Time for a quiz. How many of the following people have you heard of? Kia Silverbrook, Pevita Pearce, Philo Farnsworth, Ashref El-ziftawi, Marcello Barenghi, and Priyanka Joshi. No Googling!

If you’re anything like me, you probably haven’t heard of any of them. But they all have one thing in common. Actually, I take that back. They have two things in common. The first is they were all mentioned in a single blog post by Charlie Hills. The second is that they’ve all added something to The River.

The what? Huh?

The River. I like to think of humanity’s collective creative output as a river and each artist is a tributary. Anyone can visit the river banks and take in as little or as much as they’d like. It thousands of miles long and it never stops flowing.

Stuck

I’ve droned on and on in the past about both my desire to create and my inability to do anything about it. The cynical reader — heck, even the sane reader — by now should be shouting at me, “Geez, just shut up and do something already!” And I would if I could just somehow pull myself together.

I struggle with a number of obstacles, but the biggest one is time. I often wonder if there exists a prolific artist who only gets a half hour a day to work on his or her craft. (If so, my guess is that prolific artist is also eight hundred and fifty years old. Because that’s about the only way the math works out in my head.) But there’s no getting around the simple fact: no time, no art.

But I have a confession. This is tough for me to admit — but honestly? — lack of time is just an excuse. It’s an excuse that’s just tall enough and wide enough to hide my entire body. In some ways, I feel like Gilderoy Lockhart from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets:

Snape: A girl has been snatched by the monster, Lockhart. Your moment has come at last.
Lockhart [stuttering]: My moment?
Snape: Weren’t you saying just last night you’ve known all along where the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets is?
Lockhart: . . .
McGonagall: That’s settled! We’ll leave you to deal with the monster Gilderoy. Your skills, after all, are legend.

In the next scene Lockhart is packing his bags and fixin’ to make a quick Gilderoy-shaped hole in the door.

So I can strut around all I want about saying I don’t have enough time. But when extra time suddenly falls in my lap, McGonagall and Snape call me out on it.

Snape: Weren’t you saying just last night that all you need is a little time to work on your novel, and you could be finished?
Hills: . . .
McGonagall: That’s settled!

The Real Hurdle

If time isn’t the problem, then what is? It’s my brain. And, not coincidentally, this is all tied to my previous post on What’s the Point?

For the sake of argument, let’s jump one year into the future. We’ll assume I overcame whatever mental obstacles were obstacling my mentals and I’ve created a beautiful painting, or composed my magnum opus, or typed out “The End” at the conclusion of my seven-book series Henry Porter vs. the Snaky Snake Man. Complete. Awesome. I could not be more proud.

Now during that year I envisioned, from time to time, the Wikipedia article that would undoubtedly be written about my creation. I don’t have any data to back this up, but I assume most content creators go through this phase: fantasizing about the large impact their work will have. We share some variation of the thought, “My content is awesome and it’s just what the world has been waiting for. Everyone shall lift me on their shoulders and parade me around the room.”

And so I imagine my work of art as a huge boulder. When the time comes to launch, that boulder will be heaved into The River and — splash! — I will get noticed! Everyone along the banks will “ooo!” and “ahhh!” as if at a fireworks display, marveling at the sight.

But I’m also a rational person. I get it: this is a fantasy. I am only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all! And even the mightiest among us cannot hurl boulders that large. To help avoid a letdown, I downshift. I picture instead a small pebble flung out into The River — plink!. I still get noticed, but to a much smaller extent. Much more realistic.

Sadly, this revised dream still leaves out something important. The world population is over seven billion. By some estimates, 55.1% of those people have internet access. By some other estimates, 55.1% of those people are creating and sharing photos, videos, drawings or paintings, short stories, novels, sculpture, crafts, scripts, plays, games, dancing, and so on. On YouTube alone, four hundred hours of video is uploaded every minute.

It’s mind boggling. And that’s where I find myself now. Forget the huge stone. Forget the pebble. At best, I will flick a single grain of sand into the torrent, alongside millions and millions of others. No matter what I do, how awesome it is, or how much time I spend on the it, I’m right back to artistic existential nihilism, and think: doesn’t matter if I do it or not. No one will ever notice one grain of sand.

Is There Good News?

For anyone still with me and worried about my state of mind, there’s good news. I’ll get to that in a minute. But first, let’s look back at the people I mentioned earlier. Who are they?

Kia Silverbrook: one of the most prolific inventors in the world. Holds over 4700 patents.

Philo Farnsworth: essentially invented television. Television. And barely anyone knows his name.

Pevita Pearce: actress and singer with over ten million followers on Instagram.

Ashref El-ziftawi: 1200 followers on SoundCloud. Not a lot, but he’s already doing something that I want to do, music-wise, and it will take me years to catch up.

Marcello Barenghi: phenomenal artist on YouTube with 1.4 million followers.

Priyanka Joshi: only 143 followers on Twitter, but at age 30 she is a scientist whose research “focuses on identifying small molecule drugs and metabolites in the human brain that can modulate the formation of amyloid beta protein clumps, thought to be the underlying cause of Alzheimer’s disease.”

The takeaway here is it doesn’t matter if you have 100 followers or 10,000,000 followers. What matters is you do you. Throw that grain of sand in and don’t worry about the splash. And never let “what’s the point?” be a reason to not even try.

You listening, Charlie? This is aimed straight at you!

Tune in next week where I wrap up this three four-part series.