playing the harder game. Consider. In Seinfeld’s heyday, there was no YouTube. No social media. No podcasts. Which meant that while there was extremely limited distribution—basically limited by the number of TV stations multiplied by hours in the day—if you could land one of those spots, you were guaranteed some initial exposure. Because audiences simply didn’t have as many alternative places to direct their attention. Compare that to today, where distribution is effectively infinite… but so is competition. Rather than competing with several hundred other shows pitching NBC for that slot in their programming, you and I are engaged in a daily battle with billions of pieces of content spanning the history of the internet. Thanks to syndication (not to mention YouTube), in fact, you and I are still competing for attention with Seinfeld. All this to say: The level of dedication to craft it took for Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David to win and hold the attention required to create the greatest sitcom of all time… Might be the same level of dedication that you and I need to win and hold the attention of our audiences today. But then, there’s the other reading of the interview. The one based on this line in the opening question: “…burnout was one reason you stopped.” As businesses that necessarily run on our input—content, sales, client delivery, etc—burnout is perhaps the singular existential threat to our businesses. Which means we must do everything in our power to avoid it. If our businesses run on our creative output, and if we expect to be running our businesses for decades to come, a level of obsession with our craft that leads to burnout at any time before that is untenable and unacceptable. Which brings us to the paradox of doing creative work on the internet:
Both are true. Both are in conflict. And personally, I’m not sure that they can be cleanly resolved. But I don’t think they need to be. I think, rather, that our job is not in finding a way to resolve these opposing forces but in grappling to resolve them. Holding both objectives in our minds and attempting to find a balance that may never truly exist. Personally, I’ve taken to putting a lot of effort into my best creative work on a sporadic and/or seasonal basis (Killer Concept, The Podcast Marketing Trends Report, Podcast Marketing Trends Explained). And then maintaining a steady flow of solid, sustainable work between those larger pushes (this newsletter). Other creators find their own ways of finding their way to the equilibrium between attention-worthy creative work, sustainability, and economic effectiveness. You have to find yours. Two closing thoughts: First. Finding the equilibrium is infinitely easier when you have an expensive, valuable, easy-to-sell Logic-Based Offer that doesn’t require you to build a 100k-person audience to survive. The stakes are a lot lower when you only need to make 25 sales a year and build an audience of a couple thousand people, after all. In the end, mundane as it sounds, perhaps the ultimate hack is business model design. Second. Perhaps one of the reasons Seinfeld was so difficult to sustain is that it (famously) had no concept. No premise to provide a level of structure, interest, and scaffolding for each episode to be built around. One of the core benefits of the core objectives (and outcomes) of developing a Killer Concept is that it makes creating high-quality episodes easier and more sustainable by shifting the hooks, tension, and intrigue from the episode level to the show level, which you design and lock in once, during the show development process, and then rarely need to think of again. Food for thought.
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