Creative Resilience Day 17: Release the numbers game
Moving beyond followers and sales
Today’s post is part of 31 Days of Creative Resilience, a monthlong journey where we’ll gently tend to our creativity ❄️
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Through last week’s mindful prompts and drawing exercises, we’ve been able to slow down, get focused, and tune into our creative instincts.
With this renewed awareness we now enter Week Three: Reimagine Goals. We’ll be zooming out and examining the bigger picture for our creative practice, exploring what truly matters in our vision and what to focus on as we grow.
When I started sharing my visual art on Instagram five years ago, I had no real vision for my creative practice. I simply enjoyed looking at other art accounts on Instagram and I thought it’d be nice to have a dedicated area to share my work and connect with other artists.
This desire to connect and share quickly morphed into obsessively checking my stats. Did my new post get the usual number of likes? If it got few likes, did it mean my work was bad? Should I archive the post if it’s so bad even if I enjoyed making it? Perhaps in 2025 we are a bit more aware and evolved from this type of self-punishing thinking around social media, but let me tell you in 2020-2021, I was very deep in the trap of attaching my artistic self-worth to numbers.
External metrics such as these are deeply embedded into our society and have been way before social media was invented. Grades have existed in American education since 1785, when personal feedback from teachers began shifting to one word descriptions (best, second best, less good, worst) and numbers on a pointed scale. The more children were required to attend school, the less teachers could spend time giving personalized feedback to individual students. Hence we now have grades, GPAs, and standardized tests!
Numbers are helpful for running efficient societies and processes, whether it’s sorting through college applications, determining potential book sales, or gauging one’s reach within their community. Metrics like followers, sales, and number of clients do matter, but they will drive us away from our authentic vision if they are at the center of our practice.
How can we redefine success to shift away from these externally guided numbers? I’ve been reflecting this a lot as I clarify my 2025 plans, holding business goals lightly while staying connected to what brings me joy in my creative practice.
While exploring this question, I was heartened to see illustrator Zsofi Lang’s reflection on how she orients her freelance career rather than focusing on sales.
Like Zsofi, we’ll be exploring ways to move beyond conventional measures of success in today’s exercise—but first we’ll start by investigating which metrics ensnare us and why.
Today’s prompt:
Divide a sheet of paper into two columns.
On the left, write down two external metrics you dwell on most often. For example these could be Instagram likes, newsletter click through rates, email inquiries, or monthly revenue.
For each of the two metrics, answer the following:
How often do you check this number? Give a rough estimate.
What do you believe will happen when this number increases or decreases?
What do you gain by focusing on this number? What do you miss?
Now we’ll counter these hard metrics by recalling moments in our practice that are preciously unquantifiable. In the right column, answer the following:
Recall a moment when you felt completely immersed in your creative practice. What were you making? What helped you get in flow?
Write down an interaction or piece of feedback regarding your creative work that touched you deeply. What made it meaningful?
My response
My behavior around checking external metrics is so often about satisfying curiosity or getting a dopamine hit, whereas reflecting on softer metrics helped me acknowledge my desires to combine various fields in my creative projects and to be seen.
Optional: Share your response
What are your top two external metrics that you dwell on? And as a contrast, what is an unforgettable moment of flow or connection you felt in your creative practice?
If you’d like to share your two columns, upload a photo of your page to a hosting service such as Imgur. For those also sharing on Instagram, tag me at caromakes. I love resharing your work!