Photo: Vecteezy
It's not easy to live a creative life in a world that seems to be getting more challenging by the year. I won’t try to tell you our hard-earned skills are worthless, because they have a competitive edge over artificial intelligence (AI) and anybody else who may enter your space, depending on how seriously you take your livelihood as a creative.
A big hurdle for any creative person is the one where you need to believe in yourself, as a person, and your abilities. I’m talking self-confidence and the will to strive to be whomever you want to be. That alludes to grit, sacrifice and persistence in the face of many odds.
But first we need to understand who we are, so we can accept pushback and criticism from non-creatives. I’m talking about family, friends and significant others.
". . . we need to understand how we’re wired so we don’t live our lives with overpowering guilt and regrets for whatever setbacks we might experience. It may have absolutely nothing to do with us . . ."
The biggest bone of contention is how we spend our time. Obviously, if you’re in a relationship, you need to carve out time to share experiences, or what’s the point of the relationship? I’m talking balance. If a creative is having trouble with that, then maybe this is a relationship that needs to be dissolved. Better sooner than later.
It took me a lifetime to realize non-creatives won’t ever understand you—your need to create, and how strong that resolve is to your happiness. This is obviously complicated, as it depends on the needs of the other person, so I’m not saying relationships between creatives and non-creatives never work out. Some will and some won’t.
The point is we need to know how we’re wired so we don’t live our lives with overpowering guilt and regrets for whatever setbacks we might experience. It’s about degrees of understanding, not laying blame. I’m not a therapist with letters behind my name, just speaking from experience, which may or may not be yours. But if you are a young creative starting out, here is some advice to take or leave as you wish.
In Part II of this series, I spoke of the need to conform on some level. People buy from people:
- they like
- they trust
Since you are judged in the first three seconds of meeting a stranger, it’s good to be presentable, friendly and knowledgeable enough to start building a trust bond—if you want creative work.
I spoke of the duality of a creative’s play versus work ethic and the fact we are wired to be based in reality—something most non-creatives would have never guessed about us and how we need to communicate this to our advantage. To continue this duality theme, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, says we swing back and forth between being an extrovert and an introvert. It pays to be flexible—and internally, we are—an introvert to create and extrovert to sell ourselves and our creative output.
We are psychologically androgenous
I was once an editor of magazines and newspapers. I was told on more than one occasion “you know how to write towards a women’s audience.” I was never sure how to take that because I wrote features and editorials based on the subject at hand. Perhaps due to life experience I was able to dip further down into the depths of empathy, deeper than the male writers they were accustomed to reading. But I sensed something else within my personality.
As it turns out, Mr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced MEE-high Chick-sent-me-high-ee or “Mr. C.” with apologies) says creatives don’t necessarily adhere to rigid gender roles.
“When tests of masculinity/femininity are given to young people, over and over one finds that creative and talented girls are more dominant and tough than other girls, and creative boys are more sensitive and less aggressive than their male peers.
A psychologically androgynous person in effect doubles his or her repertoire of responses and can interact with the world in terms of a much richer and varied spectrum of opportunities. It is not surprising that creative individuals are more likely to have not only the strengths of their own gender but those of the other one, too.”
Boys and girls, that’s opportunity and possibly a human characteristic the Large Language Model (LLM) AI learning systems would find hard to duplicate. At least yet. Lots of nuance there.
The duality continues: Rebellious and conservative?
Ask any creative agency principle to list their creatives character traits and the top traits would include “independent,” possibly “rebellious,” but also “diversified,” meaning these agency principals never cease to be surprised by their creative staff, in a good way. Their creatives rise to the occasion, time after time to meet the needs of their more conservative clients.
Mr. C says it is because creatives are drawn to their chosen domains (i.e. graphic arts, music, architecture, writing) with a strong appreciation for the history and culture that is the foundation of a domain. Learning anything new for the first time, what went before, is the lifeline, a starting place. Only after getting the basics do many creatives kick off the training wheels and swim to the deep end. The early disrupters are out there, however, with their low-risk behavior, which is not a bad thing, they are generally a one-trick pony and we’re talking about building and maintaining a creative life.
"Cattle hooves and yogurt? Brilliant!"
