Why This Matters Now
PSA: I'm excited to announce the first online elective at Critical Business School — A Little Death, with Danya Shults, on endings and what they make room for. If you've been curious about CBS but aren't in New York, this is your way in. Four Fridays in May, 1 pm EST. $200, open to the public. Register here.
We are living through a moment when machines can do an extraordinary amount of what used to pass for creative work: write ad copy, generate images, draft strategies, produce code, compose music, and optimize campaigns. Everything that can be reduced to a pattern – everything that operates within known categories – is increasingly automated. By the time you read this, the capabilities will have expanded further.
It is the end of the confusion between creativity and production.
For decades, we conflated the two. Being “creative” meant producing things—ads, designs, strategies, content. The creative industries were production industries with better aesthetics. But production is the execution of known patterns, however skillfully done. Creativity is the act of stepping outside the pattern – introducing something that does not yet have a category, a name, or a market.
Machines can produce. They cannot be creative, because creativity requires the faculty of not knowing – of sitting with uncertainty, of feeling drawn toward something that has no name yet. Machines are architectures of correlation. They find patterns in existing data and generate variations within those patterns. They are extraordinarily good at this. But they cannot step outside their training data. They cannot ask a question they were not prompted to ask. They cannot feel the restlessness that signals something unknown is trying to emerge.
In a world where production is abundant and cheap, creative surplus is the only thing that cannot be replicated. It is the irreducibly human contribution – the thinking that no algorithm anticipated, the question no one thought to ask, the connection between domains that no training data contains.
This is why identifying your creative surplus is no longer a nice-to-have. It is the central question. Development is the only work.
When All Matter Is Available
When all material needs are met – when technology provides, when tools are plentiful, when information is free – our innate tendency toward interestingness and meaning finds its way through new channels. An abundance of utility asks for introspection. A plenty of technology asks for navigation. When everything is available, the question is no longer what can I get but what do I want – and the deeper question: what do I want that I do not yet know I want?
We are living in a moment of extraordinary abundance. Information, connectivity, tools, platforms, AI assistants - all available, all accessible, all overwhelming. The scarcity is not of resources but of attention, meaning, and direction. In such a world, the philosophical question – what matters? what is worth my attention? where is my creative surplus pointing? -- becomes the practical question. It is not a luxury to ask what you practice. It is a necessity because without that question, you will lose time and attention to someone else’s priorities.
This is not abstract. Every coaching session I have conducted eventually arrives at this point. The person has the skills, the network, the track record. What they lack is clarity about their own direction, a direction that their surplus and the ability to keep the world at bay as they listen to it.
