Small is more meaningful than big
Plus nine creative meditations and boundary-busting releases from Inpatient Press and others
Imagine it’s your birthday party.
It’s the start of the night. You and your closest friends are there. It’s great, but you’re hoping more people will come. Your mind races with the list of all the people who haven’t shown up yet.
As the minutes pass and the people you hoped would come don’t arrive, your stress levels increase. Sure, your best friends are here, but maybe you’re actually less popular than you thought? You become heavy with an inner dread.
Eventually more people start to arrive. Then lots more. Everyone comes! Your dream fulfilled.
But suddenly the party becomes overwhelming. You’re now a full-time host. It feels like work. You’re not having deep conversations anymore. The party has become too much.
This is what success is like.
Our projects start small. Just us and a few true believers. As people trickle in we appreciate them, but just as much we’re hoping for more. Then, finally, it happens: everyone shows up. And suddenly it becomes overwhelming. You hardly have time to think, much less enjoy yourself.
Success is a double-edged sword. It’s the thing we work hard for, but experiencing it isn’t everything we think it will be. It tends to make us more protective and conservative. It can distance us from our core fans and supporters. It can lead to feelings of obligation and forced performance. It can make it harder to be free.
When we look back later on, it’s the beginnings when we were striving to make it that we miss most, not the grand crowning moments. Despite this, we rush to move past our early smallness, believing that being big will deliver the celebration we crave. It can, but we lose something too.
Kurt Cobain once reminisced that if he could do it all over again, he would go back to those moments before they became big. When they were touring in a van and they could feel things starting to happen for them. That was the most gratifying moment in his memory. If he had his choice, they would have stayed there forever.
Believe him. Celebrate smallness. Don’t rush past it too quickly. Embrace it. Relish it as a beautiful moment that we can only hold onto for so long.
Small is more meaningful than big.
This essay is excerpted from a new release from the Metalabel squad, called Nine Creative Meditations. More on it and this week’s featured releases below.
Featured releases
Nine Creative Meditations
By Yancey Strickler (Words) and Ilya Yudanov (Design)
METALABEL 013
.zip w/ .pdf + video essay
Open edition
The earlier mini-essay relishing smallness is excerpted from a new release by me (Yancey, Words), Ilya Yudanov (Design), and the Metalabel squad called Nine Creative Meditations.
Nine Creative Meditations collects lessons from my career as a writer, author, and cofounder of Metalabel, Kickstarter, and The Creative Independent. The nine vignettes share emotional and practical lessons that you can apply to your own creative practice.
We’re releasing Nine Creative Meditations as a .zip file that includes a PDF of the piece (the A-side) and a video essay (the B-side) recorded from my desktop. You can watch the video on YouTube here.
Nine Creative Meditations is available to collect at a suggested price of $5, but you can pay what you want, including nothing at all.
Inpatient Press Newsbox Set
Inpatient Press
Four zines + multimedia DVD + poster
100 editions
Inpatient Press is an independent New York City publisher unlike any other. Built on the ethos “we publish what others do not,” Inpatient has established an iconoclastic catalog of esoteric works spanning books, zines, erotica, experimental video games, and out-of-print works in translation. In a New Yorker profile in 2022, Inpatient founder Mitch Anzouni recounts how the Whitney Museum once accidentally threw away a newspaper box stocked with the press’ books. This week on Metalabel, the press debuts their first-ever boxed set, a miniaturized newspaper box complete with Press’ most-essential works.
The box set includes a limited edition print, a multimedia DVD-rom featuring the games Mezzanine and Small Press Tycoon (appropriately, a small-press publishing SIM(!)), and four print works: Chronological Discoveries, a physical, mental, and spiritual guide to the art of time travel; Armageddon News, a collection of campus zines created and funded by the FBI; Psychotronic Crimes, the English translation of a 2020 manga about gang-stalking and political retaliation in Japan and abroad; and Universal Hedonics, a collection of diagrams and drawings of numerous patents for neurotech devices.
The Newsbox Box Set is the perfect starter-pack to the weird and wonderful world of Inpatient Press. — Anika Jade Levy ($100 suggested | 100 editions)
“Small Lake”
gblkst
MP3
11 editions
THEORY: This simple release represents a significant innovation in the world of digital publishing.
DEFENSE: In this release, a German musician who goes by gblkst has posted a new song while looking for a designer to make the cover art for the single. That designer will be added to the release and will split proceeds that arise from the track 50-50 with gblkst on Metalabel.
“Small Lake” represents a new type of creative release: one that not only puts work into the world and invites the public to purchase it, but also openly invites other creators to creatively and financially participate in the work, made possible by Metalabel’s innovation of earnings splits for all kinds of creative releases.
Very, very cool. ($2 suggested | 11 editions)
Thank you as always for spending this precious moment in time it took for you to read this message with us.
<3
Metalabel
A real gem, this. 🙏🏻
You're speaking to my moment with this one