Why Writers and Other Creatives Need to Be Careful When Told to “Add Value”
When you hear “add value,” you probably know it’s meant to encourage the idea of good, attractive service. But for writers and other creatives, the whole idea might need some danger flares. This video gives my two big reasons why.
The key here is that, when you’re delivering a product or service, “add value” usually means improving or adding features. So, for example, if your product is a social media scheduler, you could add platforms or figure out how to deliver new performance metrics to users. But the fundamental nature of the product is still there.
But for a creative person, additions or changes to a work can alter the creator’s message. I’ve had agents tell me I had to completely eliminate core elements in my books (for a range of reasons) if I wanted to have them seriously considered. In those cases, had I followed their advice, the revised books would have been dramatically different. I might have been able to land a deal if I’d said yes. But if I had, the books wouldn’t have really been mine anymore.
There’s a delicate balance between creating what you need to create and delivering what satisfies other people. To “add value” ONLY by leaning into the latter is a mistake, both because of the way it can silence your originality and because constantly accommodating through additional peripheral offers steals away your primary creative time. If you do aim to “add value,” don’t leave yourself out of the equation.
[Transcript summary]
Hello, everybody. Wanda Thibodeaux of takingdictation.com here, and I’m sitting out here on this lovely spring day to talk to you for a moment about this idea of adding value.
Now, I have heard that all the time on LinkedIn, right? That’s what you got to do. But I think for writers or other creative people, I think that can get a little dangerous, and here’s why. There are two reasons. The first is that when you are creating something, okay, and you hear that you have to add value, the instinct is going to be to go to what you are creating and say, “Okay, well, how can I change it?” But if you do that, you know, that’s your voice. That’s who you are. And now, all of a sudden, you are not giving your original message anymore. You’re not really being authentic or being yourself. You’re just changing to maybe make another sale. And so, you lose that originality when you quote, add value. It might be more popular, but it’s not necessarily better. It’s just different.
So, then the other problem is that, sometimes what happens is, you can go in this direction of saying, “Okay, well, I’m going to add peripherals. So, I’m going to do webinars, or I’m going to make downloads or whatever.” And the issue there is burnout. Because all of that takes time. And if you’re constantly doing that, you get on this hamster wheel where you have to keep producing that to add value and get people to come back. And all of a sudden you don’t want to do it anymore, and you’re so burnt out that you don’t even want to make your original content.
So, I think, at least as creators, we have to be very careful how we approach this idea of adding value. And I think if we take the stance that we have to add value by learning and making our product better in our own voice, in our own authenticity, then it’s not a bad thing. But if we’re going to say we’re going to add value just by doing more or just making it what other people want to hear, that’s not okay.
So, just think on that and know where you are going to draw those boundary lines for yourself, because I do think they need to be drawn.
Take care, everybody. Bye.