Category: Creativity

Your Day Job

Neera

Austin Kleon talks about it in his book “How to Steal Like an Artist,” Elizabeth Gilbert has a chapter about it in her book “The Big Magic,” Hugh MacLeod explains it with a beautiful example in his book “How to Be Creative.”

Basically, the message is the same.

It will take time for your art to make you enough money so that you can live off it. In the meantime, you need a day job.

“A day job is which pays you well enough and doesn’t rob you off the all energy so that you can’t even create. It gives you connection to the world and a routine. A day job puts you in the path of other human beings. Learn from them, steal from them.” – Austin Kleon

Hugh Macleod has Sex and Cash theory.

“The creative person basically has two kind of jobs, one is the sexy, creative kind. Second is the kind that pays the bill. One year John Travolta will be in an ultra-hip flick like Pulp Fiction (“Sex”), the next he will be in some dumb spy thriller (“Cash”).

Soon you accept it, I mean really accept this, for some reason your career start moving ahead faster. I don’t know why this happens. It’s the people who refuse to clean their lives this way – who just want to start Day one by quitting current crappy day job and moving straight on over to best-selling author … well they never make it.” – Hugh Macleod

Elizabeth Gilbert takes it one step further.

“I have always felt like this is so cruel to your work – to demand a regular paycheck from it, as if creativity were a government job, or a trust fund. If you can manage to live comfortably off your inspiration forever, that’s fantastic. That’s everyone’s dream, right? But don’t let that dream turn into a nightmare. Financial demands can put so much pressure on the delicacies and vagaries of inspiration. You must be smart about providing for yourself. To claim that you are too creative to think about financial questions is to infantilize yourself – and I be you not to infantilize yourself, because it’s demeaning to your soul. (While it is lovely to be childlike in your pursuit of creativity, in other words, it’s dangerous to be childish.)”

Many creative souls murder their creativity by making it their prime source of living too soon.

Many artists go broke or crazy because they have this idea that they can’t create unless they dedicate themselves exclusively to their creativity.

And when they can’t pay their bills and they have to take a “job” they descend into resentment, anxiety, and aversion to art. That is when they say goodbye to creativity forever living a life of resentment

Elizabeth Gilbert kept her day jobs until her fourth book got published, way after the insane success of Eat Pray and Love.

J. K. Rowling worked when she was an impoverished single mother while writing the Harry Potter series.

Toni Morrison used to get up at five o’clock in the morning in order to work on her novels before going off to her work in the publishing industry.

I had to wait till my financial responsibilities were over and I had access to my superannuation before I took the plunge into my creative life.

What you can do is to find a job that can pay you well enough to pay your bills and leave you with enough time and energy to invest in your creative pursuits.

You can also look for a job that can teach you certain skills you need towards your creative endeavors.

A library job can teach you how to do research, graphic design job can teach you how to make your website look pretty and copywriting job can teach you how to sell things with words.

The worst thing a day job does is take time away from you, but it makes up for that by giving you a daily routine in which you can schedule a regular time for your creative pursuits.

Figure out what time you can carve out, what time you can and stick to your routine. Establishing and keeping a routine can be even more important than having a lot of time.


Do Something…

Neera

I am a self-help books junkie. I have been reading self-help books even before they became mainstream. Which make me a kind of authority on them.

I not only read them but dutifully adopt the idea that speaks to me. That should make me one hell of a self-helped-super-achiever.

But that is not the case.

I am ‘as usual’, ‘forever’, a work in progress.

The moment I adopt a good habit, after painstakingly repeating it day in and day out, I get out of it in a jiffy.

Last year, I have been very regular with the gym. All through the winter months, I was going to the gym six days a week. Then I went away for a week during the Christmas and New Year break and haven’t gone back to the gym since then.

Why is that it is so difficult to build a good habit and so easy to get out of it.

Nine months was a long time to solidify a habit. Don’t they say it only takes 21 days to build a habit? Then how come mine came crashing down within one week. I can pick up my gym bag and go to the gym any day. But I don’t.

I have all kinds of excuses.

It is too hot. Who goes to the gym when the daily temperature is forty-one degrees? I will start once I come back from my next trip. A few missed weeks won’t hurt.

This is where everyone’s problem lies. We can sit there and cook up excuses rather than get up and just do it.

Even though we are fully aware that once started we will not only accomplish the task but also feel good about it. The simple act of ‘doing’ will take us out of misery.

And it is not just about the gym. It applies to everything else we want to do but do not do it. What is it that stops us from taking action when every rational thought in us tells us to do it?

The answer came to me from the latest self-help book, ‘The Subtle Art of Not Giving an F*ck’ by Mark Mason.

Mark writes,

“Most of us commit to action only if we feel a certain level of motivation. And we feel motivation only when we feel enough emotional inspiration. We assume that these steps occur in a sort of chain reaction, like this:

Emotional inspiration → Motivation → Desirable action

If you want to accomplish something but don’t feel motivated or inspired, then you assume you’re just screwed. There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s not until a major emotional life event occurs that you can generate enough motivation to actually get off the couch and do something.

The thing about motivation is that it’s not only a three-part chain but an endless loop:

Inspiration → Motivation → Action → Inspiration → Motivation → Action → Etc.”

Your actions create further emotional reactions and inspirations and move on to motivate your future actions. Taking advantage of this knowledge, we can actually reorient our mindset in the following way:

Action → Inspiration → Motivation

If you lack the motivation to make an important change in your life, do something — anything, really — and then harness the reaction to that action as a way to begin motivating yourself.”

