10 Things No One Tells You About Living The Creative Life

1. You will have a lot of haters.

No matter how politically correct or general you are trying to be, there are people out there who enjoy putting others down. They enjoy hating as much as they enjoy letting others know that their work doesn’t mean a thing. You’d think if someone doesn’t like something, they could just ignore it instead of reading it or seeing it and taking the time to write paragraphs mocking your work. But this will somehow be the fuel you need to keep creating and keep getting better.

2. People are a lot more sensitive than you think.

If your art is emotional; you will provoke some people. The simplest thing can really trigger a lot of emotions or send out the wrong message and you must learn how not to dwell on it.

3. You will realize that creativity is another world.

It’s really a world of its own, as a writer, I get lost in my writing every day, I get lost in my ideas, I get lost in how the words flow together and how one word can give meaning to a whole paragraph. I get lost in the art of writing – I get wonderfully lost that sometimes I really don’t know how I wrote something or all how all the pieces of it came together the way it did.

4. Heartfelt comments will be the air you breathe.

As much as you will piss a lot of people off, you will also touch so many hearts and in my opinion this is what makes it all worthwhile. Knowing your art moved someone, they helped someone find a way, they touched someone’s heart, they made someone get over their heartbreak and they made someone feel less alone. This is the best and most powerful reward you get from creative living, you get to connect with so many amazing people and you all inspire each other.

5. You have to be fearless.

If you really want to make it as an artist, you have to be completely fearless. You will always be afraid that someone else already did it better, or that you won’t be taken seriously, or that you will be too exposed, or that people will think you are a fool or that you will embarrass your friends and family. The list is endless and boring. You have to give it all you’ve got because it’s what you’re passionate about and it’s what you know and it’s what you love. Creative living requires courage. Taking the road less traveled will never be easy but it will always take you to extraordinary places not many people have been.

6. Art is not something you learn.

Creative people, artists, writers or musicians don’t really need schooling to be considered as one. A lot of Nobel prize winners and Oscar winners never even got past high school. If you are working on your craft with love and devotion and creating something that at least a few thousand people can connect with and relate to then you are already an artist – you don’t need a fancy degree to affirm that for you.

7. You will have self-loathing moments.

You will have moments when you hate the stuff you’ve written or produced and you want it to take it back, you will have moments when you wish you would’ve never published this piece – but this is part of the creative living. It’s better to produce something that is not that great than to produce nothing at all — it’s also part of growing as an artist. As long as you are creating something; you’re already ahead of the pack. Good enough is better than nothing.

8. Your love life might suffer.

Most days it will – sometimes it will take away the air of mystery if someone is getting to know you because your whole life can be revealed to them by the click of a button and sometimes it will scare people off because they don’t want their lives to end up somewhere in your work. This goes back to being fearless enough and having the courage to be an open book or exposed. In a way it filters those who don’t like you for the real you.

9. Self-discipline is essential.

People think that if you work creatively that you can be a sloppy mess with zero time management skills. This is one of the worst misconceptions about artists; we do have more flexibility but you still have to discipline yourself to prepare your craft, fix it, re-do it and find more inspiration. Creative living means less sleep and more work because it will become your priority and it represents you.

10. It’s a life-time commitment.

At the end of day creative living is something you commit yourself to. You commit to keep creating regardless of the results, you commit yourself to finding new sources of inspiration, talking to different people, visiting new placed and you sometimes commit to temporary isolation – isolation with your thoughts and your ideas. You spend your life promising your art that you will never give up on it, take it for granted or stop loving it.