Friday, February 06, 2015
What's Really Standing Between A Creative Hobby And A Creative Career
Fast Company | Business + Innovation: All too often, the creative work we most value, the stuff that brings the greatest meaning and satisfaction to our lives, gets shoved aside for other priorities. No matter the creative work you're doing—writing, designing, composing, coding, or just brainstorming ideas—if you want to make real progress, it's essential you treat your work not as a hobby or side note, but as a job.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
6 comments:
I love this article. I have so many outside of school art projects that I sometimes work on, but then forget about for months. And I have felt a lot of the things that the author is talking about- fear of failing when starting a painting in a medium or subject that I am not used to or starting a quilt when I have no idea how to quit and hundreds of other things. But whenever I push past the fear I create something really beautiful, and if it wasn't beautiful at least I learned something.
The things that struck me the most in this article were the two steps of prioritizing: “know the difference between what’s urgent and what’s important” and then “do what’s important first”. So often we get bogged down by everything that needs to get done, and done soon, that we forget that there are more important things that will help us grow. When you take the time to stop and work on a hobby, even just for a little bit, eventually all that time will add up and BAM. you’ll have completed something that others would never have been able to complete because they never took any time aside.
This was a very timely article for me to read as I am right now in a place where I am coming to grips with the fact that what used to be my hobby is now my future career. But at the same time, I have hobbies that I am trying to make time for on this career driven path I find myself on. I love what I am doing in school and while it is extremely creative work, just because it is required, makes me feel as though I do not have as much freedom. I have not been able to get into the shop as much as I thought I was going to and that has made it harder for me to keep up with my woodworking hobby. Yes I work in the shop building sets but that is not the same as fine woodworking which is something I love doing. I am currently in the process of gaining access to the Architecture wood shop to continue this hobby and while that process is hard this article has reminded me how important it is to always do what you love and keep on hobbying.
Taking this chance and coming to drama school against traditional majors was a huge step for me personally. I was and am putting it all on the line to do something that I love and have a genuine interest in. Even in the broader scope of the Carnegie Mellon community, we're all involved in something that we love to do. I really don't hear people say "I hate my major" here (unless it's 3am and I'm still in studio). Nevertheless, the article really did a great job of outlining what goes into creative fields. I heard a quote the other day (which was more like a conversation between two people) that went like this:
Person 2 [after watching Person 1 draw]: Wow, I wish I could draw like you.
Person 1: No you don't. You wish you could draw like me without having to do any of the work that I did to get to this level.
While this quote may have been fabricated, it brings up a lot of the points that the article does. The main one being that working in a creative field is hard work and it's not something that people do "for fun". At the end of the day, it is a job. Personally, I really liked how this article reassured us that even though what we're doing may seem scary, that we should stick with it. In this field, perseverance is key.
This article makes an important point about creative expression; if you want your work to be your profession, you have to treat it like one. I know that a lot of the time when on a artistic track we feel a need to step back from our creativity to address our everyday problems, but as an artist I think it’s important to distinguish our work from our breaks, and give focus and energy into creating our art just as you would at an office job for pay. I think some people who pursue art lose sight of this distinction and find that they’re someone who just likes to express themselves in their free time but aren’t willing to make their work a career. This is fine, but the distinction is necessary to keep from losing track of where you’re headed in life. It seems kind of trivial, but if your artistic endeavors make up your career, than you should treat your creation of work as such. I think the other important distinction for an artist is aesthetic distance, and the understanding that one’s work is not a manifestation of themselves, but rather a separate creation of completed work that needs to be created with the intention of moving forward after it. I like that this article address both these distinctions as they serve as some important parameters for artistic careers.
More often than not I would say that a creative career comes out of a creative hobby. For example, from just talking to a wide variety of people their love for theatre and creating art comes out of working on productions in high school or even in middle school. By being in the performing arts or any kind of arts club you are pursuing a creative hobby that you find to be pretty fun, enjoyable, and rewarding. These feelings for this creative hobby then turn into thoughts about the fact that they could be doing this for the rest of their life around the same time as they are applying to colleges, and thus decide that they will major in a creative art of some kind. This can be dangerous though because as a young naïve high school student applying to colleges you don’t really know what all a live in this world really entails, and it can come as a shock to many. That is why my two cents is to make sure you know what you are getting into (on anything) before you say yes.
This article resonated with me deeply. Before I arrived at CMU this year, I attended a rigorous academic high school where the arts were lesser in importance than “real classes.” Essentially, theater served as a creative release for me, a hobby. I looked forward to my rehearsals after school with great anticipation; although I took theater extremely seriously, the fun of it outweighed the work of it. Now, at conservatory, my hobby has indeed become my job. Learning how to strike the balance between the job-aspect of my art and the pure enjoyment of it can get be difficult sometimes. I am the type of person who, when working, will not rest until the project is satisfying in my eyes, which, oftentimes, entails an almost ridiculous amount of time. And, after a while, rehearsing the same thing over and over until 2,3 in the morning can get monotonous, making me resent the creative piece I had had so much fun with in the beginning. The article offers a few good tips for those struggling with this problem; one is determining daily focus blocks: setting periods of time you dedicate to working on your art. A limit to how much time you spend working helps to prevent that danger of driving yourself insane. The author also warns not to “over-identify” with your job, which, considering the field I’m in, is hard. So much of acting is bringing bits and pieces of yourself to make a character; when I receive harsh criticism I often do take it personally. This is an aspect of myself I’ve been striving to be rid of for a while. 54101A, Andrew Smith Acting I, Kate Rosenberg
Post a Comment