Feedback Loops and Creative Pursuits ➰
On the shared language you and I are forming here
blog.twenty // If you told me over the summer that I’d hit twenty blogs here before the end of the year, I’m not sure I would’ve believed you.
My initial goal with this little corner of the internet was to a) reconnect with friends and family and b) build up some momentum ahead of releasing my short film. I met both of those goals—and with the weekly muscle built, decided to keep the blog going every Sunday.
I plan to formalize things in 2025 a tad more with regular essays and featured conversations. But I’ve also enjoyed a looser, more low-key nature thus far. It’s led to a lot of dialogue on a human-to-human level, and it’s felt like an effective avenue to articulate a worldview in the lead-up to Powder Blue’s next chapter.
More on that in today’s essays. However, I did mean to mention up top: If you want to contribute ideas around creator culture and social infrastructure—or even write an essay for one of these sends—we’re currently organizing a “creative brain trust” of sorts. It’s a small group of folks in the Powder Blue Slack who regularly discuss many of the topics that appear in this space and our upcoming projects.
We’re limiting the amount of spots (for now), though shoot me a reply or DM if you’re interested in getting involved and we can go from there.
One more thing: Happy holidays, everyone! Let’s get into it.
— NGL
P.S. Last week, I wrote about my Roman Empire, the swinging pendulum of gatekeeping, and why the Internet is a first-person medium. If you missed it, check it out here.
I think feedback can feel unimportant at times—yet it’s endlessly essential for any creative pursuit. I’m someone who creates for myself. I write for myself. I edit videos for myself. I design apparel pieces for myself. I do all this to make sixteen-year-old Nate proud. I even wrote all of this in my first blog to further prove it to myself.
Except…no one really does anything one hundred percent for themselves. Sure, not everything’s meant for mass audiences. But art is a form of communication. It’s a beacon we’re sending out into the world. We hope it will land somewhere, and spark a conversation. Who knows what might happen from there?
I’ve been uploading things onto the Internet for a long time. I’ve been creating things for even longer. At no point during that time have I experienced an enormous feedback loop. Which is good, in a way—I’m an introverted person, and I can get overwhelmed when I feel like there’s too many people I need to respond to.
Every once in a while, though, a simple message or two slips through the facade. Last week, a couple different people happened to reach out to tell me they loved the Hollywood story, six months after I published it.
In that moment, I needed that. I needed it to finish a project I’d been working on for a long, long time—and to remember that no matter how much work you put into something that doesn’t make “sense” (that might never live up to the metrics others seem to value more than anything), all it takes is one message to ensure the beacon stays lit for years to come.
Something else happened not long after, too. You might remember my essay about the first-person nature of the Internet from my last blog. “The Internet is about ‘I,’ and movies and TV are about ‘we,’” I wrote, referencing FX CEO John Landgraf’s comments about how we’ve lost a communal sense of culture.
I received more responses and DMs referencing this essay in particular than any previous blog. In other words, it clearly struck a chord.
And it made me think more about feedback loops, because we (you, the reader; I, the writer) are really building this thing together.
I used to fall back on the preconception that making things for a specific audience in mind essentially meant that the sole motivator for creative work naturally becomes algorithmically-acquired likes and views. While I do believe it’s the creative’s responsibility to bring original insights to their work—and express a part of themselves to the world—I also know firsthand that meaning is mostly formed when our work serves as a conduit for genuine connection.
This idea is the bedrock for a lot of my belief system headed into 2025. Because…
…I think community is all about creating a “shared language.” A couple years ago, Alexis Ohanian, the cofounder of Reddit, described to me how true community is formed when members show up consistently for one another. He mentioned that he always tells the founders of startups he’s invested in that they can’t just hire a “community manager” to handle all external communications with users.
The example he used was a run club. If six people show up at the same spot every Sunday morning to go for a run, those experiences help foster a shared language, with inside jokes and mutual understanding. As that running club grows every following Sunday, the shared language becomes the glue that ties its members—old and new alike—together. It’s what keeps everyone coming back.
