Is faith alone, good enough to make hard decisions? If you’re a creative, it may be all you’ve got—Photo: Vecteezy
I started this blog series concerning the trait characteristics of creatives, because living a creative life, like many other professions, is not always easy. And it can always get tougher. It’s hard on you and it’s hard on relationships. While I’m not trying to put creatives in a victim’s oh, poor-is-us class, we have, to use the Christian saying, our own cross to bear.
What is so important about the humanities, the arts and sciences, the thinkertoys and skilled hand-to-eye coordination of our existence, that is relegated by the masses as frivolous play? Why are some humans obsessed with creativity, but not others? If you’re around that attitude for a lifetime, it can start to get to you, unless you have very thick skin and bullet-proof self-confidence. By age 60, you could care less what people think of you and your “success” or lack thereof. But in your earlier years, unless you are lucky enough to get on some creative staff in marketing communications or media, your human emotional antenna gets bent.
We have options
In market recessions, there are lots of bent antennas and enough humility to go around for everybody when creatives get laid off in the downturns. Time to pivot. Time to network. You posthumously question your choice to take on a creative profession in the first place.
But at least in the good old USA, though not perfect, there are always options. Those who take exception with that statement need to live in Europe to see what lack of opportunity is for young creatives, or construction workers, programmers, health care professionals, etc., where “patriarchy,” “class,” and “colonization” are baked into those societies. Good luck confronting the nepotism, which is why corruption is so hard to defeat over there, but I digress.
We have options. Creatives have an edge, because of the way we are wired to find and seize any opportunities we can lasso. I can’t speak for everybody, but I am living proof, starting over at age 35 with very little, and university degrees that no longer held their glow or significance, except in those fields of study and those jobs were almost non-existent.
From a mental health standpoint, I wanted to continue with the last of this series with psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s (it’s Hungarian and pronounced MEE-high Chick-sent-me-high-ee) final key trait from his book Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention.
My story
Very few of us have the mental and physical skills, luck and timing to become rich and famous in the prime of life, which is never the motive to live a creative life anyway. That being the case, I wish I had this information when things got tough. I would not have been so hard on myself when experiencing lonely weekend nights, cold, dark mornings in a twin bed staring at the ceiling and solo dining during holidays later in life. If that sounds sad, some of it was—but a lot of it wasn’t.
"I’m not saying there were itchy trigger fingers in the room, but I usually ordered a cheeseburger and fries to go."
But that’s not exclusive to creatives so much as the ebb and flow of life itself among human interaction. Living in a country where the poorest Americans have higher incomes than roughly 95 percent of all the humans who have ever lived tends to skew the self-pity quotient. A lot of my life was (and is) great. Done right, it can be a wild ride full of fun and memorable experiences with strangers, friends and family. Hopefully you won’t ever get despondent enough to cut off an ear and mail it to whomever with vengeance in your heart.
Operating in the dark with strange, unclear motivation
Why did I give up my State job as a wildlife biologist at age 27 and head South to start a rock and roll band? Didn’t I get the message rock-and-roll is a young man’s (woman’s) game? I’ve mentioned elsewhere, previously, that I was failing to see the challenge with what I was currently doing. It was very difficult to get a job in natural resources management in the early 80s, but I managed to somehow pull it off.
I started out working in the Ozarks in the Forest-Wildlife Branch of the Wildlife Division. I wore a uniform and looked like a game warden to Ozark wild game poachers. It was like a western movie, where you walk into a saloon for lunch in some logging community and the conversation stops as you look for a place to sit. My presence made them nervous. I’m not saying there were itchy trigger fingers in the room, but I usually ordered a cheeseburger and fries to go. That’s just how people are, being a survival thing—it’s fight or flight. Are you a threat or not? I never was.
But I did cool things like trap wild turkeys, helped with a roughed grouse restoration project, handled farming contracts, and helped foresters inventory timber. I was promoted after two years to work in a pilot project helping private landowners in north Missouri plan their farming operations to make allowances for wildlife habitat through complimentary farming practices, like rotational grazing, narrow-row planting of corn and soybean crops and planting native prairie grasses. I wrote my “Opus” outside of my eight-hour day, as a side project, called Farming and Wildlife in Missouri, that was published for several decades after my exit.
I played in a rock band on weekends, which was becoming an obsession with me. The beer joints and supper clubs in corn fields in southern Iowa, the music of the time, the camaraderie within the band, learning about live sound systems and new instruments, was for me, intoxicating stuff. Pocketing the cold cash at the end of the evening for a job well done, entertaining the crowds and the celebratory breakfast afterward in some diner or truck stop was exhilarating. Coming up on age 30, when most couples were thinking of starting a family, I wanted a shot at the big time.
