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Daring Forever (Find your Extraordinary)
Five minute magic pt. 39 - Creativity vs time in the world that's always on(line)
00:09:49
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Welcome to five Minute Magic from the Mindful Creative Podcast, a short bonus episode sharing tips and insights from the pages of the book of the same title. Every week, I'll be sharing one or two ideas that can give you an actionable takeaway for your creative process, your work, your business, or just food for thought for the weekend ahead. These episodes share content from the audiobook and you can find the link to the full version in the show notes below. In today's episode, we'll explore the precious nature of creative time. A creative will long for unlimited time to pursue every idea to the fullest. And then life shows up. All of a sudden. Our marathon daily shifts turn into a few short sprints, yet the daily workload doesn't shrink. And since we're talking about time, we also examine the double edged sword of our always online world. That world comes with unlimited inspiration and networking possibilities versus the pressure of constantly creating content and managing our social media presence.
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So let's get stuck in creativity and time. Yet it's our creative time that must be cherished at all times. As our lives develop, and particularly when serious relationships and parenthood come along, we often have to work in the gaps, carving out small nooks of time here and there. But however long we get, it rarely feels like enough. It's a finite resource that holds infinite options. The more options we wish to explore, the more time we wish we had. The more we become involved in creative acts, the more we explore and peel off the layers of possibilities, the more joy and satisfaction we get. Is possibly the only human activity immune to the law of diminishing returns. Let me know if you ever come across someone who claims to have too much fun being creative and wishes they could do less. So many gratifying life activities stop being fun if we repeat them over and over. Eating, drinking, even sex could lose its potency if you did it three times a day every day. However, I'd happily bet my kids inheritance that creativity, despite its multifaceted and turbulent nature, will always yield a return on your time and energy if explored with eternal intrigue and curiosity. Every creative person longs for one thing and one thing only, the time and space to get lost in their craft. I've never met or spoken to anyone who has longed for less time creating and more time to focus on sending out invoices, chasing payments, and working out how to attract new clients, let alone little things like parenting, sleeping, eating, drinking, washing, doing the food shopping, keeping up with the laundry, etc. Often, then it's not a question of lacking the tools or options. It's more a lack of time, space, or even motivation Living in the World that's Always Online the world used to be more prescriptive about what career you could or should be expected to embark on and stay in until retirement. But not anymore. Since the millennium and the progress we've made in its first two decades, anyone can pretty much do anything they like and forge a viable commercial career for themselves. The creative career tombola is filled with almost every conceivable creative journey, if you're up for taking it. However, this newfound freedom to invent our careers comes with an even bigger supply of auxiliary activities that have become vital to our success. More than that, there are things we have to do to ensure the basic viability of our business. Creatives these days can rarely afford to be reclusive or enigmatic. Social media has kicked down the door of our hideout and demanded to know what we're doing and how we're doing it. As well as artists, we may now feel pressured to be our own salesperson, manager, booking agent, accountant, PR executive, social media manager, photographer, videographer and the rest. But like most of the conundrums we've discussed so far, this situation can frighten or free you. And once again, it's always okay to ask for help. Sure, there are still people who try to jealously gatekeep knowledge, but there are also plenty of kind souls out there willing to share their experiences of establishing and maintaining a creative career. Furthermore, there are plenty of creatives out there just like you, who are available to help you buy back your time, taking care of what to you are peripheral tasks, and helping you free your schedule and your mind. There are certain pros and definite cons to a world that is always online, and the creative process benefits and suffers from them both to the degree that we allow it. For a start, we've never been exposed to so much inspiration before. If the Internet, and social media in particular has kicked down the door, it has also opened the windows and let the sunlight in. With a healthy mindset, one that doesn't see everyone else in your field as a potential threat and or far better than you'll ever be, you can find endless inspiration from all over the world. Art, films or music that might have taken years to find and cost hundreds to procure is likely now available to consume for free or at least for a subscription. We gain access. The process is demystified. Likewise, we may no longer know our next door neighbours, but we can find our peers and potential networking opportunities without leaving the comfort of our sofa, we have the potential to engage and build an audience far more easily than we would have done 25 years ago. And crowded though it is, the Internet is also theoretically unbounded. There is always space for you to carve your niche and build your presence. Yet, as we know all too well by now, the online world has its downsides, downsides that are becoming ever more apparent as it becomes an inescapable part of daily life. Some of these, we've already looked at deceptive appearances, the compulsion to compare, and the desperate desire for an undefined more More followers, more likes, more click throughs. There are others that can also affect our creative confidence. The light that comes in through the windows can soon become blinding. For a start, we may feel the need to keep up by constantly posting content, all of which takes time and effort to create and upload, especially if it's something like a reel to be posted across multiple platforms. To say nothing of the time lost to aimless scrolling, getting distracted by suggested posts, or the sudden urge to check what so and so is up to in their Instagram stories. Social media can play on our potential to develop FOMO Fear of missing out To a worrying degree, of course, any creative endeavor shared online will attract opinions, from the valid to the vile. No one likes a stranger with a bunch of numbers after their name and a clip art profile picture telling them that their work is worthless. But it's part of resilience training to either not read the comments, or at least not become emotionally entangled in them. Don't feed the trolls. Don't make the idiots happy. Easy access and demystification have also led to the loss of romance and obviously mystery around the creative process. This can lead to issues both in and of itself, and because you can so easily catapult to the other extreme overexposure. People either get tired of seeing you posting all the time or algorithms presenting your posts, or they become desensitized to your message. They scroll past, or even worse, click unfollow.