Being Creative in a World Where “Everything Has Been Done”

I know what you’re thinking: “AJ, if you’re blogging, why isn’t it recipes?”. Well, don’t you worry my friend, I will absolutely be getting into recipe blogging, but there is a certain type of fulfillment I am getting out of these first few blog posts where I dive deep into my thought process and who I am as a person. This is so I can resonate more with who I’m posting content for. There are so many content creators out there who we religiously watch and try recipes from, but do we actually know who the hell they are? We know their faces, voices, or quirks yes, but what do we know about them and their lives? In an ever growing world of online jobs and content creators, it’s easy to think that you can just post something, smack your face across it, and it’ll be great. In some cases, yeah, that does work, but in others, you start asking “who is this person and why do they deserve my attention?”.

I have always believed in making friends with whomever possible, whether it be someone online that I will never physically meet, or someone random I see out and feel like they need a friend. The world is increasingly lacking friendliness, and I try to do what I can to at least put some more out there. All along, if I’m making others smile, my day is great. I may make zero dollars one day after lots of hard work, but if I post something and someone says it helped them or they got a laugh out of it, that’s payment enough. So, what could possibly be wrong with any of that? Well, as I mentioned in my last post, there are more and more food creators every day. It starts to get to a point where every type of recipe seems to have already been done by someone else. Especially when it comes to classics like chocolate chip cookies, brownies, etc, so why reinvent the wheel?

There are a few good classic recipes I use that come from other bloggers, because while I always test pre-existing recipes and see if I can reinvent them to improve them and make them my own, some are already as good as it gets, especially when it comes to the classics. Obviously, I’m not the only person who thinks this, which is why we’ve started seeing so many crazy variations of things online, like 8 layer brownies or chocolate chip pretzel caramel toffee etc cookies. It gets to a point where you feel like everything has been done already and you don’t want to copy someone else. Sticking out and being unique on social media is essential if you want to gain a following, especially with food. If people see a bunch of recipes they’ve already seen, why are they going to pick yours? Well, this is when creators start throwing their personal twists on the way they film or put recipes together. There are tons of similarities between the recipes you see online across different platforms, but they differ in the way that they’re filmed or assembled. In recent years, we’ve really been eating with our eyes, and our eyes have to taste it first to tell us if were intrigued enough to pass it down to our mouths for the real test. If you walk into a bakery, its easy to take a look in the dessert case and know what you want to try because 9 times out of ten, what you want to try is what you think looks the tastiest. Trying to recreate that experience online through a video is incredibly difficult. There’s a level of fitness that it takes to make something look truly delicious enough for people to want to try simply from a quick video. Pictures on the other hand are a bit easier to convince people with, because you can really set them up, stage them, filter them, and make them look as pretty as possible.

Something I’ve struggled with over the years of content creation is finding my niche and sticking out from the rest of the baking community. For a while, I thought it was purely the way I was filming my recipes. I kept telling myself that my videos didn’t look professional enough and compared to others seemed quite amateur. While I’m not classically trained, it doesn’t mean that I can’t be a professional. There are plenty of creators out there today who have worked different jobs up until last month and decided to start filming food videos because that’s what gives them joy. I can’t say I’m that different from them in that sense, but I have at least worked several jobs related to the food business, plus I have my cookbook and dessert mix line. All of this is put together this image and business of a professional, to show people that I am trustworthy and know what I’m talking about. It’s really easy to watch someone online and believe them purely because they’re saying it, but you have no way knowing that they genuinely have the knowledge of what they’re trying to push, unless of course they’ve posted their history, work, etc, to show that they too have gained the knowledge and skills to show others how to create good food.

Today, as I write this, I’m finally more confident in my way of not only creating videos, but creating food. At the end of the day, it’s all about the food. How it tastes, looks, smells, what you get out of it emotionally. I found that if I can just be myself on camera, since I’m quite the weirdo, then it works. Every day of the week, I sit and think about what to film, how to be different, how to get creative, and how to put something new into the world. After enough days of doing that, I realized that the recipe itself doesn’t necessarily have to be brand new, but the way I film it, the way I portray it, and the way I make others see it can give them a new impression of it, or a newfound inspiration to finally try it. As long I know that each of my videos is special because it’s unique to me, my style and personality, then the recipes will follow in that. Keeping that mindset makes it way easier to get creative in a world where it feels like everything has already been done. The key is to simply not overthink it. Its not rocket science, its food.