The Costs Of Being A Creative

I was sitting here, at 6:45am PT, having just gotten off a conference call about the design of my greatest obsession, Workstreamr (about which more is forthcoming in a few weeks, I promise), and I happened upon a tweet from my dear friend, Hugh McLeod. Hugh has a written a post on the the costs of being a creative (which, no surprise, includes the backhanded appreciation of the benefits of such a life, as well).

Among other points, Hugh makes the case for the 10,000 hour rule: it takes 10,000 hours of practice to attain mastery of any human craft. In Hugh's case:

"Creativity" is extremely time consuming. My cartoons didn't get any good [to me, at least] until I had spent well over a decade working obsessively on them. Hell, I'm still not there yet.

Three hours per day, 330 days per year for ten years gets you to 10,000 hours.

I had the same sense that Hugh did about his cartoons about my writing after two decades of regular writing, particularly honed during a 5 year stint writing a monthly newsletter and then a few years of blogging.

He makes the point that this leads to having 'no life' during that period. That three hours comes after work, after studying and eating. It cuts into the contemporary norms of life: television viewing for example, or keeping up with the Braves, or weekend camping trips.

It eats away at the dividing line between personal and work life:

When you get into the "creative" zone, the lines between "work time" and "off time" start getting blurry. And the deeper you get into that zone, the blurrier the lines get. I often work from seven in the morning till midnight and think nothing of it. A very smart friend of mine who works over at Blip.tv once told me, "I only work 3 or 4 hours a week,. The rest of the time, I'm playing." Working eighty hour weeks is much easier when seventy six of those hours is playtime for you.

It's only work if you have to make yourself do it. If you have to hold yourself back, it's play.

This life calls us, we don't pick it. And it has an austerity to it, since the majority of the time spent practicing our craft, perfecting the art, is time spent alone. In Hugh's case, feverishly drawing cartoon after cartoon, or a young software developer designing better abstractions, or a writer grappling with grammar and intention. Being creative entails a great deal of solitude.

(As a result, creatives can overdo when they are not off sharpening their skills and working their magic, but that's another post.)

Hugh points out that creativity comes from the work:

A sense of purpose only comes your way usually because you've been working your ass off over a long period of time, intensely cultivating it. And yeah, sometimes that will appear to more mainstream people as "Having no life". To hell with them. They don't know or care about you. Successful people get that way by doing the stuff unsuccessful people aren't willing to do. Harsh but true.

Paderewski, the physicist Polish creative, once said, "Before I was a genius, I was a drudge." There is a lot of slogging involved. And others, generally, will not understand: especially before you have invested the full ten years. "You'll never sell a book!" "You call that music?" "That's the dumbest design I have ever seen!" "Keep your day job."

Another good reason to work apart from others, so you don't have to hear all that negativity. Close the door, and sharpen your pencil.

Like making a fire from rubbing sticks together, creativity's heat comes from work. Work requires dedication. Dedication involves sacrifice, specifically of time and the absence of what might have been done instead.

Lurking behind Hugh's words is the implicit message that it is worth it, that the time spent apart in pursuit of purpose and the outcome of that pursuit -- in cartoons, writing, music, or working software -- balance the costs, that the juice is worth the squeeze.

It is for me, anyway. And obviously, for Hugh. How about you?

Comments

[Sheila Scarborough]

Great post, Stowe. I guess I should take the hint when parents start calling my work an "obsession" and my teen daughter says practically every day, "Are you STILL on that computer? There's no FOOD in the house!"

I feel less psycho now, thanks. :)

[Jodi Church-Wagner]

I've been writing since I was a small child. I even began blogging back on AOL homepages back in 1996. My recent online journal is almost 5 years old. I've spent years trying to get to that point, where I felt, that my writing (or that I) had matured enough. Most of the time, I find it takes a lot of time observing, and in doing so, being very much alone. At times, I think, I enjoy the comfort of solitude, the melancholy, the almost dreamlike world, I slip into. There are times, like now, when I go through periods of not writing, which I find painful. I cannot imagine giving it up forever. And, thankfully, my day job allows me to mix my writing with one of my other loves, the web. If I should never have a book published, become rich and famous, it will still have been worth every second of time, love, and energy I ever put into it.

