Stardentity

How many times have you tried, each time believing: this time it’s really going to work?

How many courses, programs, challenges have you bought?

And you are still not there…

Well… Welcome to
the Great Creator Confusion.

How did we even get here?

Somewhere, in someone’s marketing spreadsheet, you are a lead. A prospect. A percentage in a conversion rate.

I bet you are not building your entire life and identity around the goal of becoming a better, more successful prospect.

Yet, you are building your life, your dreams, and your future financial hopes on a word platforms use for accounting.

[The word “creator” was coined by YouTube in 2011 – to replace “YouTube star.” It was a label for the people the platform was measuring. Then the industry grew faster than anyone could come up with a better word, and “creator” got borrowed for everything.]

And you are trying so, so hard. More tips, more tricks, trends, “authenticity,” software, and a zillion things more. And it always feels like you’re almost there, just a little bit more, and you will get it. Especially when you see someone “making it” – and your hope for “they did it and I can do it too!” skyrockets.

Every professional identity has its own developmental stages – whether you are aware of them or not, you either go through them or get stuck.

Take any profession.

An actor, from the day they decide to become one: developing talent. Then emerging. Working actor. Established. A-list.

A writer: unpublished. Debut. Mid-list. Lead title.

Every stage has a name. Even the first one.

In the creator economy, everything is built on the “from zero to hero” story.

And if you are not hero, well… you know who you are.

Being exposed to it long enough, you develop a deep feeling of inadequacy. So deep it paralyzes your entire body. Like a gas you didn’t notice breathing – and now you can’t move. Just keep staring at the screen.

2 a.m. You’re lying in bed, thinking about the course you bought recently and stopped watching somewhere in week two. And a voice from Instagram says: “It’s okay! Life happens!”

No. It’s not okay. Rent is due on the first, and you’re still on square one. And you have been there for a really long time. Together with your maxed-out credit cards.

Is it bad that you want to become a creator and get your share of the half-a-trillion-dollar creator economy everyone is talking about?

No. Absolutely not. On the contrary – with the way jobs look today, working for yourself and being a creator makes perfect sense.

But you have millions of people trying to do the same thing. So you have to stand out.

But how?

There is only one way: by going one level deeper.
To the level of your identity.

And where exactly do you get that – when it’s no longer clear what’s even left of it? First it was squeezed into the corporate world: tips, tricks, metrics. Then into the “from zero to hero” story – with a “personal brand” on top.

And this is where it arrives.
The Creator Identity Crisis.

I’ve seen it in my room thousands of times – and still see it… every week.

For the last six years I’ve been sitting in a room with people who came to Los Angeles to “make it.”

So many of them. Each with their own lore, circumstances, temperament, talents, doubts – and their own reason for deciding to try.

I started seeing them for free, as a trainee in Beverly Hills. Then at a very reduced rate. For a long time, and a lot of them, week after week. I started right when COVID hit. Then came the streaming shift, then the strikes, and now AI.

Someone still waiting. Someone in their fourth year of “almost.” Someone who got the callback and then didn’t hear back for eight months. Screenwriters between drafts, actors between roles, musicians between everything. And lately – people who left all of that and went online to become creators, because the industry stopped calling.

I sit with them after the audition that went nowhere. After the meeting that was “really promising.” After the hope that turned out to be nothing – again. I watch them decide whether to squeeze their identity into industry standards, and what those standards even are.

I see them before anyone knows who’s going to “make it.”

At some point you start seeing patterns: what exactly happens to the 99.999% before they become the 0.001%.

Somewhere around 2,400 hours in, I started asking myself:

So what does it actually take to “make it”?

Talent? Hard work? Luck?

And what exactly are we doing in that room, week after week?

The people who got somewhere were not the most talented ones in the room. Not the luckiest. And definitely not the most disciplined – I’ve watched discipline run for years in the wrong direction.

They had one thing in common, and it happened before any step. At some point they stopped chasing what was outside – trends, platforms, other people’s playbooks – and started figuring out who was making the choices.

When they had to pivot, they didn’t ask “where do I pivot?” They asked “who is actually pivoting?”

“In this industry, you are your own commodity.”
I’ve heard that line over and over.

So the work has to happen at the level of identity itself.

Yes, you still want to become a famous actor, a director, a screenwriter, or a full-time content creator – you still plan to. But you work at the level of your identity, not at the level of a future title.

That’s the core.

I call this Stardentity.

For now, it’s a working title.

It’s my public project on identity development in the social media and AI era.

Something you work on. Your stardentity. With all the professional developmental stages we go through on the way to “making it.”

Which identity will “make it” in this brand-new reality? I don’t know. Nobody does.

Nobody has the map. I have pieces of one, and I’m walking with them.

Access to your own identity is
a basic, human, need.

Come along. We’ll figure out the rest on the way.