Twenty-Five Creators Talk 2025 🎊

A jolt of inspiration to start the new year

Donovan Beck is a creator, author, and poet who currently works as a communications director at MIT / Photo illustration by Moy Zhong

blog.twenty-two // Is it too late to still write Happy New Year’s? Hope that you found yourself among close ones as the ball dropped regardless 🙌🏻

I’m not one for lofty resolutions, yet I do believe we can learn a lot from looking back at our latest revolution around the sun. Last blog, I shared several observations upon rereading my journal. While valuable, this practice of personal reflection felt…incomplete.

A conversation with myself might dig up some nuggets, but the real treasure reveals itself through listening to peers. So, for the last couple weeks, we’ve* been asking friends—old and new—two questions:

1. What was your biggest creative win from 2024?

2. What learnings are you bringing into 2025?

Already, the conversations have been both fascinating and fun. One TikTok creator is developing a TV show with a major studio; he’s figuring out how to balance an “insane” production schedule with playing more basketball. Another is a video journalist who’s currently in the growth stage on YouTube; they’re reveling in the moment while laying the groundwork to expand their team.

Different folks have different priorities—along with a variety of ideas and trends on their dashboards, as they chart the road of creativity ahead. That’s why we’re excited to share insights from these conversations as part of a new series: “Twenty-Five Calls for 2025.”

This series will mainly roll out on our Instagram page—if you’re interested in catching all twenty-five conversations, go follow @powderblueworld if you aren’t already. I’ll also feature specific quotes and more in this blog every week, and I can’t think of a better person to start with than Donovan Beck.

Donovan is a creator, author, and poet…along with being one of the most genuine people I know. He currently works as a communications director at MIT; his next book, Sunbreak: Notes on Hope, releases March 11.

More from my chat with Donovan below. And one last note: our mission with Creator Mag is to Make the Internet Feel Smaller. Through the zines we drop, the journey we document, and the gatherings we host, we’d like to extend an invitation into this little creative neighborhood we’re building.

By the end of our “25C” series, we hope you feel inspired to pick up the phone and catch up with a friend, too.

Here’s to a big year.

— NGL

P.S. Last week, I wrote about the power of paradox, the secret to forming a creative identity, and stacking an interesting life with a boring lifestyle. If you missed it, check it out here.

Photo via Donovan Beck

I think hope is the greatest form of influence any creator can possess. I spent a lot of 2024 considering the tug-of-war between “value creation” and “value capture.”

Let’s say you start an environmentally friendly spoon brand. You research the materials, develop a product through rigorous testing, and send it to friends and family for feedback. Eventually, you start selling your spoon at the local corner store, and it becomes a hit in your community.

An executive at Big Spoon, Inc. stops by one day and notices your spoon is flying off the shelves. He realizes that the earthy green materials are really popular, so he devises a way to cut corners on sustainability and make a mass-produced spoon in the same shade of green. That spoon takes off, and a couple months later, the executive is smiling ear-to-ear on Silverware Magazine—right next to Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg.

You created the value. He captured the value. One is rewarded more than the other.

What this simplistic narrative misses out on, however, is the byproduct of your value creation. It’s not just decreasing waste, spoon by spoon. It’s producing hope—inspiring ourselves and others to build a world we’d all like to call home.

I thought about this when listening to Donovan on the phone the other day. He noted that most poets write about “grief and loss and heartbreak” with beautiful prose, all in an effort “to help us understand the really sh**ty parts of life.” Donovan, however, wanted to write about “the aftermath of all those things.” He wanted to write about hope.

I believe hope is the foundation that we create our life on. I think it has a bad rap…people say hope is being [too] optimistic and all these other things, when that's not true. It’s a powerful driver for change, right?

Every fundamentally massive change we ever created in the world has been on the foundations of hope. And so Sunbreak: Notes on Hope was a book created from the start that set out to [explore] what happens when a poet looks at the world and says, ‘Let's find hope.’”

Donovan told me that writing Sunbreak was a long process (more on that in a second). He said it’s easy to look around at the world and feel discouraged; it’s harder to go look for the good parts and find joy.

