I can paint for the sake of painting.

I can sketch things that are interesting to me.

I can take photos of curious and interesting things.

And I can do all these things not worrying that it somehow doesn’t fit perfectly into a portfolio or a personal brand.

The ironic thing, this dismissal of external validation and approval, this refusal to fit into a box for some generic employer evaluation that might skim through these works in the future to see if I’m a good fit for their open job, means that I am probably producing better—or at least more authentic—art.

It’s one of those lessons that takes a lifetime of creative output to learn and embrace, and once discovered is probably something that would have benefited me vastly more than I realized at the start of my career.

Honed skills are great, but voice and authenticity are the work of a lifetime, after all.