The Challenge of Following Through With Your Creative Life

It was many years ago that I made my decision to live a "creative lifestyle" where I would primarily focus on the things I really wanted to do, rather than continue to subject myself to the rat race of the broader population.

Making that decision, itself, felt good of course and I would add that it was not an easy one because it was also a decision that not only required me to live creatively without a reliable income but also changed the lifestyle I was living almost completely.

Okay, so that's a long winded way of saying that artists and writers don't generally make as much money as people who work as technical writers in the IT industry... which is what I was doing at the time. So it was a definite challenge deciding that I would give up the perks of a high salary in order to have the life I wanted.

The thing we sometimes forget is that once you make a decision you also have to follow through with it. Following through doesn't just mean starting something or trying to build something it means recognizing that this is now what you do day after day, week after week, year after year.

There's no "dabbling" for a few months and then it all starts happening by itself. When I say "there's no such thing" I recognize that there are exceptions but let's put it this way: the number of people who find almost immediate automated success for their creative life can probably be counted in the scale of one in 1000.

Committing to living a lifestyle is quite different from simply stating that you want to live it.

Perhaps one of the harder things to deal with is realizing that a lot of the time your vision isn't shared by a great many people. You may think you're doing the greatest thing ever but that often falls on deaf ears when you're talking to people who are very trapped in - and attached to - the mainstream ways of life.

At the time, I honestly thought more people were going to be excited for me but it didn't take me that long to discover that a lot of people I knew looked at me a bit askance and would declare that I had "turned to that weird artist shit" and wasn't being cool anymore.

Thankfully, I've never been particularly driven by doing what's popular but I can imagine that that would be a difficult thing for some people to face... especially when the people sending criticism your way are your ostensible friends you've known for maybe 10 or more years.

One of the things my years in Psychology told me was that quite often groups do not like to have their status quo messed with. And when one person decides to strike out in a different direction from the majority of the group it makes everybody a little bit uncomfortable because it becomes an invitation for the other group members to look at whether or not the decisions they've made to get to where they are are as wise as they originally thought they were.

Which is why I have frequently said that when you make a major life change you often discover that you also cycle through most of your friends and acquaintances because your choices no longer suits their sense of reality. The question becomes why should you be the one to provide comfort in their sense of reality?

Of course, you shouldn't!

Regardless, major life changes often take longer than expected because we tend to underestimate the amount of effort required on the follow-through.

Thanks for stopping by and have a great Friday!

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Created at 2023-09-22 01:03 PDT
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