you escape competition by figuring out who you are

you need to start using your uniqueness as your greatest asset

In the past couple of years and during the research I did while I was writing my first book, I spoke to a lot of people about how they navigate sharing their work and their art online, how they build “a personal brand” (for lack of a better term), and how it feels being a young, creative person in the age of social media. One thing that kept coming up again and again was the mass exhaustion our generation is feeling about the dreadful process of having to put themselves out there, in ways that often feel draining and pointless. Having to build a brand on social media as a creative, having to turn your work into some kind of content, feeling forced to do a thousand things you’re not interested in just because that’s what the world is asking for at the moment.

I’ve been chatting with a lot of different people during my mentoring sessions, and I always hear a variation of “I’ve been studying what works for other people and trying to replicate it, but it hasn’t really been working”. I’ve been through the same phase myself – always trying to deconstruct success by looking at what brings results to other people and then trying to give that my own twist. It never brought any real results. What it definitely did accomplish, was making me feel completely drained from the whole process, leaving me feeling like sharing my work online is a bottomless pit with no exit. A constant feeling of “I’m doing all these right things – it should be working better!!!”. This is why many creatives are left feeling like nothing works except luck, and that trying to build a presence for yourself at this time is constant effort and despair.

When I first started writing on Substack, it took a few months but I eventually realized something clear as day that I had never internalized before, even if it was advice I’d commonly hear: literally nothing works as well as authenticity. That knowledge is completely freeing, especially when you start to see it in practice. I realized that whenever I was writing things I thought I should be writing, trying to learn from viral formats and figure out how my content could fit into them, and looking for ideas and inspiration outside of myself, nothing was working. I wasn’t enjoying the process and it wasn’t giving me any joy or results. After a while, it was never sustainable. But whenever I came back into myself instead of looking outside, and just created entirely what I felt like creating, little miracles would happen: one of the essays I hesitated posting because I thought its thesis was too ‘obvious’ ended up being read nearly 800,000 times (!). A video I recorded in my garden with bad audio quality and background noise ended up going viral, and leading to me meeting a lot of new friends and like-minded people. Or creators I’d admired from afar for years would start following me and later become friends. The little miracles would only happen when I created things with zero pressure, and when I was very far removed from the mindset of trying to compete with anyone or anything. When I was creating most authentically without trying to be or achieve anything but being myself, that’s when things would work out better than they ever had before.

The more closely connected I remained to my feelings, the more I realized that scrolling social media was nothing but a massive cause of stress: it removed me from myself and from the present, and sent me spiralling into loops of everything I should be doing, could be doing. Even when I thought it offered inspiration, that was just comparison and anxiety masked as being productive. Things would register in my brain as a lack, something I wasn’t doing that perhaps I should be, a constant source of draining comparison that quickly sucks the joy out of creating. I’m glad I eventually started listening to that feeling and following its orders to consume less and create more. Ever since that became clear to me, I changed a lot of habits. I became more aware than I’d ever been before of how scrolling on social media actually made me feel – and the moment a little anxiety came up, I’d stop instead of doomscrolling. Every time I’d find myself subconsciously looking at someone else’s success and wondering how my work could live up to those standards, I’d stop and instead come back fully into just what I feel like creating, and how.

These are very conscious changes that came when I realized that authenticity is a central value in how I want to live my life; when you decide that the most important thing in your creativity is making sure you protect its authenticity and allow it to be as genuine as possible, I think miracles tend to happen. The reason why this is such a freeing realization is that it teaches you, finally, that you have no one to compete with, because no one is you. Your unique amalgamation of perspectives, experiences, influences, taste, ideas, is one in eight billion – so you’re doing yourself a disservice when you try to fit into someone else’s creative mould instead of getting to know yourself better instead. I always believed that you can learn something from anyone, there’s no one in the world that is genuinely uninteresting if you are curious enough to listen; and that comes from the fact that you, and I, and everyone else passing you by on the street, has something to say in a way that only they can express. It doesn’t have to be groundbreaking, but by definition it is unique. And I think that’s where the secret to creative expression lies. There is no real competition when your main goal is to find and bring to life your own personal most creative expression. Not trying to fit into anyone else’s mold, not trying to condense your expression into an easily definable ‘niche’ if it doesn’t feel natural.

Social media removes us further from ourselves constantly, and we rarely take the time to do things that bring us back into ourselves on a day to day basis – while scrolling social media is a daily habit for nearly everyone. Without practices like journaling, or some type of mindfulness, or some type of restful, mindful alone time where you actually get to know yourself better, your days may be spent just looking for ideas and answers in other people’s success instead of developing your own uniqueness. This is why I think books like The Artist’s Way that function as a guided practice that only aims to bring you closer to more parts of yourself are so deeply valuable, if you’re looking for a place to start.

Any time social media makes you feel more confused and drained than anything, this is your reminder that you don’t have to compare and compete with what anyone else is doing and how they’re doing it. Their success will never take anything away from yours, because the success that’s most sustainable will be the one you get to through your most authentic self-expression. At the risk of sounding cliché, the answers to what you ‘should’ be doing really are inside you; create the thing you most genuinely want to create, with no audience to perform for, and I swear the right audience will come, too. The more you understand yourself, the more you will be understood.