Driving down the hill from town to home the other day, the smallest person in my family (in physical size only) shared with me an incredibly uninteresting fact:
“Did you know, Mum, that the song Baby Shark has been streamed so many times on YouTube that, statistically, every person in the world will have listened to it four times?”
In that moment, I felt a curious mix of things: a faint despair over where humans choose to focus their attention, mild annoyance that the song was now stuck in my head, and a genuine fascination that something so seemingly basic could become so wildly popular.
“Imagine,” I replied, “if I had invented Baby Shark. If, right now, I’d just made up a few lyrics while driving, you would have told me to please stop, not embarrass myself, and for the love of everything never, ever sing that song in public.”
Small Person made a snorting sound. I kept driving, eyes now slightly glazed. “It’s interesting,” I said, launching into what was surely a boring monologue for everyone else in the car, “how quick we are to judge. If I had written that song, I’d have thought it was the biggest load of sheit ever… and yet, look at it go. That’s the thing with creating- you never know how it’s going to land.”
Fast forward to last night: I’m talking to my friend Tania. She tells me about someone she’s working with, and how a (questionable) friend had told this person, “No one will ever want to read that.”
In the midst of our collective tutting and head-shaking (Why would anyone say that? How could they possibly know?!), I blurted- gracefully, of course- “You need to tell her about Baby Shark!”
Tania admitted she had no idea what I was talking about (proving that someone, somewhere, had listened to it eight times to make up for her total lack of contribution), so I told her the story. The takeaway being this:
When it comes to anything you create, no one- not even the most experienced of the experienced who think they can predict creative futures- can tell you with certainty that nobody will be interested in your work.
Why? Because they don’t know. None of us do.
And more than that- I firmly believe it’s always for someone. It might not be for me, or for you, but that’s just a matter of taste and style, which is a very different thing to the work itself.
So this is me adding myself in as a potential antidote to the (questionable) friend who thinks they know:
You don’t. And if you need evidence, let me present you with Baby Shark (da, da, da, da, da, da).
