I learned something by not going to a conference.
Here's what I think now that I didn't do a thing.
Welcome back to the Writers Secret Weapon, the newsletter where I do my best to help you write better without giving you reheated advice you can get anywhere else. I’m John, and for over two decades it’s been my pleasure and privilege to help writers and creatives write better.
This week, I want to tell you about something I didn’t do. I’d like to make clear that I’m sure everyone involved in that thing are nice people, I bet they wash their hands every time they’re in the bathroom, and I bet they totally don’t put empty containers back in the fridge. They’re nice people doing stuff, it just wasn’t stuff for me.
But by not going, I did myself some good. Here’s the story.
Their side of the street
There was a conference that promised to help me do better. I am a sucker for things that promise me I can do better.
So I paid for a seat and haven't gone to a single seminar or talked to a single "professional." It was not cheap, but I'm okay with eating the cost. Here's why.
If you see an advertisement for something called "Growing Your Business And Finding Your Audience", you'd probably assume that it's going to talk about things like workflows or audience building strategies. You'd probably assume it was slightly unequal parts rah-rah to informative presentation. Maybe you'd even go the next step and look at the list of speakers to see if any particularly interested you. After all, you're paying for a seat, or at least you're wanting to pay for a seat, you want to get your money's worth.
And sure, maybe one speaker out of the two dozen might hit you with an upsell for their own stuff, maybe they're new and bringing the topic to themselves is comfortable and they saw this conference as an opportunity to make a splash. You have to expect stuff like that every now and then, people sell things, they've been trained to, it's inescapable. It sucks, but welcome to late stage capitalism.
Now let's say that you're impressed or even taken in and charmed by the marketing so you pay the early bird price for a seat, even though people are a little skimpy on information other than a list of speakers and a general statement of how they're all going to help you either grow your business or help you find your audience. The conference is weeks away, surely they'll roll out more info as you get closer to the start date.
Time passes, maybe if you're like me, you lose track of the weeks passing, so when the email lands in your inbox you come to it with some eagerness, like it's new all over again.
Sure enough, it's more information about the conference, now associating little blurbs with the speakers. Some of it is biographical, you can see a number of speakers have spoken before elsewhere and a lot of them use the word "consultant" or "entrepreneurial rock star" to describe what they do. Fine, it's just a little marketing language, the conference is still trying to move some last-minute tickets. You've got a link to the website to attend the conference now, you can go about your business.
The conference kicks off a few days later. The whole website goes live and you can read for the first time what everyone's going to be talking about and when and plan your time accordingly.
And that's when you see it.
Every single speaker is selling something. Some have AI material to help you "expedite your productivity 10x" others have "foolproof systems to help you get your first 10k customers" others have all new expensive tech to show off. Everyone's got a thing, everyone's got a gimmick or some genius capitalist idea (like outsourcing your admin work to third-world countries because "you're helping other people find dignity in work.)
But you paid the money. You budgeted for this. Maybe what all these people are doing in their fancy studios with their big bright smiles and their enthusiasm to be billionaires (the opening speaker’s presentation is literally called “We’re All Going To Be Billionaires!!!”) has to be working because they’ve got fancy studios and big bright smiles. They’re speaking at a conference, so presumably they got paid something to be here.
They’re professionals.
They’re winning at business.
They’re better than you.
Aren’t they?
And that’s why I’m not attending.
My side of the street
I’m not comfortable using AI to 10x anything. AI isn’t Jarvis or Data1, it’s not going to hang out with me while also being an amazing assistant. I don’t want to exploit people in a third-world country, because work doesn’t help you find your dignity, dignity is an inalienable human right formed by you being a human, no matter if you work or where you live.
I don’t care how shiny your smile is. Or how you’re filming this in 8k so you can edit it up for socials later. I thought you’d help me, not upsell me. I thought things would be different.
Am I naive Romantic too caught up in utopic ideas and too foolish to see how business works? Maybe. If we measure bank accounts, probably. Am I getting older and maybe a little cynical and bitter? Maybe. I can turn my anger and self-loathing into some pretty sharp knives against myself.