[Marcin Jagodziński]

Correction: Paderewski was Polish pianist, composer and a statesman, not a physicist. More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignacy_Jan_Paderewski

[Stephen Collins]

Stowe, fantastic post. This resonates very strongly with me, in particular your thoughts on balance and sacrifice. As someone who is trying to build the kind of success you and people like Citizen Agency have, I know I have much grind to do and many sacrifices to make. Your words give me greater motivation. Thank you.

[Stowe Boyd]

Marcin - Corrected. Thanks.

Sheila and Stephen - You're welcome.

Jodi - I will speak to you later, young lady!

[Kin Lane]

It took me so long to even realize I was a creative. I thought being a programmer was like being an accountant.

Only in the last five years I realize I am a creative and this understanding has really allowed me to evolve greatly.

Thanks for this great read Stowe!

[shooperman]

Stowe, your post scares the hell out of me. But it got me thinking about anything that's worth doing is worth taking 10 years to do well. It's a wake up call to all of us, yours truly included, who jump from fad to fad and sound-byte to sound-byte at the click of your mouse.

[Tim Walker]

Good stuff here. As I commented on Hugh's post, it relates to the reading I've been doing lately on the work of Anders Ericsson. He studies how people build expertise, and it matches what you've said here about long, hard, focused work.

[kiran mova]

nice post. i don't usually buy the numbers, but as implied in this post, it is when the lines between working and creating become blur..

[vanderwal]

Excellent post and it rings very true here. Last evening on ABC's 20/20 I overheard their show on "happiness" mention flow, so I went to investigate. Their use of flow was based on deep focus based on Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and how productivity is driven by this passion and focus leading to productivity. A link to that section written out is http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Story?id=4087250&page=2

[Wdlo]

I appreciate everyone's thoughts. For me, being a creative is a blessing and a curse, depending on which mood I'm in! Every creative will agree that when they are in the flow (as Kiran mentioned) time slips away and it is pure bliss! The same is true for athletes and musicians. Practice makes perfect, right? So lots of time goes into it...

But when no juices flow, well that's another story. In those moments when you have to push to hit a deadline or reach a goal, you experience a true test of will and creativity! That's when I take a few minutes to play a good old office game or step outside to get some fresh air.

Though these moments can be ridiculously frustrating and un-nerving, they are true tests as they challenge you to be super creative and transform the situation!

Peace to all creatives ;)

[Ben Tremblay]

A paradigm-type story I learned in consulting ... helped me justify charging properly. (Short version.)

So the grizzled old trouble-shooter writes up the bill, after unjamming the huge air-conditioning system with his little silver hammer: $25K. The management balks, calling it outrageous, insisting he re-submit an itemized version.
He wrote:
* hitting with the hammer - $250
* knowing where to hit - $24,750

I can fix a complex system in a matter of minutes. But it might take me 2 or 3 hours to do "fault location, isolation, and identification". And it only takes 2 or 3 hours because I've spent hundreds of hours crawling the system's intimate details.
When the shit hits the fan, I don't need to spend lotsa time thinking ... because the thinking's already been done.

You don't warm up when you're standing at the plate. That's just common sense. But now-days? Rainbow-colored smoke and snake-oil are the order of the day in far too many situations.
It ain't a happy time.

cheers

[Nathan Ketsdever]

I think tech creatives that are also freelancers have the tendency to suffer from the isolation the worst.
The coffee shop cafe can make up for it a bit....as can a lunch with a friend, but in the absence of
a co-working environment or a similar alternative, being in these three fields can be rough.

I sometimes find myself drawn away from conversations at dinner or out when an idea comes to mind.
Its certainly is a moment of both excitement and exhilaration, yet a subtle internal tearing.

Is there an alternative? Is there a way around this? Am I being too skeptical?

[Anthony Kuhn]

Now if only I could figure out a way to be creative, content, happy AND pay the bills, too. Then I would be in the pink, for sure... I am realizing, through my few years of experience and failure, that the key might be found in expertise. Hence, the oft-quoted 10,000 hours to become an expert and command a reasonable price for all the effort one spends learning where to hit with the silver hammer. Thanks for another thought-provoking entry, Stowe.