Why You Still Haven't Started Creating?
Over the years running a podcast and creating content, I've been asked countless times: "How do you express yourself with such confidence, clarity, and logic?" My answer has always been the same: Write consistently. Speaking and writing are fundamentally the same skill, but writing demands more rigor in logic and rhetoric. It's a more intensive training ground for expression. So if you want to improve how you communicate, start with writing. And if you want to write well, start with consuming great content. Here's the thing though: you don't need to wait until you've accumulated enough knowledge before start creating. Input and output must happen simultaneously. Even if your first attempts are clumsy, you need to begin. Think of it like your digestive system: if you don't eat, there's nothing to process. But if you only eat without processing, you'll become constipated. A healthy system requires circulation—continuous input, continuous output, each feeding the other. Social media platforms have created a paradox: they've democratized the opportunity to create while simultaneously raising the bar impossibly high. Platforms tell us "everyone can be a creator," yet reality whispers that you need exceptional insights, depth, and style to break through. We're hungry to express ourselves, but we're blocked at the starting line by a nagging question: "Am I good enough?" Over the past year at YouMind, we've worked with thousands of creators. Some are seasoned professionals with formal training or established audiences. They use YouMind to draft blog posts, script videos, and outline podcasts before publishing across various platforms. But the majority of our users aren't what you'd traditionally call "creators." They're using YouMind to study, build products, write reports, or keep journals. So, are they creators at all? I'd argue yes. Before I started creating publicly, I spent a decade quietly writing hundreds of thousands of words in private. No one said creation has to be "for the public." A recipe you make for yourself, a proposal you write for your team, even a thoughtful social media post—if it went through the process of input, understanding, and output, that's creation. By this definition, YouTubers are creators, knowledge workers are creators, and anyone thoughtfully organizing their life is a creator. At least a quarter of the global population creates something every day. Most just don't think of themselves as "creators." So what's stopping these two billion people from claiming that identity? Looking back at my own creative journey and observing those around me, I've identified three artificial barriers to creation. These barriers have historically kept most people on the sidelines, whispering to themselves: "I'm not cut out for this." Until AI agents arrived, these gates seemed insurmountable. What are these three barriers? And how do AI agents help us overcome them? Overthinking is the biggest internal obstacle to creation. At YouMind, we require all team members to run social media. The content can be related to YouMind or completely personal. It can be about work or just life. This isn't busywork; it's essential training for understanding content and platforms, which is crucial when we are building an AI creation tool. This policy started with our marketing team, spread to product, and eventually reached engineering. I was already an experienced creator with established workflows. With AI agents, my output multiplied and even be able to publish daily without breaking a sweat. But several engineers confided in me their anxiety about this. It wasn't that they found making videos or writing posts technically difficult. They were afraid no one would care, afraid their content wouldn't be engaging enough. Deep down, they believed content creation was something only professional creators could and should do. More importantly, they felt their "amateur" work wasn't worthy of being seen. This hesitation isn't about capability. It's about a subtle but pervasive psychological barrier: imposter syndrome around creative expression. So how do less experienced creators overcome this feeling of unworthiness? The answer: let AI elevate the presentation. Many brilliant insights fall flat when expressed purely through text. Let me give you an example. Imagine a device that forcibly translates all arguments and screams into expressions of love. Observers think conflicts have been resolved and are moved to tears, but the people involved are trapped in false harmony, unable to voice their true feelings. Reading that paragraph, you'd probably find it mildly interesting at best—an unremarkable social commentary you'd scroll past in seconds. But this exact concept, when transformed through AI into a visually compelling comic strip, generated hundreds of thousands of views and thousands of likes within 12 hours. The creator did one extra thing: instead of stopping at words, he used AI to transform this concept into a vivid, satirical "Tom and Jerry" style comic strip. This creator uses AI to generate all his comics. AI helped him bypass the skill barrier of drawing, transforming their dark humor into engaging, shareable visual content. The results speak for themselves: this practice helped him gain over 7,000 followers within a month. Comics are just one option. Your scattered notes, messy reading highlights, fleeting inspirations—all can be instantly transformed by AI agents into polished videos, podcasts, presentations, or web pages. This elevation from pure text to multimedia fundamentally changes how you perceive your own output. Visual sophistication isn't just about aesthetics; it's about rebuilding creator confidence. When your work looks "professional," that nagging imposter syndrome dissolves, and you feel genuinely confident hitting that "publish" button. We've been conditioned to think of "input" and "output" as two distinct phases, where