How should one’s audience affect what one does?

There seem to be two competing schools of thought with this question:

1. Audience/customer is king. Who cares what you want.
2. Just make what you like. Audience/customers will follow.

I admit to holding conflicting views on this subject, and this post is an attempt at reconciliation.

First, my critiques of the two views:

Customer Is King

-- By appealing to as many “kings” as possible, I appeal to the lowest common denominator, and make nothing interesting.
-- By appealing to the “average” person, I appeal to no one in particular.
-- What’s so great about people? Or what’s so great about money? Why should I strive to win broad swaths of either?

Pleasing Self

-- How much value can there be in my creation if I am the only one to value it?
-- What’s so great about “me”? Why should I strive to please myself?
-- I want to make things that others will value.


So, neither approach is nuanced enough to satisfy me. But I’m not sure I could come up with a coherent approach that would satisfy me. My actual aim(s) go something like this:

I want to make things that people will value – a lot of people, but not so many people that it becomes lowest-common-denominator, and not so many people that it becomes impersonal – and I want the things to be interesting, and I want to like them myself.

Not exactly inspirational poster material.

The problem is, to use an MBA term, “alignment”. It’s a problem of priorities. I want these different things, but there are implicit trade-offs. A productivity consultant would probably tell me to focus on one of these aims and ignore the rest. But fuck that, I say. These aims are mostly unconscious anyway, and my unconscious mind can certainly do a better job of estimating these relative weights than my conscious mind can. Even writing this is probably wasted energy because when it comes to actually deciding what to do, I defer to the unconscious relative weights by asking what feels right. And that is that best way I know to make these decisions.

But then there is a problem with relying solely on the unconscious (= feelings), because what feels right is often what feels comfortable. By continuing to do what feels right I may end up spending my nights watching re-runs of That’s So Raven. My point is that unconscious desires must be measured against a conscious recognition of biases and impulses.

And for that, I refer you to the 10 heuristics collected by Colin Marshall. Go read the whole post, but here they are, in brief:

"Would I respect me?"
"What benefits my future self?"
"Find the thin end of the wedge."
"Barf it out, then clean it up."
"Can I fail at this?"
"Always produce."
"What's the deadline?"
"What are the rules?"
"What am I doing now?"
"What's the hardest thing I can do?"

The only one I take issue with is the last one, because, in short, it sounds exhausting. I get that it’s a defense against laziness, but I think “always produce” already covers that. I see no need to kill myself trying to make stuff. If the two approaches to life are to (1) fight and struggle against it in all its misery, or to (2) do the most useful thing that comes easiest, then I’m opting for the latter.


This has been, at best, an incomplete answer to the question, but it's a start.