If You Feel Like No One Cares About Your Creative Work... Watch This! - Glenn Gers

Key wellness / mindset strategies for creative work (especially when you feel unseen)

• Embrace “insignificance” as a normal, even freeing starting point

  • On a grand scale, everyone is insignificant (even legendary artists like Shakespeare are less “accessible” now than they were in their time).
  • Past “greatness” is also often just people being human, doing the best they could in their moment.
  • Use this perspective to reduce pressure to be validated by a “large audience.”

• Redefine success away from fame and toward the act of making

  • You can’t directly control outcomes (hits, fame, major attention).
  • You can control the quality and sincerity of the work and your effort to put it out.
  • “Significance is what happens when you do the job.” You earn opportunity by already doing the work, even when it feels small.

• Lower the emotional risk by accepting that results are luck

  • Many top performers still feel insecure; fame can come with fear of losing what they have.
  • Treat recognition as partly random (“luck”), so your wellbeing doesn’t depend on external validation.
  • If you wait to be “in” before creating, you may never get in—people want to see your work, not just your potential.

Practical self-care / productivity techniques for creatives

• Do the work assuming nobody will care

  • Make what you believe in.
  • Do it as well as you can.
  • Put it out anyway—your job is creation and sharing, not winning.

• Share publicly in whatever form fits your medium

  • If you make ceramics: open a small shop, set up a table at a street fair—bring it to people.
  • If you write: put scripts out on the internet; let people read them without over-strategizing how to “win.”
  • Create a habit of output + visibility: “Show it to anyone you can.”

• Aim for “work you can be proud of,” not guaranteed hits

  • Make “the best version you can” and define “better” for yourself.
  • Create small challenges that keep the process meaningful (e.g., “How can I blend a rom-com into a western?”).
  • If you’d still watch it in an empty theater, that’s a sign you’re valuing the right outcome.

• Find satisfaction in small audiences and early feedback

  • A community theater crowd (or a small YouTube view count) can still be success.
  • If a handful of people comment “that was cool,” that counts.

• Use increased creative freedom to keep going

  • Being “insignificant” means fewer people can judge you—so you have more freedom to fail within your own standards.
  • The mindset becomes: “At least I’ll get to try—and I’ll be glad I did.”

What to do with the pressure to be “significant”

• Accept that you can choose market alignment, but don’t abandon your heart

  • You may choose commercially trending formats (e.g., rom-coms vs. westerns) to improve odds.
  • Or, if your heart is with something niche, still make it—maybe it opens doors later or the trends shift.

• Stop trying to guarantee success

  • Creating a hit is not something you can force.
  • Better approach: keep producing, keep improving, and accept uncertainty as part of art.

Presenters / sources

• Glenn Gers