Creativity Quote by Natalie Merchant

A little verbal shrug ("and, um") is doing a lot of political work here. Merchant takes the most overused self-help imperative in the book - "Be true to yourself" - then undercuts it with a sideways glance at the real antagonist: corporate time, measured in quarters, profits, and index numbers. The hesitation isn’t uncertainty so much as a refusal to sound like a slogan. She’s letting authenticity stay messy and human while pointing at the clean, spreadsheet-driven logic that tries to discipline it.

The line lands because it reframes "being true" as something you practice against a pressure system, not inside a bubble of personal empowerment. "Some large companies" is deliberately vague: a soft target that somehow hits harder, suggesting the whole apparatus without naming a villain-of-the-week. And "quarterly profit index" is comically bureaucratic, a mouthful that mimics the corporate voice; it’s humor as deflation, a reminder that what gets treated as sacred in business is often just jargon wrapped around incentives.

Context matters: Merchant’s career sits in that long arc where alternative music tried to keep moral and artistic independence while the industry consolidated, monetized, and optimized. This reads like advice to younger artists, but also to anyone trapped in a culture where "metrics" are treated as meaning. The subtext: if you let quarterly logic set your values, you’ll spend your life auditioning for a scoreboard that doesn’t love you back.