Protecting Your Two Cores
In industries shaped by capitalism you learn quickly that growth metrics get treated like a universal report card. User counts, monthly revenue, engagement percentages, retention curves - they are all things that companies will regularly place into the executive statements. Whatever can be shown as a rising curve will be front and center, because investors respond to an upward line. Over time the industry rewards the headline-friendly number and buries other forms of success.
But what if success wasn’t defined by numbers on a dashboard?
I personally measure success by whether two things are growing - my Emotional Core and my Creative Core. If both are fed and protected, I’m doing fine.
You too get to choose what counts as success instead of the platform choosing for you. Decide what progress looks like and you stop outsourcing that definition to an algorithm, or to whoever happens to be watching.
There are two cores of my being that I focus most on and track almost all success metrics towards.
The Emotional Core
Your Emotional Core is made of the quiet, persistent feelings that steer motivation and resilience. It shapes what you’re able to make.
When it’s stable, ideas flow more freely and risk will feel manageable. When your emotional core is drained or under constant attack, even the smallest tasks will feel heavy.
Plenty of content perceived online can lift it. Positive comments from people who understand what you’re making. Thoughtful mentorship threads. Watching your work spark someone else’s creative process. These are all valuable contributors.
The same spaces will also erode it. Endless comparison comments, a constant feed of other creators’ “polished” launches, toxic comment threads, and algorithm-driven negativity loops all chip away at confidence and will make your creative risk taking feel absurd - or as the kids say “Cringe”.
So audit your feed like it is part of your production equipment:
Increase what you follow
Healthy risk-takers
Educators
Behind-the-scenes process
Theorists
Reduce what you follow
Negativity harborers
Comparisons
Toxic comment threads
Anything that reliably triggers you
Observe your specific triggers and build guardrails appropriately. Mute, block, limit, and schedule your interactions deliberately. Then build routines that refill the emotional well - time away from screens can be a major contributor.
The Creative Core
Your Creative Core is the center of curiosity and courage that takes scattered ideas and translates them into meaningful work. Inspiration feeds it most.
I encourage you to go to museums and sit with objects that carry hundreds of years of human history and design choices you would never encounter otherwise. Linger in cafés to overhear fragments of conversation and watch how people hold themselves. Walk your neighborhood and people watch. Notice how strangers solve everyday problems, or how they dress for their journeys outside.
Even the mundane works. In college I’d just sit and watch what happens around me - Street signs. A building going up. People waiting on a bus that was always late.
I encourage you to keep a small notebook when you travel, or build a voice memo habit, so these quiet inputs don’t disappear. They will accumulate in fantastic ways over time.
Not all collaboration will feed your creative core.
Constructive collaboration is rooted in trust and a shared appetite for the same mission. The working relationships that made me better all had one thing in common: A free flow of ideas.
Some of that happens naturally in conversation. You can also build it on purpose. A short critique round. A brainstorming sprint. A “what if” workshop tacked onto a normal meeting. When people know the goal is exploration, they share riskier ideas than they ever would alone.
Creators who work in total isolation end up feeding their own biases, and their Creative Core barely expands. Be cautious to fall into this trap as well.
Risk-taking is a skill to be trained.
Constructive risk-taking means weighing what you’re willing to put into the world against what you can afford to learn from getting it wrong. Reframe risks as experiments with a clear hypothesis, then launch the smallest version of it you can. Show a rough prototype to a few people you trust before it goes anywhere public. Plenty of established creators test ideas on secondary or alternate channels for exactly this reason. A flop there costs very little.
If you are timid about this, start small. Commit to a tiny public deadline. Share a draft with three to five people whose opinions you respect. Keep a “lessons learned” log where every entry counts as information. Over time your tolerance for larger risk grows, because you are no longer reacting to fear.
There is no such thing as failure if you are learning.
What this changes
Consider the gains that would never show up on a chart. The muscle memory you build practicing a craft. The reflexes you sharpen speedrunning a game on your day off. And the quiet confidence that shows up uninvited once you finally crack a problem that’s been sitting there for weeks.
Those compound in ways platform metrics never will.
When you respect both emotional balance and craft, the practice itself starts rewarding you back. Exploration. Resilience. The occasional real joy.
That becomes your measure of success.
This framework comes from Create With Purpose.
Chapter 5 defines the Two Cores, and Chapters 9 and 10 go further into where inspiration actually comes from and how to break the comparison habit that erodes both cores fastest. The book is available in paperback and Kindle.
