CREATIVITY AND WORK
CREATIVITY AND WORK
When a person finds an activity that brings them joy and pleasure, it is logical that they want to do it for most of the day. Often such an activity takes away the wish to do anything else.
This can be seen especially well when a person finds an interesting kind of creativity. Creative processes give so much pleasure that they swallow people up completely, and everything else becomes uninteresting.
The next logical step for a person absorbed in creativity is to turn it into a profession. So that during working hours, too, they do what they love instead of work that is less interesting and inspiring, or even completely uninteresting and, on the contrary, emotionally draining.
Turning creativity into your main profession is dangerous for creativity
Most of the pleasure and inspiration in creativity is connected not with the physical process of making a work, but with the creative freedom of searching and the freedom of the result. A profession means getting paid for what the buyer needs. The work has to be the way the buyer wants to see it, by the buyer’s deadline and within the buyer’s budget. Besides, once it becomes a profession, you have to do many completely non-creative things as well: find clients, be able to sell to them despite a lot of competition, and also deal with accounting and taxes.
In other words, the creative process loses exactly those valuable parts that bring creative pleasure and inspiration, and gains a lot of non-creative tasks, obligations and legal and financial responsibility.
You have to protect your creative pleasure
First of all, remember why a person needs creativity. Creativity appears as an impulse of the soul, as the result of reflection, as a reaction to what is happening around or inside the author. Creativity is needed for inner calm, for interest in life, for inspiration, for pleasure. Creativity is an important but personal matter, for yourself. There are many such matters: someone does sport not for medals but for fitness and pleasure, someone studies wine for personal development rather than to work as a sommelier, many spend a lot of time fishing although there is food at home and they are not going to sell the fish, people travel not for YouTube views. A person needs all these activities not to earn money but to enrich themselves with thoughts, sensations and physical fitness.
This enrichment helps you get more pleasure from everyday things too. The main thing is to find the right proportion between things for the soul and things for income. So that you have enough inner strength and money.
If the wish to earn from creativity is invincible
The first thing to remember: a buyer will pay for your product or service only if they need it, like it, or you have convinced them of it.
Then there are three ways:
- Find out what the client needs and how you can realise your creative freedom within those limits. Ideally, the client’s limits match your own.
- From the start, look for a client who will not set limits on your creative freedom and will trust you completely.
- Create your own work without a client and only afterwards look for a buyer who will want to acquire it.
All three approaches are widely practised in the creative professions and have many positive examples in the history of art, but also many tragic examples of authors who made creativity their main source of income. As a result they lost either their income or the very pleasure and inspiration, for exactly the reasons described at the beginning.
A creative person has four ways:
- Be creative to fill yourself.
- Try to make money from your creative work from time to time.
- Learn to sell your creative work in the right amount without losing the pleasure of creating.
- Turn your beloved creative process into non-creative obligatory work.
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