Make Something Nobody Asked For

Professional life trains every creative impulse to arrive with an audience, an outcome, and a distribution plan. Some work needs to exist before it can explain itself.

When I was 15, I wrote a book.

An entire novel.

I packaged it up, sent it to publishing agents, and received the kind of rejection letters that make perfect sense in retrospect but feel like a clear administrative error when you are 15 and have recently completed a masterpiece.

Nobody asked me to write it.

A few years later, I started filming my friends skateboarding and snowboarding. I made what I later described, with the clarity granted by distance, as “a few crappy movies.”

Nobody asked for those either.

There was no audience strategy. No content pillar. No monetization path. No little box in Notion explaining the business objective.

I wanted to make something, so I f*cking did.

This is an incredibly normal way to begin a creative life. It is also an impulse adulthood becomes strangely good at beating out of you.

Every idea eventually gets called into a meeting

Professional life rewards usefulness.

A project needs an audience. The audience needs a problem. The problem needs an outcome. The outcome needs a metric. The metric needs a dashboard. The dashboard will need a meeting, presumably so several adults can look at the same number and experience different emotions.

This is not entirely bad.

Learning to make useful things changed my life. Client work taught me to finish. Marketing taught me to care whether an idea reached another person. Product work taught me that intention is not the same as behavior. Building companies taught me that a thing can be beautiful, intelligent, and completely irrelevant if nobody needs it.

Constraints made me better.

But useful work has a side effect… eventually every private curiosity is asked to present a business case before it is allowed to live.

A photograph becomes a post.

A trip becomes a recap.

A weird idea becomes a startup.

A hobby becomes a personal brand.

A personal essay becomes a lead-generation asset about the future of authentic storytelling.

Nothing is permitted to remain itself.

Everything has to become content about becoming content.

I did not become creative because I had a strategy

The neat version of my career would say I was a filmmaker, became a marketer, moved into startups, and eventually started building products.

The real version is far messier.

Writing came first. Then cameras. Then making films with friends. Then a small production company and real client work. Then I brought a camera to the beach, became obsessed with Instagram, and became equally obsessed with the analytics behind why some things traveled and others disappeared.

Creativity and distribution were braided together early. By 2017, I was publicly describing myself as a photographer, filmmaker, entrepreneur, and digital marketer because apparently choosing one identity felt unnecessarily restrictive. Looking at my Linkedin profile in 2026 it’s clear I have yet to break that habit.

Nonetheless, the useful work did not replace the creative work. It grew out of it.

That distinction matters.

I did not start making because I had identified a high-value audience problem. I found valuable problems because making taught me to notice, select, sequence, finish, publish, and watch what happened next.

The pointless work developed the person who could later become useful.

Uncommissioned does not mean unserious

Some of the work I care about most began without a brief.

I made a cinematic short from a winter in the Tetons because the mountains were there and I wanted to learn what I could make from them.

I filmed New York and the Outer Banks over a summer while learning a camera’s color science.

Before my wedding, I wandered Florence and later turned an ordinary afternoon into a short film.

My wedding and honeymoon became another film built around the feeling of slow days in Italy.

These projects had constraints. They required equipment, judgment, editing, color, music, patience, and the deeply glamorous experience of watching the same eight-second clip 40 times because something about the cut felt wrong.

They were not casual.

They were uncommissioned.

That is different.

A commissioned project begins with an obligation to somebody else. An uncommissioned project begins with attention. You noticed something. You cared long enough to stay with it. You made a standard before there was a stakeholder available to approve it.

Nobody asking is not permission to make the work badly.

Sometimes it is the reason the standard can become fully yours.

The internet teaches us to interrogate an idea too early

The current creative stack is unbelievable.

You can write, design, code, compose, film, edit, publish, and distribute from devices you already own. AI can help you move through unfamiliar disciplines before you have earned the traditional title associated with them. The distance between “I wonder if…” and a real artifact has entirely collapsed.

This should have produced an explosion of weird personal work.

It has.

It has also produced an explosion of people asking what niche the weird personal work belongs to.

We have become very good at evaluating an idea before making enough of it to understand what it is.

Who is this for?

Can this monetize?

Will the algorithm reward it?

Does it reinforce my positioning?

Could this become a recurring format?

Should I capture emails?

These can be excellent questions on day 30.

On day one, they can kill the exact thing that made the idea even worth following.

A curiosity often arrives without language for its own value. That is why you have to make some of it. The artifact tells you what the idea was trying to become.

Paul Graham makes a related point in How to Do Great Work… the way to figure out what to work on is by working, and we should not let “work” mean only what other people tell us to do.

You cannot research your way into every conviction.

Some opinions need to be made before they can be stated.

The hidden value of useless work

Calling a project “useless” is intentionally unfair.

