Few things allow the level of fafo that creating something new in the world does
Could be a company, art, music, film, a human being - whatever new thing you want to put out. If you’re lucky, you get to create many such things in your lifetime.
You not only get to learn how the world operates but also learn who you are. It’s hard to put the feeling(s) in words, and everyone feels it slightly differently.
To me, it feels like a mix of exhilaration, nervousness, awe, laughter and silence. They all somehow mix into a fierce level of focus that oscillates on a micro level but eerily persists for a long time on the macro level.
You might think the feelings have something to do with the final output but that’s got nothing to do with it. Society has weird ways of measuring final outputs. It’s the inputs that determine what you feel.
It’s y=f(x) where all you get to work on and work with is x, and damn it’s so cool. The x takes everything, including the elusive x-factor. It takes a part of you, that’s the sacrifice. If an output makes you feel something, anything, what you’re feeling is the part of themselves that the creator sacrificed and inserted into x. Without that, it’s just machinery, LLM, soulless - call it what you will.
To make something new in the world, the sacrifice feels essential. Think of making a baby - the sacrifice starts with the mom and over the lifetime of the child, good parents sacrifice so much. All creations are the same, they’re each someone’s baby. There’s no creation without parental sacrifice.
The sacrifice is the x-factor ingredient. It looks different for everyone. no one else can tell you what it should be for you, but it has to be something and it can’t be nothing.
It’s both the pain you get to bear but more, much more, is the privilege you get to carry. What a privilege to make a sacrifice to the world, to put a part of yourself out there that others can interact with, to love something so much that you couldn’t resist leaving a part of you behind.
No one else will ever be in your head but they can touch, feel and grapple with this part of you that’s out there. It doesn’t even matter how many people interact with it. Just the existence of this thing that no one but you could have created, this part of you that’s now alive outside of you - what a privilege.
Just thinking about it makes me feel alive. It drives me. If you haven’t felt this yet, I hope you do someday. It’s magic.