By Product I mean: Anything I myself produce. Something that was once inside my brain but is now fully fleshed out and dancing around the sphere of Earth entertainment with a life of it’s own.
There is something so personal about a product you come up with 100% by yourself and then BAM all of a sudden it’s available for all to ingest. What I realized after I started doing that cycle of events more often was that once that product is it’s own entity, it is no longer just yours. Yes, you own a part of it because on the top it says your name – but at the same time it also now belongs to anyone who has had any emotional response to it as well.
Even if someone hates it, it is an idea within them and not yourself. No one will ever see the product exactly like you did. They will make their own assumptions and craft their conscious/subconscious responses around their own life experiences and belief systems.
Everything you create has the ability to be someones favorite thing or someones most hated thing – but most likely it will be thrown into the pool of, “things I have consumed and subsequently not been changed significantly by.” No matter what the reaction though, it is now theirs as much as it is yours.
For me my product is usually my writing, and I have found it to be the toughest medium to convey exactly what I wanted too initially. Some people very much understand my ideas as I lay them out and others downright hate them – but that will be true for anything you ever do. You have to almost detach yourself from the product and see it as it’s own entity outside of your creation bubble. Talk about it like it’s an ever changing person. Think of it like a child your have fostered and then let out into the big bad world. If it sustains consensus then so be it. If not, then so be it as well. Letting the product speak for itself is incredibly important to me.
I’ve had so many conversations with other people that started off as constructive criticisms and ended up as a full blown product defense. Unless what you just produced was your dissertation, you should never have to defend anything you create. That would be like someone yelling at your 30 year old son and then you stepping in screaming, “DON’T YELL AT MY BABY!!!”
Your product, just like your fake 30 year old son is not your baby anymore. It must now travel through the same hardships you have always struggled with. The matter of whether it survives is another story – but once you hit the real/metaphorical publishing button, that product is public property, and your stock is ever diminishing over time.
Ryan Brady 