What Counts as Experience When You've Never Called Yourself a Content Creator

Someone left a comment under one of my last posts that I've reread more times than I want to admit: "You have ten years of workshops and a book. Of course this was easier for you." I sat with that one for a full day before I answered her, because the honest answer isn't "no, it wasn't easier." The honest answer is: I've always called myself creative. What I never called myself was a content creator and for a while I let other people decide those were two different things.

I wrote about this a few weeks ago, the day I decided to launch my “new” instagram accout with 10,400 people already watching but I skipped past the part where, underneath that number, I still didn't think my kind of experience counted for this particular thing.

The distance between "creative" and "content creator" is doing more damage than it's worth

Here's what I've noticed: women write to me constantly with some version of "I'm not really a content creator, I just posted a couple of photos on my instagram account." I ran a small business for eleven years. I managed teams through three reorganizations. I raised a kid part time while running that business and somehow never missed a school pickup. That word "just" is doing the same job every time: it's disqualifying real experience because it didn't come with a ring light attached.

Experience isn't content-creator-shaped or not. It's either evidence that you can build, sustain, and survive something, or it isn't. Most of what people wave off as "not that" is actually just evidence they haven't looked at yet.

What actually counted once I stopped requiring it to look like Instagram

I used to think my ten years counted because I'd designed layouts and taught technique: the visibly creative part. It turns out the part that counts most is duller than that: I know how to keep showing up to something for years past the point where it's fun. I know how to fix a workshop that's going badly in real time, in front of the people it's going badly for. I know what it feels like to have a business plateau and choose to keep going anyway, or choose to let it end.

None of that is new creativity I had to find. It's the same creativity I've always had, just never applied to a platform I hadn't grown up with.

The Young Living years taught me the thing I was most embarrassed to admit

For years I built a network marketing business: real numbers, real top-performance in Europe, and also real conversations that didn't go anywhere, real months where nothing moved. I used to leave that chapter out of my story because it felt like the opposite of creative work. It wasn't art. It was cold outreach and consistency and getting told no. But I created content as well: classes, inspiration, content for my blog/instagram (again), email marketing, wellness guides…

But that chapter is where I actually learned to talk to a stranger about something I believed in without sounding like I was selling. When I write a caption now, that's the skill doing the work, not some brand-new creative gift, just years of practice having a conversation that could easily go nowhere.

What I still had to build, and why that's not a contradiction

I want to be direct about this, because it matters: being creative didn't mean I knew how to run a content calendar, or what a lead magnet was supposed to do, or how Flodesk segments a list. I had to learn all of that myself, by signing up for marketing classes and even go back to school.

That's not proof my old experience didn't count. It's proof that "being creative" and "knowing the mechanics of publishing publicly" are two different skills. You can have the first one for decades and still need to build the second one this year.

If you've never called yourself a content creator, here's the actual question

Not "am I creative enough to do this." You probably already know you are, even if it's quiet knowledge nobody's asked about in years. The real question is: have you ever built something, kept it going longer than felt comfortable, and adjusted it when it stopped working? If the answer is yes — a business, a household, a team, a decade in a job you hated but ran well — you have exactly the kind of experience this requires. It just wasn't labeled "content" because nobody ever pointed a camera at it.

I open my Hobonichi most mornings before I write anything for HWC, and most days the page says some version of the same thing: I'm creative. I'm just still learning what that means on a platform I didn't grow up on. That sentence has been true for about a year now, and I've stopped waiting for it to feel resolved before I keep going.

If you're circling this same question, wondering whether your version of experience counts, even though it never came with a content calendar attached, that's exactly the moment the Side Hustle Audit was built for. It doesn't ask if you're creative enough. It asks what you've actually already survived, and helps you see which of the three starting points — Overthinker, Restarter, Circler — is yours.