MADE BY MANY: It Ain’t About You
**This column originally appeared in our January 2026 issue**
In last month’s reflection — essay or love/hate letter, depending on how you read it — I heard from people across disciplines and regions who recognized what was being described because they were living it. That recognition extends beyond us, to cities and regions across the country that dare to build through the browbeating of a nation that consumes our fruit while refusing to acknowledge the tree.
The labor of the creative class has always lived in the subtext — whispered behind closed doors, embedded in development decks, underwriting power moves. Or more accurately: we are the centerpiece at the red wedding — necessary, desired, and disposable once the alliance is secured.
It’s imperative we remember this.
When budgets are cut and chitlins are offered in place of tenderloin; when goalposts move in violation of contract terms and we’re told to be grateful we’re still invited to eat; when our value is measured by a check instead of the systems that depend on us.
These decisions are not a referendum on your worth. They are a byproduct of something much larger — something structural, something that shapes economies, starves or feeds nations, and decides who is allowed to build versus who is allowed to benefit.
And still, when something blooms from our head, hands, and heart, the sting of being undervalued is real. We feel it in our bodies, in our rent anxiety, in the quick math we do before deciding whether to keep going or fold.
But we must get on — to survive, to stabilize, and to support those who depend on us.
Which is why the lesson isn’t “take it less personally.” The lesson is: become fluent in the system.
As Audre Lorde famously warned, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” But effectiveness requires fluency — and that means knowing what’s in the tool shed, for protection, for posterity, or, dare I say, for peace. Stop paying the tuition of ignorance with your body and your life.
Jim Collins, in Good to Great, doesn’t write about cities or culture — but his work unintentionally exposes the game creatives are forced to play. Collins’ central insight: good outcomes come from talent; great outcomes come from systems.
Or as he puts it more bluntly:
“Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice and discipline.”
Here’s the truth that creatives internalize: we are often hired for our talent but exploited by systems we didn’t design, and then blamed when those systems fail to produce greatness.
Collins found that companies don’t leap from good to great through charisma, flash, or vision alone. They do it by aligning people, incentives, and decision-making structures over time. Which means when cities and institutions treat culture as decoration instead of infrastructure, the best they can ever achieve is good — never great.
To the creatives reading this: stop interpreting systemic extraction as personal rejection.
When institutions underpay, under-support, or over-promise, they aren’t confused about your value. They’re operating inside incentive structures that reward optics over long-term greatness. Your job — if you choose to stay in the game — is not just to create, but to get fluent in how and why power allocates resources, then find out where.
Collins warns:
“Bureaucracy is compensation for incompetence and lack of discipline.”
Read that again.
When process replaces partnership, committees replace accountability, and “exposure” replaces equity, it ain’t about you. That’s a system compensating for its inability to build something that lasts.
Which means protection looks like contracts, posterity looks like ownership, and peace looks like discernment.
And to those in power who read pieces like this — city leaders, developers, funders, institutional stewards — hear this clearly: you can build good cities without leveling the playing field for the creative class. You cannot build great ones.
Collins’ research makes one thing clear: enduring greatness requires humility at the top and real empowerment throughout the system. The leaders who transformed organizations didn’t center themselves or hoard control; they built conditions that allowed others to do their best work and then protected those conditions long enough for greatness to take root.
As Collins puts it, “Level 5 leaders channel their ego needs away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a great company.” Applied to cities, the implication is unavoidable. When growth depends on creatives subsidizing development with nearly unpaid labor, unstable lives, and permanent precarity, what’s being built is not greatness — it’s extraction. Culture is strip-mined to make places look alive, then expected to regenerate on its own. It doesn’t.
You cannot market authenticity while destabilizing the people who produce it. That contradiction doesn’t just hurt creatives — it caps what a city is capable of becoming.
And this is where the responsibility shifts back to us.
Collins posits that “people are not your most important asset. The right people are.” The quiet truth is that we are the right people — but only if we stop allowing systems to treat us as interchangeable. That doesn’t require bitterness, withdrawal, or abandoning care. It requires sophistication: knowing when a table is extractive rather than collaborative, understanding when “opportunity” is code for “free labor,” and recognizing that greatness — personal or collective — demands more than talent.
It demands leverage. And leverage is built, not gifted.
So no — it ain’t about you, creative. It’s about the systems that shape who is protected, who is exposed, and who is expected to absorb growth’s cost. It’s about whether cities settle for adequacy or commit to something that can endure, and whether the creative class continues to be surprised by the game, or chooses to understand it well enough to move with intention. And when power makes systems legible, long-term growth follows through healthier creative ecosystems.
Because once you see it clearly, everyone stops bleeding unnecessarily. And that alone is a form of freedom.
If any of this feels familiar, I want to hear the patterns you’ve been navigating both internally and in the world. Email me at patrickharris@themetroland.com