If you make something and no one is there to appreciate it, is it worth creating?

Let's dive in. Different scopes, different answers.

If we're talking about building a tech product, survey says... absolutely do not build something until you have validated a market demand. Do the bare minimum before you build. Create a landing page that sells your product before you've taken a single step to create it.

Why? Because if you're building a product, its consumption is central to its value. We typically build products to serve a need, create value, and make money.

But creation doesn’t always serve a market — it can also serve the self. Enter: the arts.

Artistic creation benefits from the opposite approach. You may be surprised to learn that making art doesn't make as much money as tech. Shocker.

And yet, we create art anyway. We artists make for the sake of creation. It's an internal imperative.

Sure, there are other reasons people create art. To belong, to seduce, to feel important.

But from my perspective, the highest ideal of artistic creation is for the sake of creation itself. There is no means to an end. Art is not so that we can get approval, love, appreciation, sex. The creation itself is its own reward.

And this doesn't mean art is just for us. Art needs witness — not for validation, but for completion. In being seen, it lives beyond us. Our art has to venture out into the world to alchemize — it is not creation for the artist alone.

But the act of creation, actualized by the sharing of the art, is the reward. Not the fame, not the praise.

Why? Because when we create art, we change ourselves. We transform. Something within us has moved in our creation of art. We are not the same person before and after our expression.

The creative act is a spiritual act of transformation. It externalizes our own journey through life.