Unhelpful advice for creators

By DTL
Posted November 13, 2025

There's a mindset that I don't know the term for. The Germans probably have a word for it; they have word for everything! But let's see if I can explain ...

Take the idea of threshold concepts:

threshold concepts can be understood as a pedagogical framework that brings into view the areas of conceptual difficulty in a field: the points of entry that must be understood for students to move to higher levels of understanding. One crucial characteristic of a threshold concept is that once learned, the learner is transformed. Transformative thinking transcends what one might call foundational concepts and rather refers to a type of knowledge, a conceptual gateway so to speak, that leads to new ways of understanding or interpreting core notions of a discipline.

So far, so good!

The key phenomenon I wish to describe is subsequent to that enlightenment: once you are transformed, you can no longer empathize with or relate to people who are not transformed. Once you have crossed this threshold, you are no longer capable of imagining the mindset of someone who has not crossed this threshold. The two of you simply do not live in the same world of understanding. And interestingly, it is the transformed individual and not the ignorant individual who is unable to accept that this is the case; they literally cannot conceive that other people are not transformed. Their mind can't receive or hold or accept the fact that other people don't also have this mindset.

For example: if you try to learn French, your teacher will say to you fairly early on, “Think in French!” They know what they mean -- but they are simply incapable of understanding that, to someone who has not crossed that threshold, those three words do not parse into any coherent concept, let alone into anything actionable. What they say is, quite literally, useless until you have crossed that threshold.

Good teachers can work around this with the careful application of empathy and by tailoring instruction to meet the students where they are, not where the teacher feels they should be. It must be frustrating for them! Look at it from their side; it feels to them that they're trying to get a basic concept through to someone who just doesn't understand. And, let's face it, most teachers are not good.

So it is with movie-making. Successful creators are simply incapable of comprehending that newbie creators -- or even of accepting that such people exist. They can't return to the mindset they had when they themselves were newbies. The fact that they have succeeded itself gets in the way and makes this impossible.

The Duplass Brothers (Jay and Mark) are often held up as exemplars of the DIY, indie-movie creator. They definitely prove that you can accomplish great things with nothing but talent, hard work, and parents willing and able to fund you. They succeeded by having all three of those things; if they were missing any one of them, we would never have heard of them, because they would not have succeeded. Don't overlook that last factor! (See “It takes a windfall” for further discussion.)