8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Category: Part 2 – Nowhere but Everywhere

The creative professional and what it means to create at and for work, pay, and career. The work of creating.

Chapter List

  • Gifts Dangers 

    For me, personally, I have often struggled to keep a clear line between the work I do for money and the work I do for fun.  That is not to say that the creative aspects of my job have been particularly lucrative in my life, but the overlap of my creative talents has often benefited employers–and vice versa, my hobbies have often benefited people and companies I don’t actually work for (or get paid by…)

    Coincidentally, I was reminded of this recently: a photo I took on a running adventure with my friends found its way through a bit of sharing in a corporate newsletter that landed back on my inbox: weird thing that, getting your own work sent back to you by a company who is using it for something they didn’t inform you about or pay you for.

    Legal blurriness aside (this is not a post about that, really, and if any company was going to benefit from my work in this way this is one of about three companies in the whole world I would look away and say, okay, you guys have given me so much over the years, blah, blah, blah, I’m gonna ignore this one… but I digress.)

    Creativity is a gift, but it can be a dangerous minefield of people taking what you can do for granted. It happens routinely. You become the guy with the camera. The dude who can make websites. The man to go to if someone needs something sketched. We all have those things: plumbers are going get asked about leaky faucets, doctors are gonna get asked about that mole on my back and chefs are going to be expected to bring the best dish to a potluck. Navigating the overlap is the hard part for all of us.

    Under the category of Gifts & Dangers, I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Gaps Spaces

    It’s a sad reality of the modern age that art (usually) doesn’t pay very well.

    Artists at the top of their game can, of course, find great fame and wealth in creative practice, but the reality is that most of us are struggling to hone skill, practice our crafts, write our fiction, and justify expensive equipment purchases in the gaps and spaces of otherwise busy lives.

    Work schedules. Parenting duties. Trying to eat well. Doing housework. Commuting. Nurturing  relationships. All of it is important and barring some sociopathic commitment to leaving it all behind to focus on watercolour painting or recording a solo album, most of us are working with the leftovers.

    Malcom Gladwell wrote about a famously misinterpreted theory of the ten thousand hour rule in his book Outliers [1], which a lot of people took to mean if you do something for ten thousand hours then you will become an expert, tada, wipes hands, mission complete. But the actual basis of that theory is that the people who became successful simply had access to ten thousand free hours because of the support systems in their lives: someone else was paying the bills, caring for the kids, and washing the dishes—all while they honed their craft.

    Limited free time to pursue creativity is the norm. I don’t have a lot of answers, but I do have some ideas.

    Under the category of Gaps & Spaces, I’lll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Poise Purpose

    Three years prior to writing these words I was on the brink of a huge professional change.

    I’ve made a lot of excuses for that change over the span of time that followed it, but it was locked in step with the topic of this category of writing: finding purpose and keeping ones poise, and the side effects of failing in either or both.

    This isn’t a self-help blog, but it is very much the reflective writings of a guy who burnt out hard at his career because of a lot of big ideas that are in lockstep with both professional poise and purpose: that for many a job is a job, your salary could always be higher but you get the work done—but also that for many of us finding meaning and an honest life in our work can be an essential part of the balance.

    Burnout follows when that balance fails. And that balance is more precarious than ever when one pursues work that is already heavily skewed towards purpose and meaning, like creative pursuits, and away from salary and strict process, like creative pursuits.

    That doesn’t need to be a fatal blow to those efforts. At least, I think so.

    Under the category of Poise & Purpose I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Blind Collapse

    I have a blind spot. Do you?

    I catastrophize.

    Imagine the worst possible outcome: the worst reaction from a client, the worst feedback from a reader, or the worst review from a customer. Imagine failure not just as a setback but as a liability to reputation or personal welfare. 

    It can paralyze. 

    It can freeze momentum into regression.

    I wanted to write on this blog a little more about the lies we tell ourselves, the stories we make up in our own heads, and the demons that haunt our efforts to hold us back.

    We all have them.

    One of mine is overthinking the worst of it. Those notions swirl around in my brain, often keeping me up in the middle of the night or causing me to sit and stare at the screen during those precious moments I could be writing. It snowballs into narratives that play out as conversations in my own head where I debate and explain and justify—none of it with any value to the work.

    The feedback loop would be much worse if I didn’t have strategies to cope with it: my personal counter-attack is math. Some little corner of my brain is a bookie for the odds and reminds the catastrophizing majority that the probabilities for the worst outcome are in my favour for a good result.  (That bookie, though, he takes long naps and only really wakes up when things are spiralling.)

    All that is to say: we each of us have blind spots, and acknowledging them might just be the first step in overcoming them.

  • Resumes Resources

    I served my time in the white collar world of desk job, and while I can’t tell as I write these words if I’ll ever go back to being a salaryman poking numbers into spreadsheets, composing jargon-strewn emails to colleagues, and hosting countless meetings about project status updates, I can suggest that I’ve been there.

    Your experience will vary.

    There is a kind of unique uniformity to working in a desk job: they are all somehow the same, but then too, everyone has an experience that requires the caveat that you can never quite be certain what will happen next in those jobs.

    What I do know is that the uniformity can often work in the favour of creative souls. 

    Creative practices not only build skills and talents that make one stand out from the crowd, but many of those hobbies, habit and creative pursuits develop in parallel to skills that employers drool over. 

    Again, your experience will vary. Your boss may not care. Your company may crave conformity. Your job may require the precise opposite of creativity. But for many, creative pursuits and practices make you better at your job, a better employee and a better colleague to others.

    Under the category of Resumes & Resources I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.