Creativity is the only way out

I’ve always considered myself a creative.

Finding creative solutions to problems.

And of course, finding creative solutions to make money.

Open up X and all you’ll see is people complaining about their jobs. Yet they are just as tied down to their jobs as their jobs are to them.

Give them a deadline - “in six months, you should have your own business making as much if not more than you do at your job”, and they wouldn’t know what to do.

These same people complain about not having enough time to build something of their own but the truth is, you give them all the time in the world and they wouldn’t know what to do with it.

Nobody has taught them the creative way to live.

To leverage their mind instead of their hours to earn and therefore not have to work 8+ hours a day.

The truth is, most people who leave their jobs for their own business end up hating their business.

They just build themselves into a 9-5.

I’ve often wondered why that happens.

I used to think it’s because of the lack of knowledge of leverage and that’s partially true.

What’s even more pertinent however, is that they haven’t been taught the creative way to live.

Entrepreneurship is simply an extension of that creative lifestyle.

Outdated Work Habits

We’re not in the Industrial Age anymore.

The 9-5 is a wildly, WILDLY outdated concept.

You don’t need a hundred employees to create millions of dollars in revenue.

Solopreneurship is the most obvious path towards work that you enjoy and get paid for.

I’ve written in-depth about all of these topics but for today, all I’m asking is that you realise that you’ll have to shed a lot of your beliefs about work.

For a creative, walking around listening to a podcast related to their current work obstacle is work. Scheduling time for relaxation to build your creative muscle is work. Shattering all measure of work-life balance for a while to work 20 hour workdays for a week is work.

Monotony

This is a huge one.

When you’ve been conditioned your entire life to go to school from 8am-2pm and work from 9am-5pm, have all your meals at the same time and schedule every single thing (if it’s not scheduled, it’s not work), you start to think productivity looks like monotony.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for discipline. I spend hours writing letters, copy, analytics reports and going over my accounts everyday but monotony is the killer of creativity.

If you feel that rush of 2am motivation, a worker-droid conditioned from working 9-5 at a cushy W2 job will just write that off as extra energy which wasn’t burned throughout the day, whereas a creative would realise that they’ve found something they’re extremely passionate about to the extent that working on it gives more energy to them than not working on it.

Think about it, excitement. That’s a foreign concept to a lot of people over the age of 25. Don’t let yourself be one of them.

I know this letter was a lot more abstract and less on the practical side but for that same reason, I hope it helped a lot more people realise their own bottlenecks and start to embody more of a creative mindset.