While it may be impossible to truly quantify the impact of a book on those who read it, all it takes is one ripple to set off a chain reaction of positive change. In this instance, we can credit Donovan’s deep work of cultural excavation as creating more value than it captures—a feat worth celebrating, from my vantage point.

I think one phone call can change everything. Donovan moved to Boston in the fall of 2023, and it wasn’t an easy transition from Southern California, where he grew up and went to university. On top of that, during this period, he owed his literary agent a manuscript for Sunbreak—his first traditionally-published book (i.e. through a publishing house, as opposed to releasing yourself).

He told me that there were a lot of delayed timelines. Many emails went ignored; he navigated the pressures and mental health journey of doing a “one-eighty” in his life while still trying to deliver a book. Finally, he hit a point in March 2024 when he was on the way home from work, and his agent texted him asking for a minute to chat.

“I'm just sitting on the train having a panic attack…like, ‘s**t, they're going to drop the book. They've already paid me most of my advance. I have to somehow come up with the money to pay them back. What is going on with my life?’

I texted, ‘Yes, I'll call you when I get home.’

And I get on the phone. He's just like, ‘I wanted to know how you were doing. We hadn't heard from you in a while, and we were worried. What do you need to make the manuscript happen?’

It was the most gracious experience of my life. Then it became sort of a very diligent next couple of months of ‘let’s do this, let’s make this happen.’”

If it wasn’t for that phone call, Sunbreak may not exist. Never underestimate the power of checking in.

the book’s cover

I think “creator culture” has become “culture.” When mentioning how he advocates for more in-depth research on creators at MIT, Donovan made a great point about digital-first folks continuing to make waves in new arenas:

“You’re seeing creators implement themselves in spaces where they typically weren’t—politics, food, music.

It’s not just about YouTubers or tech reviewers anymore. It’s creators leading the way in industries that were never considered part of the ‘creator economy.’”

We saw this dynamic evolve leaps and bounds in 2024; there’s no reason to believe things will slow down in 2025. In August, Vox’s Rebecca Jennings had a great piece (headline pictured below) on Caroline Gleich—a thirty-eight-year-old ski mountaineer and “professional influencer” who won the Democratic nomination for Senate in Utah last year. Jennings asked whether Gleich was “the first of many.”

It’s not far off. Ronald Regan was an actor-turned-politician. So was Arnold Schwarzenegger. Donald Trump traded reality-TV-and-tabloid fame for the Oval Office. Is it really that much of a leap to imagine someone will use their years of building community online—in a professional capacity, at that—to mount a successful political campaign?

Gleich only received thirty-one percent of the vote. She was relatively green to politics; Utah hasn’t elected a Democratic senator since 1977, after all. But culture impacts everything. Those mobilizing communities online (whatever we call them) are clearing higher and higher hurdles in spaces everywhere.**

I think you should chase what haunts you. That’s the biggest learning Donovan is bringing into 2025, after observing the phrase across a piece of graffiti in South Africa.

He feels like he took a step away from “The Hole” last year. The Hole, Donovan told me, means shutting up and sitting at the computer—instead of running away from the thing you want to make.

“There is nothing to blame about why I didn't create this past year. Not even myself. It just didn't occur. But then I have to make the decision that I want to sit in The Hole a lot more.

The Word document is indifferent to you. It isn't fighting for your benefit. It is indifferent until you give it some sort of meaning.”

The thing that haunts him? Using his experiences—and the resources at MIT—to help and support a new generation of artists. He believes in spotlighting overlooked creators from non-Western regions, and he wants to spend more time focused on writing, research, and advocacy work.

I think this quote is a bar. I’ll end with this from Donovan:

“There are only twelve notes in music and twenty-six characters in the English language, yet we’re still creating new music, films, and stories.

That’s the magic of art—it’s the eternal sewing of hope.”

Brb, I’m about to go run through a brick wall.

You can follow along with Donovan’s journey here.

Thanks for reading! Shoot me a reply, comment, or DM if anything resonated with you in particular—I respond to them all.

* No, I’m not referring to myself as “we.” I’ll share more about our team over the next several weeks!

** Daggumit, I really hope Logan Paul doesn’t win the presidency a decade from now.