Sometime around 2014, the startup mentality escaped Silicon Valley like a gremlin from a cargo hold and infected the rest of us. Suddenly your sourdough habit needed a value proposition. Your dating profile needed a pivot strategy. And your creative workâwell, it wasn’t enough to just make things anymore. You had to scale them.
I get it. The language is seductive. “Minimum viable product” sounds so much more responsible than “I made a thing and I’m scared to show anyone.” “Growth mindset” feels better than “I’m perpetually unsatisfied.” And “disrupting the space” has a certain cache that “I painted some flowers on a Tuesday” simply lacks.
But here’s the thing: your art is not a startup. And treating it like one won’t make you more productive or more successful. It’ll just make you miserable in a very specific, very managerial way.
The Minimum Viable Painting
The concept of a minimum viable product makes perfect sense when you’re building software. Ship early, learn from users, iterate. The market tells you what works. Fine. Great. I don’t want to live in a world where every app spends five years in development before anyone sees it.
But this logic starts to break down when you apply it to creative work. A painting isn’t a beta release. A short story doesn’t need user testing. And the impulse to “ship fast and break things”âbesides being a questionable philosophy in generalâmakes even less sense when the “things” you’re breaking are your own willingness to make anything.
I’ve watched countless friends and acquaintances paralyze themselves trying to apply lean methodology to their novel. They outline like they’re building a product roadmap. They write sample chapters like they’re pitching to investors. And somewhere in all that optimization, they lose the actual pleasure of making the thingâwhich, I should point out, was the whole point before the spreadsheets got involved.
The dirty secret of art is that it’s supposed to be a little wasteful. You’re supposed to write scenes that go nowhere, paint over canvases you liked, record takes that don’t make the final cut. That’s not inefficiency. That’s how creation actually works. Trying to squeeze every session for maximum output doesn’t make you more artistic. It makes you a factoryâand not even a factory that makes anything good.
Pivot Culture and the Death of Commitment
In the startup world, a pivot is a sign of intelligence. You tried something, the market didn’t want it, you changed direction. Adaptability is survival. Makes sense.
In art, a pivot is sometimes necessary too. But the constant, twitchy readiness to abandon ship the moment something gets hard? That’s not adaptability. That’s fear wearing a very expensive vest.
I see this most often in people who’ve consumed too much entrepreneurial content. They start a project, hit the inevitable middle stretch where everything feels like garbage and progress has slowed to a crawl, and they decide they need to “pivot.” Maybe they switch from literary fiction to thriller. Maybe they abandon oils for digital. Maybe they start a podcast instead because that’s where the audience is.
But the middle stretchâAnne Lamott calls it the “messy middle,” Julia Cameron calls it something else entirely, I call it “Tuesday”âis where art actually lives. The friction isn’t a bug. It’s not a signal that you chose the wrong project. It’s the project becoming itself. And every time you pivot away from that friction, you’re robbing yourself of the depth that comes from pushing through it.
Startups pivot because they’re solving a problem and they need to find the right solution. Art isn’t solving a problemâat least not in that way. Art is exploring a question, and you can’t explore a question if you keep switching questions every time the first one gets interesting.
Growth for Growth’s Sake
If there’s one phrase that’s done more damage to creative people than any other, it’s “growth mindset.” Not the actual concept, which Carol Dweck laid out thoughtfully in her researchâalways believing you can improve through effort and learning. That’s fine. Good, even. But the bastardized version that circulates online? The one that says you should always be growing your audience, growing your output, growing your personal brand?
That’s just cancer dressed up in productivity drag.
I’ve met writers who are genuinely proud of the fact that they haven’t taken a day off in three years. Painters who measure their success by how many Instagram followers they gained this quarter. Musicians who spend more time analyzing streaming metrics than they do practicing. And every single one of them looks exhaustedânot the good kind of exhausted that comes from losing yourself in your work, but the hollow kind that comes from grinding for a number on a screen.
Art doesn’t grow the way a business grows. A business scales: you find what works and you do more of it, hopefully with better margins. Art deepens. You find what works and you sit with it, turn it over, see what else it has to teach you. The novelist who writes the same book fifteen times because it sells is not growing. They’re shrinking. They’re just doing it with better quarterly numbers.
The Metrics Trap
Let me be honest about something embarrassing: for about two years, I tracked my creative output in a spreadsheet. Daily word counts. Hours spent. “Sessions” completed. I even had a formula that calculated my rolling seven-day average, because apparently I wasn’t content to just ruin my own weekâI needed to ruin next week too.
The spreadsheet didn’t make me better. It made me anxious. It turned every creative session into a performance review. And worst of all, it gave me a convenient excuse to avoid the actual work: instead of writing, I was tracking my writing. Instead of making things, I was making charts about making things. Very efficient. Very pointless.
This is what the startup mentality does to creative people. It convinces you that if you’re not measuring it, it doesn’t count. And then you spend so much time measuring that you forget to actually make anything worth measuring.
Some things resist quantification. The quality of an afternoon spent drawing. The value of a conversation that changes how you see your work. The weird, quiet satisfaction of finishing something that no one will ever read or see, just because finishing it mattered to you. These things don’t fit in a spreadsheet, and that’s not a flaw in the system. That’s a flaw in spreadsheets.
A Better Way to Think About Making Things
Make first, optimize never
Or at least, optimize very rarely, and only after you’ve made enough work to know what “better” even looks like for you. You don’t need a content calendar. You need a notebook and the willingness to fill it with things that don’t work.
Commit to the project, not the outcome
Finish things. Not because they’ll be goodâmost of them won’t beâbut because finishing is a skill, and it’s one you can only develop by doing it over and over. The startup mentality tells you to quit fast if something isn’t working. The artistic mentality tells you to keep going until you discover what the thing was actually about.
Ignore your numbers for a month
Turn off your analytics. Mute your notifications. Don’t check your followers, your streams, your views. Just make things and let them exist without any data attached. See how it feels. If it feels terrifying, that tells you something important about how much you’ve let the numbers define your relationship to your own work.
Let your art be small
Not everything needs to scale. Not every project needs to become a series, a brand, a business. Some poems are just poems. Some sketches are just sketches. The startup mentality will tell you that you’re leaving potential on the table. I’m telling you that sometimes a small, finished thing is worth more than a grand, abandoned plan.
FAQ
But what about artists who do treat their work like a business and succeed?
Sure, they exist. And some of them make really good work! But correlation isn’t causation. The business acumen didn’t make the art goodâthe art was good, and the business skills helped it find an audience. Those are two different things. You can learn marketing without treating your creative process like a board meeting. In fact, you probably should.
Isn’t some structure good? Don’t I need some goals?
Absolutely. Goals are fine. Daily practices are fine. The issue isn’t structureâit’s the specific kind of structure that treats creative work like a revenue pipeline. Set a goal to write for thirty minutes a day, and you’re a person with a healthy habit. Set a goal to increase your daily word count by 5% each quarter, and you’re a person who’s lost the plot, possibly literally.
What if I actually want to make a living from my art?
Then you’ll need to learn some business skills, and there’s no shame in that. But learn them alongside your art, not instead of it. The business of selling your work is separate from the practice of making it, and conflating the two is how you end up writing marketing copy instead of writing whatever you actually care about. Keep two hats. Wear them at different times.
The startup mentality has its place. That place is startups. Your artâyour odd, unscalable, metrics-resistant artâdeserves better than to be treated like a product that hasn’t found its market yet. It deserves your attention, your patience, and your willingness to let it be exactly as small and strange as it needs to be.
And honestly? So do you.