Mark calls it the “do something” principle.

The author Tim Ferris relates a story he once heard about a novelist who had written over 70 novels. Someone asked the novelist how he was able to write so consistently and remain inspired and motivated. He replied, “Two hundred crappy words per day, that’s it.” The idea was that if he forced himself to write two hundred crappy words, more often than not the act of writing would inspire him; and before he knew it, he’d have thousands of words down on the page.

Two hundred steps were all I needed to start a lunchtime walk. Tomorrow it will be 200 steps on the treadmill and I will be back to the routine. I don’t feel like a failure anymore.

If we follow the “do something” principle, failure feels unimportant. When the standard of success becomes merely acting — when any result is regarded as progress and important, when inspiration is seen as a reward rather than a prerequisite — we propel ourselves ahead. We feel free to fail, and that failure moves us forward.

Any time you feel disheartened, dispirited or depressed, ask yourself these questions…

Neera

When was the last time I danced?

When was the last time I sang?

When was the last time I was enchanted by a story?

When was the last time I found comfort in silence?

When we stop dancing, singing, being enchanted by stories or finding comfort in silence is when we experience the loss of soul.

Angeles Arrien, a cultural anthropologist, award-winning author, educator, and consultant to many organizations says in the foreword to Gabrielle Roth’s Maps to Ecstasy: The Healing Power of Movement that dancing, singing, storytelling, and silence are the four universal healing salves.

No matter what you are going through or what you need to do, use dance, movement, art, creativity, storytelling, crafts, writing, and silence to feel more alive, get clarity and to connect with your soul.

We need idle time…

Neera

As the festive season approaches, I am getting busier and busier. There is so much to do before we reach the shutdown period. What I look forward to is the idle time between Christmas and New Year.

We all need idle time.  To wake up in the morning and have that feeling that the whole day is yours. No morning rush. No usual clean up. No tidying up to do.  To slow down. To do absolutely nothing.

Being idle is frowned upon in today’s society. We are so much under pressure to keep doing something all the time that we have forgotten the importance of idle time.

Contrary to the common belief that ‘Idle mind is devil’s workshop,’ the idle mind is the germination ground for ideas. Creativity thrives in boredom.

Rainer Maria Rilke writes in Letters on Life

“I have often wondered whether especially those days when we are forced to remain idle are not precisely the days spent in the most profound activity.

Whether our actions themselves, even if they do not take place until later, are nothing more than the last reverberations of a vast movement that occurs within us during idle days.

In any case, it is very important to be idle with confidence, with devotion, possibly even with joy. The days when even our hands do not stir are so exceptionally quiet that it is hardly possible to raise them without hearing a whole lot.”

But it is Tom Hodgkinson who has tackled the subject head-on in How to Be Idle: A Loafer’s Manifesto.

He starts with,

“In 1993, I went to interview the late radical philosopher and drugs researcher Terence McKenna. I asked him why society doesn’t allow us to be more idle.

He replied: I think the reason we don’t organise society in that way can be summed up in the aphorism, “idle hands are the devil’s tool.”

In other words, institutions fear idle populations because an Idler is a thinker and thinkers are not a welcome addition to most social situations. Thinkers become malcontents, that’s almost a substitute word for idle, “malcontent.”

Essentially, we are all kept very busy . . . under no circumstances are you to quietly inspect the contents of your own mind.

Freud called introspection “morbid”—unhealthy, introverted, anti-social, possibly neurotic, potentially pathological. Introspection could lead to that terrible thing: a vision of the truth, a clear image of the horror of our fractured, dissonant world.”

He goes on to say,

“Idleness is a waste of time is a damaging notion put about by its spiritually vacant enemies. The fact that idling can be enormously productive is repressed. Musicians are characterized as slackers; writers as selfish ingrates; artists as dangerous.”

Robert Louis Stevenson expressed the paradox as follows in

“An Apology for Idlers” (1885): “Idleness . . . does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognized in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class.”

He argues, “Long periods of languor, indolence and staring at the ceiling are needed by any creative person in order to develop ideas.”

He concludes by saying, “A conclusion I’ve come to at the Idler is that it starts with retreating from work but it’s really about making work into something that isn’t drudgery and slavery, and then work and life can become one thing.”

Art Bus

Neera

I walk out of the workplace at lunchtime and find a colorful bus parked in the middle of the city walk. There is no sign next to explain what it was other than the sign on the head of the bus that says ART BUS.

What a treat! I take some photos and then hit the net to find out what it was about.

Australian National Capital Artists Inc. (ANCA) has transformed a retired Action Bus into a mobile contemporary gallery and studio space. What a great idea!

Once a humble local bus has been stripped of its seats and fitted out with gallery walls, lighting, and new external paintwork by local artist Riley Beaumont and turned into a mobile gallery. It is heartening to know that the ACT Government and Transport Canberra are supporting this initiative by ANCA.

ART BUS will be at three different sites across Canberra’s City Centre showcasing contemporary art by local artists and interactive art workshops for children.

Each artist will take over the ANCA Art Bus for a month at a time.

In November, it will display artist Ruby Berry’s work. Ruby is a textile-based artist working with three-dimensional sculptural textile works and sensory engagement.

December’s artist is Dionisia Salas, who has been working with repeated marks and patterns and has experimented with painting, silkscreen printing, burning techniques into paper surfaces, and collage.

In January 2019, Tom Buckland, a sculptor and multi-media artist focusing strongly on making and materiality, will exhibit his work.

This is what the Canberra Times is saying about it.

I would like to see more of these art buses parked at various public places in Canberra.