we must accumulate knowledge before we can produce anything worthwhile. This is a complete misunderstanding of how creation actually works. The real creative process looks more like this: consume some content, develop understanding, attempt to create, hit a wall, circle back to consume more (this time with specific questions), refine understanding, try creating again... and repeat. "Learner" and "creator" aren't two separate identities. They're the same one. You don't need to wait until you've mastered something before you start creating. When you research to answer a specific question, you're simultaneously a creator and a learner. Medieval European merchants faced a similar challenge, which led them to invent double-entry bookkeeping. Every debit must have a corresponding credit; every transaction must be recorded in two accounts to maintain balance. Creation works the same way. Think of it as "double-entry bookkeeping for knowledge." Every input should correspond to an output: - Read a compelling argument (debit: input)? Immediately jot down your counter-argument or extension (credit: output). - Encounter a great case study (debit: input)? Instantly consider how you could apply it to your own project (credit: output). Only when input and output are recorded simultaneously does knowledge truly transform from cognitive debt into cognitive assets. But here's the problem: balancing accounts isn't easy. Reading is enjoyable; taking notes requires effort. Organizing those notes later? Even more work. To avoid this extra energy expenditure, we often choose to skip the output entry entirely. AI agents dramatically reduce this friction. YouMind's founder, Yubo shared his practice on how to consume 10 podcast episodes in 1 hour while producing content for multiple platforms. Faced with hours of audio, he uses AI to transcribe it into text and rapidly scans for key insights. From the AI transcript, he quickly generates new angles, extracts interesting perspectives, and drafts long-form articles. Then AI adapts the content into social media posts. Listen to someone else's podcast, generate your own ideas. What used to be time-consuming input and burdensome output becomes one fluid motion. When input and output exist in the same continuous space, creation stops being a high-pressure emergency state and becomes a low-friction daily behavior. You don't need to constantly switch between "learner mode" and "creator mode" because you're always creating. This is why, once the workflow barrier is removed, creation returns to a state more aligned with how humans naturally think. Many people suddenly discover even though they haven't become more disciplined, they've simply started producing more naturally. Beyond fear and friction, the third mountain blocking creators is often unrealistic expectations: we believe we must have a unique voice. But to be honest, don't think you're that special. Even experienced creators don't all have distinct, recognizable styles—let alone beginners. When I worked in media, my editor's most frequent advice was: there's nothing new under the sun. Studying others' creative styles and writing about topics others have covered is the necessary path for all creators. After all, what worked before will work again. We need to normalize imitation. Our education systems overemphasize originality, creating unnecessary shame around imitation. But literary and artistic history proves that all mature forms of expression began with imitation. In writing, painting, and music, professional training always starts with extensive copying, transcribing, and replication. Benjamin Franklin documented how he practiced writing by imitating The Spectator: read excellent articles, take notes on their logic, wait a few days, then rewrite from memory, finally comparing his version to the original to identify gaps in language and reasoning. Hunter S. Thompson famously typed out The Great Gatsby word-for-word just to feel the rhythm of great writing through his fingertips. Even Mo Yan admitted that before finding his voice in "Northeast Gaomi Township," he spent considerable time as an apprentice at the "blazing furnaces" of Márquez and Faulkner. If masters do this, why should we feel ashamed? With AI agents, we can now go even further than these masters. We're no longer limited to clumsily imitating the abstract style. Instead, we can use tools to dive directly into more fundamental elements. Beautiful prose and unique voice are the skin. Logic, structure, and narrative strategy are the bones. Take those articles that make you want to stand up and applaud, or those interviews with profound insights. Feed them to AI and ask it to strip away the skin to reveal the skeleton. Learning masters' thinking patterns is far more valuable than superficially imitating their language. When you've absorbed enough mental models and infused them with your own experiences, your style will naturally emerge. If we look at these three barriers together, we see they're really the same issue manifesting at different stages: They all push creation into the future, onto some idealized future version of yourself: I'll start when I'm more mature, when I've learned more systematically, when I've developed my voice. While YouMind is an AI creation agent, we never allow it to diminish human agency. It simply ensures that quality expression no longer depends on natural talent or technique, that consistent output no longer requires superhuman discipline, and that style transforms from a privilege into a structural problem that can be analyzed, replicated, and iterated. AI has made creation accessible to everyone, but it will rapidly become the dividing line between people. Stop waiting for that ready perfect version of yourself. That ideal self will always be in the future. The one who can create is only you, right now, flawed but real. Go create. Now. --- This article and its images were co-created with YouMind.