You may be asking yourself what I mean by this title. As writers, artists, and creators it's getting more difficult to put time and effort into what you do. Between growing an audience, making connections, and paying the bills the act of doing is starting to abstract away. Don't let it happen. Focus on what makes the beer taste better.
Back in 2008 Jeff Bezos gave a speech at Y Combinator's startup school that began with this strange story about an old brewery he visited in Luxembourg:
"I was in Luxembourg recently and took a tour of a 300 year old brewery. The business of course is making beer. About 100 years ago they were one of the first factories in Lux to start using electric power to help in the manufacturing process of making beer. Of course they couldn't buy the electric power off of the electric grid because there wasn't an electric grid so they started making their own electric power. A lot of companies did that in that era. If you could make your operations more efficient or do new things with electric power, the only way to get power was to setup your own generator and become an expert in electric power generation. The important thing to notice here is that the fact they generated their own electric power didn't make their beer taste better.
What companies of all sizes want is to go from their idea or vision to a successful product as quickly as possible. The problem always is that there's undifferentiated heavy lifting that gets in the middle between your idea vision and that successful product. The undifferentiated heavy lifting has to be done at world class levels of excellence or your vision will fail, but is totally undifferentiated and isn't actually making the beer taste better."
Now Jeff here was making a pitch to startups to use AWS instead of building their own data centers, but his point is valid for many forms of creation. What does posting frequently on X, Farcaster, and Instagram do to make you better at your craft?
With Farcaster and web3 culture with collections that's started to get better for artists, but there's an open question about what tooling needs to get better for writers? What tools are you looking for to help you make your beer taste better?
I'd love to know your answers :)