“So, it is difficult to see how a person can be creative without being both traditional and conservative and at the same time rebellious and iconoclastic. Being only traditional leaves the domain unchanged; constantly taking chances without regard to what has been valued in the past rarely leads to novelty that is accepted as an improvement,” he notes.
The question facing every creative on every new project, with possibly a new client is, “How safe do I play it?” What is the risk management quotient? Mr. C says breaking away from the safety of tradition is necessary. This is where the role of play comes into the picture, the need for divergent thinking, followed by an editing process.
Passionate, but objective
Here’s another duality. Mr. C says, “Most creative persons are very passionate about their work, yet they can be extremely objective about it as well.”
Something very important: Without clear direction of an outcome, it’s hard to have a creative process leading to a vision for an interesting outcome—which may not be a practical one.
I needed to design a container, a bottle to hold a new Italian beverage I formulated with an Italian liqueur producer family. It was not a liqueur for an after-dinner drink; more of a shooter-style drink for the 20s market, based on the Italian liqueur, limoncello. At the time, I was running a promotion for McDonalds for the countries of Germany, France, Italy and Luxembourg. I would meet on weekends at their fabrica in Caserta, in Southern Italy. I would hire an interpreter and spend the morning laying out a roll-out marketing plan, based on test markets I had done in bars in Atlanta, back in the States. I wanted liquor store packaging that would really stand out on the shelf in bars and retail spaces.
I love Italian innovation and by observing their graphic packaging creatives, I learned something very important: Absolutely nothing is off base when problem solving. Does Dannon yogurt need a new clasp to close a cardboard carton surround, holding the individual cups? The discussion revolved around the cloved hooves of cattle, because the right and left sides of the hoof are flexible for better balance and stability on uneven ground. Why would package “balance” and “stability” not be considerations when those yogurt packs would be stacked on shipping pallets and grocery shelves? Cattle hooves and yogurt? Brilliant! Templating, die cutting and graphics discussions would follow. All of it infinitely fascinating to graphic artists, marketers, engineers and quality control managers.
I drew my bottle design on paper first, trying many interesting shapes. Graphic packaging designers know about making human connections, the “intrinsic details” to be conveyed. Humans buy products that appeal to their emotions. Given gender differences, I needed to find inspiration in ways I had not explored previously. The packaging had to stand out on the shelf from the competition, it had to “look” like Italian design and the bottle materials had to be safe for humans, as well as be easy to mass produce and export from Italy.
As part of my website marketing for the drink, I was also working on a project with Dott.ssa Flegra Bentivegna, premier sea turtle biologist at the prestigious Naples Aquarium. My bottle design had a nice sweeping curve of a broad, insect-like back. Out of the blue, I drew some turtle flippers on the bottle and broadened the 750 ml. bottle tank to be more like a sea turtle. These could be stacked easily on a shelf, almost like little humanoids hugging one another. With alternating colors, it would be a striking display. I drew prototypes in Illustrator and used software I owned at the time which could produce a 3-D clay model, and they looked great. Now came the big question—how will they be produced?
That’s a cliff hanger for another time. Lesson learned. Cattle hooves and yogurt? An alcoholic beverage and sea turtles?
Was I passionate about this project? Hell yes! Was I objective? Sometimes passion can override challenges long enough to find solutions.
To bring this discussion around to my author readers, in his book, Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, Mr. C quotes historian and author Natalie Davis.
“I am sometimes like a mother trying to bring the past to life again. I love what I am doing, and I love to write. I just have a great deal of affect invested in bringing these people to life again, in some way. It doesn’t mean that I love my characters, necessarily, these people from the past. But I love to find out about them and re-create them or their situation. I think it is very important to find a way to be detached from what you write, so that you can’t be so identified with your work that you can’t accept criticism and response, and that is the danger of having as much affect as I do. But I am aware of that and of when I think it is particularly important to detach oneself from the work, and that is something where age really does help.”
Yes, age and experience have untold value when it comes to living a creative life, but youth have tremendous advantages as well and I will share all of that with you in the coming months.
I had planned to wrap this 3-part series up, but there are other important observations to be made about Mr. C’s final trait of chronic creators, one that deals with sensitivity and pain. As someone who navigated the creative waters without a creative’s art or humanities degree, contacts and money, but maybe lots of preparation, sacrifice and luck, Part IV is where I start to get into the heart of “Living the Creative Life.”