Perhaps you’re one of those unfortunate creatives who nurture a spare-time passion while suffering through a day job. Maybe you even enjoy your day job, but you wish it gave you more time and energy to do the thing you love more.
Here are five tips:
Reframe your situation. Tell yourself you’re lucky. Nelson Mandela wrote a book in prison by having miniaturized pages smuggled out by another prisoner. You have weekends and several hours a day to work on your side-hustle, and no one is trying to stop you.
Use every second. During lunch, downtime, or even during boring meetings, do your real work: think, plan, pretend to write notes, and furiously jot down ideas. Check out and daydream as often as you can, guilt-free.
Get a different day job. If your day job is too demanding, look for an easier one. A cohort of mine once got a night-shift security job guarding seeds. He spent each 8-hour shift writing a script.
When I was starting out, I got a job at a radio station where my only job was hitting a play button every hour and making a short announcement. I spent the rest of my time drawing cartoons.
Ask yourself how much you want it. How much do you want to pursue your passion? How much is it worth to you? Why do you have your day job? If you can answer honestly, and assess whether the lifestyle your day job affords you is more important than your passion, maybe you’ll discover it’s not.
There are myriad tales of successful performers who fed their passion for acting or comedy by living as cheaply as possible—even in slummy apartments in Hell’s Kitchen with several roommates—just so they could devote their time to performing at clubs every night or going to auditions.
At a financial ebb in my life, I was homeless. For several months, I slept in the recording studio where I produced The Onion Radio News.
Get obsessed. If your passion is truly important to you, you’ll stop at nothing to pursue it. Don’t let the trappings of a day job stand in your way.
No one says, “I’m so glad I stuck with that day job,” on their deathbed.
Maybe you can find a job that helps you develop your creative side, or find a creative part of your job and focus on that. I work in cyber security. I come up with realistic and plausible cyber disaster scenarios that are as dramatic as any Hollywood movie. I build audio and video components for these simulations. I develop in-person talks that follow solid good story telling formulas, and then deliver them online or in person. I've even written scripts for animated learning modules with a ton of comedy in it and assisted with their production.
I don't know how creative you can be if you're on a production line screwing the caps onto toothpaste tubes, but some jobs reward doing things creatively.
Not sure, 20 years as carpenter and 20years as business owner and think it my limit on a task, job ect. In this life's journey, feel like throwing news papers or selling t shirts. I feel change would be exciting, so using fear. Fear of what, I have no idea, my wife, myself, still in action. My creativity voice is I think attacking me, so I am taking actions for cleaning up some things to eliminate them. Exploring this side and not blowing up everything in my life as I have done in the past. Glad I am sharing my process to the best of my ability. As I unfold.
Ed