I was planning my exit from Missouri, trading a known, secure world for an unknown adventure while I still had time to "get it out of my system.” I allowed myself five years and would reevaluate things at age 35. I had reassurances from the Dept. of Conservation management that I would be welcomed back, should things not work out, providing there was an opening. I knew there would be, and I left on good terms. Little did I know about the rise of powerful H.R. departments at this time, with their quotas, which quickly shut down any plan of a return.
Why? Just why?
To an outsider, this decision could be viewed as extremely selfish and maybe just plain crazy. It’s not necessary to go through the complexities of a relationship that turned sour, leading to divorce. This life change was way down the list of problems and that’s all I’ll say, while recognizing this was one crazy move on my part, but I did have (or thought I had) buy-in from all concerned. What was it in my hard-working, generally responsible, nice guy personality that caused me to shake things up?
"I saw my share of failures but didn’t focus on them, because I was building a new person—a person who believed in himself and his work . . ."
For this question, which haunted me for years, I found Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s research enlightening as I thought back to when I struggled to find my footing, as I alternated between musician, landscape designer/contractor, graphic artist and marketer. Long story short, the band I helped form in Athens, GA didn’t make it, but we got very close to a record deal before it imploded in Atlanta just before I turned 35. I was the first to leave the band, having given everything to the project and I’m proud of what we accomplished. I had to cut my losses and move on. But I was totally lost.
The Way Forward
I stayed grounded with the things I knew well, while I learned new skills, found markets for my creative output and networked in Atlanta to seek openings through new contacts. No job was too small or unimportant as I tried to put my self-valued signature on every piece of work which multiplied when I asked clients for referrals.
At this point, everything felt like a side-hustle, as I breathed a sigh of relief with each contract I made, knowing I’d be able to eat and pay the bills for the month as an independent contractor.
I saw my share of failures but didn’t focus on them, because I was building a new person—a person who believed in himself and his work, a person who normally would shy away from promotion, but instead, learned how to pull opportunities in, almost conjured from thin air, and I worked to identify and improve small percentage numbers of individual selling skills to add up to double-digit bottom line improvements overall. In short, I planned my work and worked my plan.
In summary:
- Focused on what I could do well to make money immediately
- Opened and read The Living Bible
- forced myself to network in business groups
- Sharpened my selling skills
- Learned new creative software
- If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it—measure for incremental improvement
- Cross-over into other creative work
- follow up and ask for referrals
- learned public speaking
The Final Creative Trait
“Mr. C,” as I affectionately call Mr. Csikszentmihaly, notes creative people are open and sensitive in a way other people are not. “The greater sensitivity can cause slights and anxieties that are not usually felt by the rest of us.” He does however question research that shows artists and writers having unusually high rates of psychopathology and addictions.
“... the openness and sensitivity of creative individuals often expose them to suffering and pain yet also a great deal of joy . . .”
It is the “joy” within the creative process that overrides any negativity. Surprisingly, according to Mr. C, non-creatives don’t feel this—certainly not on our level of experience. Aren’t we special!
But he says blazing trails alone, trails that maybe only we view important enough to explore, can make us exposed and vulnerable. “Eminence invites criticism and often vicious attacks. When an artist has invested years in the making a sculpture, or a scientist in developing a theory, it is devastating if nobody cares.”
The “So what?” meme floating around consulting circles can be flipped. I’ve never been devastated as audiences talked through a rockin’ set of good music, drew blank faces at my ad concepts as being “too purple,” or trashed a perennial landscape design for one that looked like a little old Presbyterian Church lady layout of pretty single rows, instead of grouped masses of color. I reached a point where I thought “So What?” to their criticism, though tact is needed to plead your case. The time will come when you must take a stand for your creative work; but that calls for patience, sales knowledge and people skills. They are, after all, the client. You win some—you lose some.
I’ll talk more about the creative process at some point, but for now, you know why you do what you do. You know why you love a creative challenge. You understand your pathological fixation, the need to focus, dig and finish creative work, whether anyone cares or not. You know why other people may not understand you.
But what is most enlightening about Mr. C’s research is how grounded we truly are, our driven commitment to our work, our reality-based world that still thrives on fantasy, our ability to adapt and iterate, and in general, it is important to recognize our trait dualities that foster leadership, the spear point that will take us forward into a brave new world.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) (p. 73). (Function). Kindle Edition.