I just can’t imagine being that wrong about people. I can’t believe that people would walk into a room, into a conference with paying attendees with all ranges of experience and life and income and plans and dreams, and then someone else would just upsell them on expensive subscriptions or talk in circles about how you need to look at a moodboard until your customers show up.
I am willing to be wrong. I’ve been wrong so many times in my life. Maybe I’ve finally taken all my knowledge about how to tell stories and told myself one that’s so deeply poisonous that I’ve made it impossible for me to succeed.
But I don’t measure success in making sure my set of numbers is bigger than someone else’s set of numbers. That would require self-esteem I ditched decades ago. And I don’t measure success in always having a new product with low overhead that can go flying off shelves, because that would require capital I’ve never had.
I measure success in abstract things made tangible - a writer who didn’t think they could start or finish a book holding a copy of it in their hands; someone who fought doubt and paralysis for years puts words in a manuscript; someone picks up a paintbrush for the first time; someone writing a wedding toast for their daughter’s big day. I didn’t need AI for that. I didn’t need to pay fractions of pennies on the dollar to have someone half a world away toil for me.
So why did I get a ticket for this event in the first place?
The business-art gap
When you’re writing a book, you’re making art. That gets pretty abstract for people, so usually I steer them towards a different viewpoint: that they’re getting the story out of their head and onto a page so that the story can go into someone else’s head.
Doesn’t matter what the story is. Two people in love. A kingdom under siege. A young girl wizard. It’s art. And the creative person is an artist. Not a factory. Not a producer of business material. They make art. Just like all the artists Ninja Turtles were named for. Just like the dancers and actors and filmmakers they watch. Just like every kid in school with a smock and sticky fingers. Artists, all of them.
But this thing happens when the art is done and it has to go out into the world. The art, which up to that point was something vague and notional and ephemeral barely contained by letters on a page now has to be made a product. It transforms into a commodity. It becomes something people sell and to sell it they need people to sell it to, so they need an audience. They need consumers. They need business.
I mean, they don’t, ultimately we can abolish capitalism and currency, liberate all oppressed people and change the way we live so that communities of people help each other flourish as caring humans chasing dreams over dollar signs, but for the moment today, we need products and customers and we have to sell sell sell so they can buy buy buy and we win win win2.
Every single writer I’ve worked with, every artist I’ve met, every creative person I know, has taken their art from abstraction to production and reached the point where they have to sell it and they, even for a second, freeze. Because there’s this gap. This divide. This thing you can’t art your way over.
Suddenly you need salescopy and a pitch and you have to muscle through resistance and build an audience and it feels sometimes like you’re jamming forks and broken bottles into your heart and eyes because all this business seems so much the polar opposite of the writing and art you were doing.
It can be incredibly difficult to apply the “rules” of business to art. You can sales funnel and lead magnet and push to platforms until your ears fall off, but it becomes a greased slide and you get stuck doing that more than the art you’re trying to market in the first place. Too many of us see this slide and wrongly decide to do different, choosing to do marketing with that “write the term paper the night before it’s due” energy, trying to build an audience or connect with people in little bursts after art is done. Because that’s what a business would do - they’d get inventory, then they’d sell that inventory.
But art isn’t truly inventory. Art starts as an expression of self, and you don’t need to hold 1500 of those in boxes in the back of the store before you open the doors up and invite people in.
You have to be willing to let people in as you’re making things, in the same way that what you’re making has to be inviting enough to also take people in as they’re engaging with it.
You gather them around, you tell them about how it’s going, you share part of what you’re making, you talk about what it’s like to make it, you encourage them to come back again and again to see more and see where things are going. I’m not sure which rule of business that is or isn’t, but I know it’s a good experience for artist and audience alike.
But what do I know, I bought a ticket for a conference and didn’t go to a single event.
Love you. Talk soon.
I couldn’t think of other cool AI. Let me know if you think of any.
If you could tell me what we win, I’d appreciate it