Fixation on Outcomes: The Logic Trap for Creative Leaders
Within every artistic decision, there’s a compulsion toward certainty—a need to map every possible outcome, motivated by a corrosive fear: the fear of missing out. For many founders, directors, and artists conditioned by economies where the cost of a misstep translates directly to lost revenue, visibility, or power, this fear isn’t abstract. It’s practical. The desire to see all possible results before committing doesn’t come from indecisiveness; it grows from scarcity thinking bred into our professional DNA.
Where does all this endless tab-opening get us? The seductive logic is that surveying every parallel universe brings us closer to perfection. Instead, it destroys focus. Much like a computer slowed by dozens of browser windows, our brains become sluggish, split between hypotheticals. This state isn’t enhanced productivity; it’s a stall—an inability to move from ideation to action.
The FOMO Economy and the Mirage of the “Perfect” Opportunity
This obsessive contingency planning is reinforced by power structures in the creative sector that monetize attention and idea-generation rather than outcomes. Grants, residencies, programming budgets—these rarely reward decisive risk-taking. Instead, they incentivize the continuous demonstration of option-evaluation and readiness, producing founders and directors skilled at seeing paths but hesitant to walk down any. The cultural narrative is clear: the “best” artists and leaders are the most adaptable, never fixed, always on the brink of something better.
Yet the truth is plain—the need to be everywhere leads instead to being nowhere. You cannot animate multiple realities at once. In the attempt, your presence is split, your capacity stretched, and no opportunity, present or future, receives full investment. All the open tabs become performance—evidence of mindfulness and diligence—while the infrastructure you intend to build remains insubstantial.
From Possibility Hoarding to Outcome Orientation: The Mindset Shift
What if the problem isn’t a dearth of opportunity but a refusal to enact any singular vision? What if the founder’s real power lies in closing tabs, not opening them? If creative leaders replace the obsession with parallel possibilities with a mindset grounded in present investment, the paradigm shifts: every opportunity becomes an avenue, not an escape route.
When you operate from the belief that each decision can lead to the next, rather than cut you off from all future chance, you move from scarcity to generativity. This is not optimism for its own sake, but an economic principle: iterative, values-driven choice builds resilience, not fragility. In practice, the perfect outcome is always an illusion; every decision brings mixed results. Certainty isn’t an asset—it’s a barrier.
Practical Tool: The Tab Audit for Founders and Directors
A straightforward exercise for artists and leaders committed to solution-based thinking:
- Write down each major decision currently “on your desk”—whether literal or mental. Each is an open tab.
- For each, name the action you have delayed by searching for more data or alternatives.
- Commit, for 72 hours, to close all but one tab. Practice being present in the action required by that tab, even if discomfort or FOMO arrives.
- At the end, record what changed in your process: did closing tabs impact your agency, your anxiety, your ability to build?
This discipline is not aesthetic. It is infrastructural—a method of refusing distraction economies and opt-in inertia.
The Unasked Question of Creative Labor
Every time you open another tab, ask yourself: Whose narrative about risk, opportunity, and value are you really serving—the system’s, or your own?
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