From: 267 / the Most Important Metric for Creative Work: Resonance – Dense Discovery

The US is producing more oil than ever before. The nation’s crude oil production hit 13.2 million barrels per day, surpassing the pre-Covid peak.

An activity worth doing: Create a list of activities and values (max 12) that make you feel content and part of a healthy humanity. Essentially, what does a good week look like to you? It might be photographing, making food, participating in community events, writing to friends or having kind boundaries. Rate your success for engaging with each and use it as a reflection for making changes (when we have this privilege).

Rob Hardy (see also DD208), whose writing explores the intersection of business, creativity and self-fulfilment, uses resonance as a way of gauging whether his creative work is on the right track. He splits it into two broad categories: “Internal Resonance: How did it feel to write and publish this? Did it make me feel alive, both intellectually and somatically? Did it feel like something no one else but me could have created? Did it feel true to who I am, and who I’m becoming? Did the content of this writing *matter* to the deepest parts of me, beneath all of the cultural stories about who I think I *should* be and what I *should* do? “External Resonance: How did people respond? Did I strike an emotional nerve? This goes beyond easy, legible metrics like pageviews or social media likes, or even comments, which are at best hazy approximations of external resonance. It’s about looking for signals that something genuinely MATTERED to one or more humans, and elicited a response that’s *out of proportion* with the average digital interaction. Lots of likes is an okay-ish signal. Lots of comments is a clearer signal. A small handful of comments or private replies from people saying they’ve never felt so seen or understood by a piece of writing – that’s the kind of thing I’m trying to discern and quantify here.”