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?