How Process Became a Product

Happy Friday 👋🏼 This week marks ten years since Hamilton opened on Broadway, and that anniversary got me thinking about the way we remember shows for what they became—not for the long, uncertain road they took to get there.

This year, I’ve had the rare chance to travel that road—twice. Two brand-new musicals, each in the process of figuring out what they want to be. Right now, I’m at Williamstown Theatre Festival, working on another new musical still in its infancy. We’ve spent the week going page by page and song by song, combing through the details to find its tone, its voice, the way it wants to sing.

From the outside, this stage can look romantic—blooper reels, “making of” documentaries, TikToks of quick changes and set renderings. But from the inside, it’s slow. It’s uncertain. There’s no applause yet, no proof you’re on the right track—just the work, and the faith that the work will get you there. Somewhere. Eventually.

So this week, I wanted to look at that gap: the difference between how process appears and how it’s lived. And maybe, what that contrast can teach us.

Let’s get into it.

Admittedly, I’m a documentary slut. There’s something deeply satisfying about learning how a story unfolded. Seeing the raw materials and how they fit together is oddly comforting. It’s why I’ll binge YouTube videos on how albums were recorded one minute, and fall down a rabbit hole of Veep blooper reels the next.

And I’m not alone. We are in the middle of a documentary boom. In the 2000s, theatrical releases of documentaries tripled. The past decade has been called a “golden age,” fueled by streaming platforms that made them easy to find, binge, and share. Demand for documentaries grew 142% from 2018 to 2021—the fastest-growing streaming genre. And with YouTube democratizing the format, there’s now a documentary (or doc-adjacent deep dive) on nearly any topic you can imagine.

So why do we love them so much? Why are we willing to watch hours of the making instead of just the thing itself?

Part of the answer is curiosity. Part is connection—real stories about real people feel like higher stakes. But part of it is neurological. When we watch someone else in the act of making, our mirror neurons fire. Our brain doesn’t just register what they’re doing—it simulates it. We get a small dopamine hit from their breakthroughs, a micro-release of tension when they recover from a mistake. Our brains rehearse the motions, as if we were the ones doing them.

That’s the quiet magic of watching process: it lets us borrow the feeling of creation without the risk. It makes greatness feel more accessible, more possible. It whispers: you could do this too.

From the outside, process can look like a playground. Highlight reels and satisfying arcs: the joy of creation. But inside, it’s often slow. Repetitive. Blinking cursors on blank pages. Repeating words until they’re just jumbles of sounds. The big laugh in the rehearsal room and the heavy silence ten minutes later when you inevitably hit a roadblock. Tiny wins. Tiny deaths. Over and over.

The difference is that when we watch someone else’s process, we’re only seeing the curated version—the edited sequence of breakthroughs and resolved problems. In our own process, we have to live through every moment in real time, without knowing which ones will lead anywhere. The stakes feel heavier, the uncertainty sharper.

And layered on top of that is a new kind of pressure: the commodification of process itself.

We live in a culture that rewards “behind the scenes” content. How can I prove I’m working on something? And how can I do it in a way that’s bite-sized, shareable, engaging enough to stop someone’s scroll?

What begins as external pressure—from producers, managers, or the algorithm—quickly calcifies into something internal. A quiet, insidious belief: if I can’t show people what I’m making, am I really making anything at all?

That’s dangerous territory. Because the moment process becomes a performance for others, it stops being a space for real discovery. We start mistaking the performance of process for process itself. We turn the process into a product—forgetting the deeper truth that the process is the product.

Maybe the point isn’t to romanticize process or to demonize it, but to recognize it for what it is: a space where both truths exist at once. Where exhilaration and doubt live side-by-side.

In nature, nothing blooms all at once. Seeds spend seasons underground, doing the quiet work of becoming. Rivers carve canyons grain by grain. Even a tree in full leaf is still in process—pulling water from the roots, sending sugar through its veins, adjusting to wind and weather in real time. It’s beautifully endless.

We don’t demand a flower show us proof it’s growing. We trust the process because we can see its place in the larger cycle. And maybe that’s the invitation for us as artists and creatives—to remember that our work is part of a longer arc than whatever deadline or deliverable is in front of us.

In practice, that might mean carving out pockets—whether in a rehearsal room, a blank Google Doc, or a 30-minute window of the day—where the work can be messy and private, unfolding in ways that can’t be translated to a camera roll. It might mean learning to see (and celebrate) the small signals of progress.

Because in the end, the seed doesn’t know the shape of the tree. The river doesn’t know the canyon it’s carving. We don’t always know what we’re making while we’re making it.

So maybe the work is to keep tending anyway—to water, to shape, to listen—trusting that something is taking root, even if we don’t know how or when or if it will bloom.

This year has been one long lesson in living inside unfinished things.

All The World’s a Stage was fresh, delicate. We were a small circle of people in a small room, trying to tell an intimate story. There was no road map, only the fragile trust that if we showed up with enough Love and curiosity, the piece would tell us what it wanted to be.

BEAU was the opposite in some ways. I’ve been working on it for nearly eight years, and even this past run was still deep in process—sanding its edges, stripping away what wasn’t essential. Not to reinvent it, but to help it sing in the clearest, truest voice. That kind of process teaches patience, loyalty, and the strange satisfaction of realizing that “finished” will never really mean “done.”

And now, at Williamstown, I’m watching the birth of something completely new. In a way, it’s like we’re collecting sticks and branches for a future fire. We’re not even touching Act Two. Just page by page through Act One. It’s slow. It’s meticulous. Sometimes to the point of frustration. But it’s also miraculous—the spark of creation.

When I was younger, admittedly, I wanted the lights, the stage, the moment of being seen. Now I just want to be in the room where it happens. Contributing to the quiet alchemy of people trying to make something together. The privilege of being one little flash in a constellation of a process that, if you’re lucky, you get to witness from the inside.

Maybe that’s all any of us are doing—weaving mess with magic. And arriving is less of a landing some place and more a recognition of where we already are.

See you next week ♥️