Finding a way to be artistic can add tremendously to your quality of life.
For most of us, much of our active time every day is dominated by task-completion-activities, things that aren’t particularly meaningful or important to us, but just have to get done. Creative practice is about making a time for meaning.
Here are some benefits of a creative practice: (Anywhere where I’ve written ‘writing’ feel free to substitute any other kind of artistic activity).
1) To be happier. Aristotle’s definition of happiness is “deploying your full force along lines of excellence.” Writing allows you to do exactly that. It’s about discipline and seeing something through. And I do find it makes me happier, feeling a piece come to form. As Hugh Macleod says, “Everybody has their own private Mount Everest they were put on this earth to climb.”
2) To learn. People always say, “Write what you know,” but writing is always a process of discovery. By writing you’re not just documenting what you already know, but you’re coming-to-know things you hadn’t yet realized.
3) It’s good for your career. Before I was hired for my most recent job I was Googled by my interviewers. They mentioned in my interview that they’d read by blog about Roger Federer and were impressed. I could tell that they were more comfortable with me because they had some evidence of how my mind works. In a way, they knew me. It made me more of a known entity and slightly less of a risk. I don’t write my blog for the recognition. But it’s nice.
4) To be generous. When you share your art, you’re being generous. Even the tiniest, honest observation is a gift. (That’s what I think anyway). And gift-giving creates community. If you share something that people can read (or look at and see truth in) that, if nothing else, is comforting to people. Also by writing, you put yourself out there. You make yourself a little vulnerable. You show that you’re human and people appreciate that.
5) To keep a record. I sit in airports and cafes around the world, writing mundane minor details about how the light is shining in through the steam of my morning coffee or about how the smell of sawdust takes me back to my dad’s studio above the garage on Second Street. Taking the moment to write these thoughts makes me aware of things I wouldn’t otherwise notice. It helps me appreciate the moment, in the moment. And reading my notes later reminds me of the life I’m living. It shows me what I like about my life and explains, in little ways, how my life is coming together. Catherine Bowen said that, “Writing … is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.”
6) To stay balanced. We all want jobs that value our humanness. But it’s okay for a job to just be a job. It doesn’t have to fill absolutely every void in our lives. Hugh MacLeod (in his ebook) shares what he calls his Sex and Cash Theory. He explains it like this: “The creative person basically has two kinds of jobs. One is the sexy, creative kind. Second is the kind that pays the bills. Sometimes the task in hand covers both bases, but not often. This tense duality will always play center stage. It will never be transcended.” This theory suggests that it’s okay that your colleagues value your ideas about life or appreciate your humour, because it’s just a job. In a way, it’s a good problem, I find that the tensions from my working life give me something to write about. They feed my art. A few times, when I finally have no distractions and all the time in the world to write, I draw a blank.
7) It feels good. Author Natalie Goldberg compares her creative practice with exercise: “Some days you don’t want to run and you resist every step of the three miles, but you do it anyway. You practice whether you want to or not. You don’t wait around for inspiration and a deep desire to run… You just do it. And in the middle of the run, you love it. When you come to the end, you never want to stop… That’s how writing is, too. Once you’re deep into it, you wonder what took you so long to finally settle down at the desk.”
In more ways than one, the future belongs to the creative classes, the people who have developed a voice and have bothered to share.
The traits of successful people is a subject that has intrigued us since at least the 1930s. That was the era when Dale Carnegie founded self-improvement industry (which now worth $11 Billion per year in the US alone); it was also in the late 1930s that a group of social scientists quietly began the ambitious Grant study exploring the lives of 268 Harvard-educated men.
Sixty years later (the study still going strong) they have basically given up hope of discovering the secret recipe of greatness which they were after. (They also didn’t achieve their other lofty aim of easing “the disharmony of the world at large.”) However, they have at least identified seven primary factors that predict healthy (physical and psychological) living and aging. They are: getting an education; having a stable marriage; not smoking; employing “mature adaptations;” not abusing alcohol; having some exercise and maintaining a healthy weight.
