Building Tools for Yourself and Your Community

With how cheap it can be to build, focus on tools that you can use yourself or with your community. Not everything has to have immense scale.

Welcome to Day 3 of our journey to unlock your creative potential!

Today’s Focus: Building Tools for Yourself and Your Community

Think about small ways to create something for yourself or those around you.

Key Takeaways:

  • Identify pain points in your creative process
  • Design simple solutions that address these issues
  • Consider how your tools could benefit others
  • Use personal experience to refine and improve

A lot of people only think something is worth building if it can get a ton of users. But the increasing power of AI to create tools means that it's becoming more and more cost effective to create tools for small groups of people. One example is the writing tool I'm building based on my experience in Foster, a writers' collective. As part of the weekly writing circle practice we do, we do a somatic check-in with our bodies to see how we are feeling before we get started writing. But I have a hard time doing that for my writing outside of the writing circle, so I decided to build a tool that prompts me for how I'm feeling before it gives me the blank page. Maybe this turns into a larger product or maybe it's something that will be used only by me and a small group of users, but it was easy enough to build based on what I've previously done.

And I offered to partner with Foster, if they were interested. Again, maybe they will be, maybe they won't, but I put the idea out there and I'll see what happens. Think about where you have leverage and skills in your life. What can you create that it useful, either for you or the people around you? When something is based on your local community, it's more likely to be something that can easily grow and thrive. You won't need to do much to push it out into the world.

Here's more about what I built:

Did You Know?

​DIY projects offer an opportunity to unleash creativity. Engaging in such activities can lead to a state of "flow," where individuals are totally immersed in the task at hand. This flow state is immensely gratifying and can enhance mood and vitality​​

Action Step:

List 3 pain points in your creative process and brainstorm potential tools or systems to address them.

What hurts?

Quote of the Day:

Community becomes the place where content filtering and distribution start

Next Lesson: Learn how to amplify your expertise using AI!