The Most Valuable Identity a Creative Can Have

Why "artist" is the only identity that survives an ever-changing world

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It’s a rainy Tuesday night.

I’m making dinner and listening to a business podcast.

Nothing about music or songwriting craft.

Not even something a little bit related to my creative work.

And then it hits me… that old familiar guilt.

Shouldn’t you be learning about your craft?

For years, I carried that voice around like a stone in my pocket.

Every book I read about something other than music, every YouTube rabbit hole about investing or psychology or the history of ancient Rome…

Each one felt like a betrayal of my better self.

A confession that I wasn’t serious enough.

That I was dividing my energy when I should have been laser-focused on becoming the songwriter and producer I wanted to be.

The identity I held was narrow:

Musician. Songwriter. Producer.

These were the lanes I was supposed to live in.

Everything else was a distraction.

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What I didn’t understand then, and what I’m only starting to understand now, is that I wasn’t dividing my energy.

I was becoming an actual artist.

All those “distractions” weren’t pulling me away from my work.

They were shaping the person doing the work.

The books, the curiosities, the detours down back roads that had nothing to do with music…

They were building a wider view of the world.

And a wider view of the world is what makes for richer, more resonant art.

The narrow identity wasn’t protecting my craft, it was smothering it.

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I used to roll my eyes at the word artist, at least the way the music industry uses it.

I was a musician.

I had worked my entire life to become one.

I had a specific skill set and I worked in a specific medium.

But something has been slowly chipping away at that resistance.

Partly it’s letting myself follow my curiosity, wherever it leads.

Partly it’s watching the world change so fast it makes any one skill feel fragile.

And partly it’s the recognition that the things I was most ashamed of (the wide-ranging interests, the tendency to get obsessed with things other than music) were never weaknesses.

They were the whole point.

The artist identity holds all of it.

The songwriter, the producer, the reader, the thinker, the entrepreneur…

It’s not some vague version of what I once was.

It’s a more honest one.

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There’s also something practical here.

The tools are changing. The industry is changing.

The world is already a drastically different place than it was five years ago.

Whatever it means to be a writer or a producer is going to keep shifting in ways none of us can fully predict.

A narrow identity is brittle in that environment.

It’s built around what you do… and what you do can change overnight.

But to be an artist — that’s about how you see.

How you make sense of things.

How you move through the world with curiosity and attention and the willingness to shape something out of what you find (or what you don’t).

That doesn’t become obsolete.

That’s the identity that bends without breaking.

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So if you’ve ever felt guilty for being interested in too many things:

That breadth isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.

The business books, the cooking classes, the YouTube videos on how to live your life on purpose…

Those things aren’t keeping you from becoming who you’re supposed to be.

They are who you’re supposed to be.

And here’s why that matters right now:

The most durable identity a creative person can hold isn’t tied to a tool, a platform, or a genre.

It’s not musician or writer or designer or filmmaker.

Those identities are built around what you do.

And what you do can be disrupted, automated, or made irrelevant before you even see it coming.

The artist identity is different.

It’s built around how you see.

It survives the disruption because it was never about the medium in the first place.

You don’t have to pick one lane.

You just have to find the thread that runs through all of them.

For me, that thread is simple:

I want to make art that inspires people.

The medium keeps changing.

The thread remains.

That's the real case for calling yourself an artist.

It’s the only identity that can hold everything you are, and everything you might become.

If you enjoyed reading this, the highest compliment I can think of is if you restacked it or shared it with one person who you think it would help.