So, Where to Start for a Self-Sustaining Creative Lifestyle
Journal Entry: Monday, August 22, 2022
I am going back combing through my 2022 journal to be sure I have posted all the good stuff from there. I don’t think I have published the following several articles yet from that journal. So if I did post some of this already, please forgive the repeat.
This group of articles are focused on the problem of a self-sustaining creative lifestyle as compared to a creative lifestyle that does not depend on making a business out of it. The business part is the hardest part in my opinion. I think this is because in many ways it is contrary to the creative part. Personal creativity is in many ways completely internal, delicate, subtle and private. It is a form of spirituality. Business on the other hand is business. It is very external and market driven and requires a different set of skills and attitude. They can be balanced together but it is an uneasy alliance at the beginning.
An artist has to be able to compartmentalize these two very different activities. For myself I am only my artist self when I am working in the studio but when I get to the office, I am a representative of the artist. Not really the artist, but the artist’s production that can be placed in the public. Luckily, me the artist and the other me, the representative have a pretty good working relationship with each other as long as the representative and his concerns stay out of the studio and stays focused on business.
So, Where to Start for a Self-Sustaining Creative Lifestyle…
What ideas can I share about my own journey in the arts that another person would regard as helpful to their desire to develop an ongoing, creatively vital life and lifestyle?
It is one thing to pursue a creative life and another thing to pursue a creative living. A creative life can be striven after by anyone at any stage in life. Establishing a sustainable creative lifestyle, which means deriving a living from the fruits of your creative efforts is quite another subject with a whole host of other considerations.
A lot of creatives do not want to conflate their creative interests and freedom with business concerns. There is something to be said about this. These are two completely different mind sets. If you are happy to work privately on your own creative projects without any economic pressures or considerations, then that is wonderful. If you are in a financial position to not need to derive any monetary benefit from your creative endeavors that is potentially the best of all possibilities. Then your work will only be held back by your own shortcomings which might include a lack of discipline, a lack of drive, a lack of time, a lack of interest or a lack of long-term dedication to mastering your creative interests.
Professional creatives working full time in any field face these same barriers but with the difference that they are under the added pressure of economic viability – they need to make a sustainable living from their creative efforts in order to survive over the long run. How to do that is the constant question and it is neither simple nor easy, and it takes a long time to become established enough to have confidence that you can keep going without other supports.
So I would say that the best way to think about arriving at an economically self-sustaining creative lifestyle is to think of it as a continuum of moving from your creative activity as a personal, hobby-like activity unconcerned with economics at one end to a full on professional practice at the other end. All creatives will end up at some point on that continuum that satisfies them.
It is not an all or nothing, win or fail decision. It is a matter of going as far as you are willing.
There are many artists who are going to work at their creative vision no matter what happens. Who knows what the inner drive is that keeps artists working at what they love regardless of the consequences? They are driven and dedicated. It is a mystery in many ways. It is perhaps their spiritual path, their purpose in life, their north star, how they deal with life. These, you could say, are the natural born artists. I salute them. This discussion is for them because that is the way I am. I never really had another idea. I thought about other ideas, other ways to make a living, but nothing satisfied me. My heart was not in it. I could put my heart into other things, but it didn’t feel authentic to me. So, I concluded that being an artist is my bedrock. Anything else I do or have done is built on that foundation, on that intention.
In the early years a person who is inwardly an artist seems to have a lot of choices as to which path one can take in life. However, of the endless number of possibilities, if one looks inwardly, most can be scratched off the list right way. This includes everything you don’t have an aptitude for or an interest in. Still, inwardly, something is pointing you towards your life’s path if you have figured out how to hear your own intuition or inner voice.
So, how to gain access to your own intuitive knowing is probably one of the first things a person should work at developing. Our intuition has always been there our whole lives. We are born with it. We have usually figured out how to ignore it or discount it by the time we are adults as we have worked on our individuation and social indoctrination and replaced it with other ‘trusted’ things like reasoning and logic or beliefs of one sort or another. If we suffered a lot of childhood trauma – and most of us have - then we are likely driven by self-protection decisions and deep almost unconscious mental patterns we made as children and might still be living by them no matter what age we are.
So, that’s a lot of mental and emotional noisy baggage that must be cleared out and quieted down. Now, how does one go about doing that? I am not saying you should go out in the woods or to a monastery and spend a year in meditation, but I am not saying you shouldn’t either. That probably is the fastest way to quiet your mind and your heart so that you can hear your intuitive knowing. But for artists, there are other ways in modern society to do this.
Assuming you are one of these people who knows in their bones that they must follow their creative trail then for all of my ‘natural-born’ cohorts out there, we’ll first need to set a long-range goal to shoot at…
I am an artist and I want to live my life as an artist by developing a self-sustaining lifestyle that is conducive to my ultimate aim: to be fully immersed in my creative interests.
If this is your goal, then that goal requires short and long-term strategies and daily practices. These strategies have to do with keeping us focused on our priorities. All our priorities have to align with the above goal.
This is rule #1: “Is what I am currently doing aligned with my ultimate goal? - to be fully immersed in my creative interests in a self sustaining way”
Maybe you want to print this out and put the above goal on your wall or maybe you want to hand write it a hundred times like a mantra. Whatever works for you.
If, on the other hand, this is not a goal your driven to strive toward, you should rewrite the goal to fit your own vision of what you want to accomplish in life.
Now that we have the goal established, it is time to go through a possible game plan of how to get from here to there. Once this goal is achieved, from that position the sky is the limit. New goals will start to emerge.
In the several following articles there will be a reference to Rule #1 so you will want to remember it…
Rule #1: “Is what I am currently doing aligned with my ultimate goal? - to be fully immersed in my creative interests in a self sustaining way”
Again, I realize that this might not be everyone’s goal. If not, pick your own goal in life.