I’ve spent my entire life with future-sight, too early for everything, coupled with being pretty darn good at a lot of things.
That’s the curse and gift: the high is in the discovery, not the applause. The moment something goes mainstream, the dopamine evaporates and I’m gone. I’ve stood on a thousand soapboxes shouting into the wind, then quietly watched the same ideas I begged people to care about get repackaged by someone who follows trends and capitalizes on them.
And that’s just a fact—nothing bad about it.
Because while creative spirits are out here sprinkling fairy dust across twelve different passions, the mediocres are locked in. They take your half-finished spark, sand off the rough edges, add a ring light, and churn out 400 nearly-identical videos until the algorithm crowns them king. A million views on “egg whites as face toner”? Yeah, I’ve known that since the 1980s, but I never made the TikTok🤣.
Call it Idiocracy 2: Midiocracy Rules the World.
So why am I writing this? Because:
If your goal is subscribers, money, and a career, stop treating your ideas like precious one-offs. Protect the unfinished ones like gold in a vault. Study the game you’re actually playing: SEO, thumbnails, upload cadence, email lists, funnels, the whole boring machinery. Find the most successful “mediocre” in your niche and reverse-engineer their playbook. You already have the talent; you just need to borrow a teaspoon of their greed and a truckload of their discipline.
But if your goal is simply to create and release beauty into the world because it burns in you to do so, then sit back and enjoy it. You fulfilled the assignment. The universe doesn’t owe you a blue checkmark for being right first.
The line, unfortunately, is so clear. Many want both: want to be seen, paid, and still feel like pure artists. Find your lane and celebrate it, hell celebrate others. Don’t waste time grumbling – if you are – translate that into action, or not.
Side Note: This is an old story for me. I am watching folks freaking out of stolen art and design who didn’t realize the battlefield of commerce they were playing on. I have always been ahead of the trend. In 1991, the year before Cross Colors blew up, I was the kid getting laughed at for spray-painting neon designs on my jeans in the garage. I had the first Bluetooth headset that required an adapter the size of a deck of cards plugged into the audio jack of my Star Trek Motorola flip phone (yes, Jabra made a little plastic holster for it). I was “telecommuting” when HR still thought it meant you were probably playing golf. My business cards had QR codes in 2012 while people asked, “So… do I scan this with a fax machine?”
I wrote the very first plain-English guide for Firefly the week it dropped, back when most people hadn’t even heard the phrase “text-to-image.” By the time Midjourney and DALL-E were on every YouTuber’s tongue, I was already bored and chasing the next shiny thing.
And I have had real solid projects stolen by mayors and major corporations. I can’t waste time tracking down every success that has been sparked by my light and shake a finger at them. Instead, I celebrate on a higher level that the pattern is growing, flowered by me. My light is eternal. No one can dim it but me.
If you’re reading this nodding along, thinking “this is me,”, try a refocus and drop a comment with the earliest trend you loved before it became trendy. This future-seer loves early-adopter company.
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