Uncommissioned work produces all kinds of value. It just refuses to specify which kind in advance.

It can train attention.

Photography taught me that the frame is as much about refusal as inclusion. The image changes based on what you decide does not belong.

It can train sequence.

Filmmaking taught me that individually beautiful moments can still produce a terrible story if they arrive in the wrong order.

It can train completion.

A finished bad film teaches more than an immaculate folder of references for the good film you plan to make once life becomes less busy, which historically should happen around never.

It can train taste.

When there is no client brief, trend report, or conversion rate to hide behind, you have to decide whether something feels right. Then you have to survive the possibility that your judgment was not as advanced as your self-concept.

It can train identity.

I wrote previously about wanting things without irony. Making something nobody requested is one of the clearest ways to practice it. You cannot blame the assignment. You chose the subject, the standard, the effort, and the risk of caring in public.

The project may eventually become useful.

It may lead to a job, a company, a customer, a friendship, an audience, or a new way of seeing the work you already do.

Mine did.

But if you demand that outcome before beginning, you have replaced curiosity with speculation.

You are no longer making the thing.

You are trading imaginary futures on it.

The Nobody Asked Test

I am not arguing that every adult should abandon their obligations and begin an experimental feature film in the kitchen. Rent remains famously resistant to artistic intent.

The project can be small.

The point is to protect one space where usefulness is allowed to arrive late.

Before you start, ask five questions (you didn’t really think I’d get through an entire article without assigning a task, did you?):

1. Would I still care if this never performed?

This does not require secrecy. You can publish it.

It means the work has a reason to exist before the response appears.

If the only interesting part is how people might react, you may be planning distribution rather than making.

2. What am I curious enough to learn by doing?

Choose a question that cannot be fully answered in a notes app.

Can I make New York feel like this?

Can I build a tool that behaves this way?

Can I write about this memory without sanding off what made it strange?

Can I learn this camera, material, instrument, or form well enough to express an opinion through it?

The project is an experiment, but the experiment should produce an artifact.

3. Is it small enough to finish before I explain it to death?

A three-minute film can be complete.

A ten-photo sequence can be complete.

A tiny application can be complete.

A short story can be complete.

The goal is not to begin an expansive new identity. It is to make one thing real.

4. What constraint will give it character?

One camera. One afternoon. One neighborhood. One roll of film. One page. One material. One week.

Constraints prevent uncommissioned work from becoming vague private ambition. They replace the missing brief with a shape you chose.

A project with no client still needs an edge.

5. Can I delay extracting value until the thing exists?

Do not announce the series before completing the first piece.

Do not design the course while learning the skill.

Do not build the content strategy around the hobby before discovering whether you like the hobby.

Do not turn the making-of into more work than the work.

Finish first.

Then decide whether it wants an audience, a business model, a sequel, or a quiet place on your hard drive.

Make something with no stakeholder, not no standard

The phrase “nobody asked for this” is usually delivered as an insult.

Good.

There should still be work in your life that cannot point to a committee, customer ticket, market report, content calendar, or optimized funnel as the reason it exists.

Not because usefulness is beneath you.

Because usefulness is downstream of capacities that need somewhere to develop before the market knows what to request.

Attention.

Curiosity.

Taste.

Patience.

The willingness to be bad privately and specific publicly.

The ability to follow a feeling before it becomes a thesis.

I still care deeply about making useful things. I love a real customer, a sharp constraint, a measurable result, and the undeniable satisfaction of watching something work outside my head.

I also know that the person capable of doing that work was shaped by a long trail of things nobody asked him to make.

A rejected book.

Crappy skate films.

Cameras gathering sand on beaches.

Ordinary afternoons cut into sequences because they felt like something worth remembering.

Not every creative impulse needs to become a company.

Not every hobby needs to become a channel.

Not every beautiful thing needs to explain how it scales.

Make something with no stakeholder and a high standard.

Let it become useful later.

Or let it remain yours.

What is something you want to make that nobody is waiting for? Reply and tell me. Naming it may be the first useful thing you do with it.

-zc

P.S. If you like essays about taste, ambition, creative work, technology, and the strange effort of remaining a person while becoming professionally useful, subscribe to Don’t Feed The Algorithm.

Rabbit hole for the overcaffeinated

- Falling in Love with Film & Promising Not to Buy a Leica M3 — a story about difficult machines, family memory, photography, a hazy dinner in New York, practical intentions, and the predictable failure of those intentions.

- How to Do Great Work by Paul Graham — especially useful on curiosity, self-directed projects, and discovering what deserves your effort by doing the work rather than planning your identity around it.

- An Afternoon in Florence

— a small personal film made from wandering Florence before my wedding. No grand premise required.

- Wanting Things Without Irony — the adjacent argument for stating a desire clearly enough that it can acquire cost, evidence, and a visible next act.