We assume the best stuff makes its way to us. Great books, great ideas, great songs, great inventions. They’ll rise to the top and be included in Best Of lists, popular collections, and history books, right?
Yet we all know from experience this is not true.
If you’re a consistent creator of any kind, you know that your best stuff is not your most well-known stuff.
There are things hidden in the thousands of posts I’ve written that I think are the best, deepest, and most important. I’d most like them remembered. Yet they are essentially unknown, even to the small number of people that read a lot of my stuff. And that’s in the internet age for a loud and public person.
Now compound that over every single mind in history, remove the ability to do any record keeping or distribution for most of it, and you start to realize that the majority of worthy things created have never been seen or have been forgotten.
This is exciting to me, not depressing.
The act of creation is about more than other eyeballs or ears enjoying it. It transforms the fabric of reality itself, even if never seen by another soul. We are living in a world partly shaped by acts of creation we’ll never know about.