These days, I seem to be going through a personal renaissance, re-thinking who I am, what I do, and my contribution to the world. I keep running into other writers, artists, and creative professionals who seem to be struggling with the same thing: What does nurturing your creative life in a pandemic actually look like?
Before you can create anything, you must first create yourself. The process of changing your life—of pursuing a vocation, finding a true love, even making a career transition—always begins with an understanding of who you are. But it doesn’t stop there.
In creative work, there is a spectrum from “starving” to “sellout,” and somewhere in the middle is where most of us find ourselves. How do we make sense of this?
The world is in crisis, and many people are telling you to do something new. But what if you didn’t have to do that? What if, instead of pivoting into new and exciting opportunities, we who make things considered this a call to our true work? What if we doubled down on our strengths, taking these familiar skills deeper than we thought they could go, seeking new ways to do old things? What if we asked, “What role is being required of me right now?”—and then did that?
What role is being required of you when you feel like the thing that you offer the world isn’t even needed? In this week’s episode of The Portfolio Life, I interview my longtime friend and mentor, Michael Port.
Bestselling author and creativity expert Jeff Goins dismantles the myth that being creative is a hindrance to success by revealing how an artistic temperament is, in fact, a competitive advantage in the marketplace.
For centuries, the myth of the starving artist has dominated our culture, seeping into the minds of creative people and stifling their pursuits. But the truth is that the world’s most successful artists did not starve. In fact, they capitalized on the power of their creative strength. In Real Artists Don’t Starve, Jeff Goins debunks the myth of the starving artist by unveiling the ideas that created it and replacing them with fourteen rules for artists to thrive.