Nonetheless, if the founder of that run club decides to outsource their community formation to someone else—and show up once it’s already built—they can’t really speak the shared language with true conviction. They don’t really know what makes the thing hum, and they’ve missed the boat when it comes to better understanding the core group that produced magic early on.
I view this letter as a run club of sorts, showing up every Sunday afternoon and starting a conversation with you and our fellow members.* It’s certainly early, yet the early days of formation are what will make this thing special in the long run. And I can’t wait to see how the shared language we create here translates into our in-person gatherings and larger-scale stories soon enough.
I think I’m kinda restless. I can say everything I said above—and also acknowledge that showing up is easier said than done, requiring a certain level of obsessiveness.
That big piece I’ve been writing all year? I finished it last week.** With the holidays coming up, you’d think that would be a perfect time to hang up the cleats and call it a year.
But nope! I’m working on a video that I’m gunning to get done over the next ten days. I don’t believe it’s always the healthiest mindset, yet when creative sparks fly and you feel like you have something to say, it’s hard not to open the laptop in the wee hours of the morning.
A recent print-only profile of the rapper Future in GQ talked about how one of the genre’s most consistent hitmakers still pretty much lives in the studio, even as he approaches forty.*** On the one hand, the consistent commitment to his craft is a marvel in of itself. On the other hand, that sounds like a pretty crappy approach to leading a balanced life into middle age.
I haven’t figured this dynamic out for myself yet. I probably never will. I do, though, look at Stephen A. Smith (and now Skip Bayless, who are fifty-seven and seventy-three, respectively) growing their own YouTube channels on the side by talking about increasingly wild topics engineered to go viral. This can only be seen as a direct response to Pat McAfee (who is in his thirties) making more money than them, mostly due to the fact that McAfee brought massive popularity and a million-subscriber YouTube channel into negotiations with ESPN.
However, if I—by the time I turn fifty-seven—had made tens of millions of dollars over the course of my career, will you hear me debating whether or not Mewtwo could beat LeBron in one-on-one? Probably not.****
As long as there’s a story to tell, though, and something that speaks to me, it feels like it’ll always be hard to say no to that voice in the back of my head, itching to go turn an idea into reality.
I think I'm interested in fractional aircraft ownership. Speaking of feedback loops, I get a lot of random DMs on LinkedIn these days—and they’re getting increasingly random-er.
Check out this one from Saturday—a sponsored one, at that. Meaning they actually paid to send it:
LinkedIn is weird. Anyway, if anyone wants to go all in on fractional airplane ownership with me, my DMs are open.
I think I hit peak DC. Before moving to Los Angeles, Vicky and I lived in Woodley Park, a neighborhood in Northwest DC.
It’s not far from the Naval Observatory, which is the vice president’s residence. Several times a month, we’d see (and hear) a bajillion police officers drive right by our apartment as Kamala Harris’ motorcade made its way to the White House. People would always stop on the sidewalk and take photos; it felt like our backyard was essentially a set for filming episodes of Veep.
Well, last week, I was about to cross Connecticut Avenue when the cops began blocking the intersection. As I stood there for a couple minutes, an older gentleman walked up next to me. We watched the motorcade scream by us, horns blaring and all.
In the most DC way ever, I leaned over. Think it’s Kamala? I asked him. He looked at me, and—with all the gravitas of a man who has been in the district for a very long time—simply nodded. Yup.
I mentioned how I used to live in Woodley Park, and this was a common experience up there. He looked at me again. That’ll do it, he said, before we made our way across the street and onto the remainder of our riveting evenings.
All in all, that gentleman and I? I think we broke down intergenerational communication barriers in one fell swoop.
Thanks for reading! Shoot me a reply, comment, or DM if anything resonated with you in particular—I respond to them all.
* More like evening of late. Things have been busy!
** Well, at least the fully-assembled cut of it.
*** This interview made headlines more so due to what Future and Metro Boomin had to say about lighting the fuse for the Great Rap Beef of 2024. Like always, my takeaways were simply very niche and catered to my specific worldview.
**** Look, in between the gazillion shows Stephen A. films for ESPN, for all I know he’s having the time of his life wildin out on his YouTube channel.