Creative Fields Make For Crap Careers

by Bruce Kasanoff

I adapted my headline from author Elizabeth Gilbert, who wrote, "People often say they want to go into a creative career, and then they try to do that, and they end up in a place where the work that they are doing is not quite creative enough to really stimulate their soul, and it’s not quite career enough to keep them financially stable."

Bingo.

Hundreds—perhaps thousands—of people have written me to describe being torn between their passion and the need to make money. Most end up in an unsatisfying compromise.

So before you bet it all on a creative career, consider this: what if you became your own funding source?

Novelist Ann Patchett does a nice job of setting up why you may want to consider this, "The tricky thing about being a writer, or about being any kind of artist, is that in addition to making art you also have to make a living. My short stories and novels have always filled my life with meaning, but, at least in the first decade of my career, they were no more capable of supporting me than my dog was."

Patchett took nonfiction work—magazine assignments—to fund her passion for fiction. She viewed the two as completely different, and could easily knock out nonfiction to pay the rent. "In my mind, fiction and nonfiction stayed so far away from each other that for years I would have maintained they had no more a relationship than fiction and waitressing. Writing a novel, even when it’s going smoothly, is hard for me, and writing an article, even a challenging one, is easy."

I ghostwrite articles for speakers, executives, and entrepreneurs to fund my freedom to write my own work. Or at least that's the way I think of it. But over the years, I've built a following for my own pieces and that reach brings my clients for my paid work.

In other words, a synergistic relationship has formed between my passion and my profit center.

By separating your passion and your profit, you increase the odds that you can become better at both. To stick with my own experience for one more moment, when I ghostwrite, I am 100% focused on the needs of my client. When I write my own work, I am 100% removed from whether something will sell or pay the rent; I simply pursue what interests me.

Separating the two has empowered me.

For a few years, I worked in a large advertising agency. Many of the creatives there probably wanted to be producing a TV show or writing a bestselling novel, but they ended up in advertising to pay the rent. Does this really make sense?

The biggest argument against what I'm saying is that "I'll never reach the top," meaning you'll never get to star in a hit movie or run a TV show. Nonsense.

If you fund your life one way and pursue your passion another, you still leave room for lightning to strike, in a good way. Write your novel at night, pitch it over the weekends, and don't stop striving, ever.

Early in his career, cartoonist Scott Adams started to enjoy some success with his Dilbert comic strip, but he kept his day job at the phone company for...a...very...long...time. Doing so didn't stop him from producing one of the most popular comic strips in history.

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