On the Master List of Human Challenges™, timing lands somewhere in the top 5, depending on the day.
When it comes to creating and publishing content, timing has more to do with our audience’s readiness for it than it does with our own agenda.
We only have to look at some of Western history’s great masters to see this to be true.
Vincent van Gogh.
Emily Dickinson.
Claude Monet.
None were received well at the time of publishing their content. Yet today, each of these masters, along with dozens of others, are regarded as some of our finest examples of creativity, invention, insight.
Why is that so many of the modern world’s most revered artists struggled to have their work accepted at the time they produced and offered it to the world?
Why is that a span of time — sometimes years, often decades — needs to pass before the world recognizes how astonishing and valuable and marvelous a certain piece or type of content truly is?
Thoughts around these questions range from the content being ahead of its time, or needing more of a story around it (i.e. the creator’s history, struggles, sacrifices, etc.) in order for it to gain the illustrious notoriety its audience demands.
Think of the story about van Gogh cutting off his ear, for example. That one intriguing yet grotesque detail adds tremendous weight to the artist’s contributions — but only after several decades passed and a new century arrived.
As much as we’d all dearly love to control when and how an audience responds to our content, doing so takes an enormous amount of effort, not to mention buckets of cash — with no guarantees of the outcomes. Plans can be drafted, strategies put in place, new products and services launched, only to be met with disinterest, mockery, or (perhaps worst of all), silence.
Yet anyone working in a business or field that demands new content consistently cannot afford to sit back and do nothing. It’s the proverbial chicken or the egg scenario, where figuring out which comes first — content or an audience’s desire for content — becomes a dizzying puzzle that can drive even the most stalwart artist-inventor-marketer mad.
Here’s the thing. Sometimes you just have to create content because it needs to be created. For yourself. For your team. For your organization. Because you have a vision, like Steve Jobs did, with the iPhone. Like Claude Monet had, with “Water Lilies.”
We live in a time where data and numbers and metrics drive so many decisions, yet even those systems of measuring what people want are flawed because they are based on the past as opposed to the right now.
Should someone like van Gogh, whose artistic impulse was so strong, have sent out a survey to his target audience before dipping one paint brush into his palette of paint so he could paint what they said they’d buy? What happens when an audience changes its mind between the time it was surveyed and the time the content arrives in the world?
It’s absurd to think of creation in that way, yet that is where we find ourselves in this new world of creating and publishing content. Horror stories abound about systems and programs and software and products that were built over weeks, months, even years before entering the marketplace only to fall flat in the online space. (I happen to be a central character in one of those stories which I will share in a future post.)
But for now, gurus from every corner of the Internet preach never to create anything unless you’ve done your homework about audience desire first. Then, and only then, do you build up anticipation for said program-product-service (the way Jobs did with the iPhone) before finally unveiling its magnificence and ideally, triggering a buying frenzy that sets you up for life.
Anyone who’s created any kind of content, whether one blog post or an entire product launch, knows how unlikely the above scenario is. Sometimes our content will hit the bullseye and other times it will miss it completely. What’s most important is to keep moving forward, even if that means seeing our content from a different angle and adjusting accordingly.
As long as we remain in integrity about our project, the timing of when it’s well received isn’t quite as important as getting it done.