All of these strike me as surprisingly simple, straight-forward and actionable recommendations –all but the one. Challenging is the concept of “adaptations,” which the study has explored. Adaptations are the defence mechanisms that people use to respond psychologically to challenges in life:
Vaillant explains defenses as the mental equivalent of a basic biological process. When we cut ourselves, for example, our blood clots—a swift and involuntary response that maintains homeostasis. Similarly, when we encounter a challenge large or small—a mother’s death or a broken shoelace—our defenses float us through the emotional swamp. And just as clotting can save us from bleeding to death—or plug a coronary artery and lead to a heart attack—defenses can spell our redemption or ruin. […]
The healthiest, or “mature,” adaptations include altruism, humor, anticipation (looking ahead and planning for future discomfort), suppression (a conscious decision to postpone attention to an impulse or conflict, to be addressed in good time), and sublimation (finding outlets for feelings, like putting aggression into sport, or lust into courtship). (The Atlantic article is available here.)
I love talking to people about their aspirations. I really do. But there is a dark side to goals and what we often think of as “motivation.”
I have a lot of goals. Last week I confessed that I wanted to be a doctor, a pilot, a CEO, and a Senator before I die. I admit that I was at the pub at the time. But I am sure that I will likely not do any of these things. I don’t have a problem with this though. I like listing these as goals anyway.
The problem I have with goals is something different. I have a problem with their power.
Growing up I learned a lot form motivational speakers like Tony Robbins and Steven Covey. I learned from them that:
- Anything I wanted to achieve, if I really wanted it and I was willing to sacrifice whatever was necessary, I could achieve. For this reason they say quite rightly that the hardest part of achieving something should come in the decision-making, right at the beginning. When you understand the power of goals, you realize not to set them lightly.
Many people go wrong by setting too few goals. Many people underestimate themselves and therefore set goals half-heartedly.
But for those who have confidence in themselves and set challenging goals, there is a hidden dangers.
Tunnel Vision
Focus on one thing, necessitates less focus on other things. Businesses experience this all the time. A recent Boston Globe article discussed how General Motors’ failure was partly the result of company goal setting. All of GM doggedly focused on regaining the 29% market share they had once held. Focusing on this meant they ignored profits. They slashed sales prices when they should have cut costs. Everything became about achieving the almighty 29%. So, part of the power of goals is that they are non-reasonable. Once agreed the goal itself becomes the reason. Naysayers at GM (and there must have been a few) weren’t heard because by questioning the goal they seemed to be talking nonsense.
I had a friend who was so obsessed with her goals that she seemed to be running on autopilot. It got in the way of her seeing other possibilities, much like what happened at GM.
Don’t get me wrong. Goals can be great. And I really do want to achieve everything I can list, that I might enjoy. I would like to gain every possible skill. I would love to speak Spanish for example. And maybe one day you’ll find me performing surgery on a fellow Sentator, in Spain, while flying. Maybe.
Money is an emotional thing for most of us. I’ve met wealthy people who still felt they didn’t have enough and relatively poor people who embarrassed me with their generosity. Certain attitudes toward money seem almost hard-wired into people.
There are few ways you can find out which money personality type you have. There is this article and this one and this one which are all interesting But the most insightful might be this one, written by psychologist Kathleen Gurney.
Attitudes toward money seem to be influenced by how we grow up (see Born to Rebel ). Brent Kissel (in this article) says that, “our early experiences with money cause us to cling unconsciously to specific strategies to feel secure and happy about our financial decisions.” Fair enough. But I can hear some subtle bias here against risk-adverse types, those who play it safe. Is such a bias fair?
Certainly, I would like all of us to be rich some day soon. And I’m comfortable with my attitude toward money. (We are pretty involved in trying to build some investments and our strategy seems to be working so far. Fingers crossed.) And I think we can all agree that risk taking generally leads to increased wealth. But does this mean that everyone should be taking risks? It seems as soon as we look at it as a Quality of Life question it’s not so straightforward.
Kathleen Gurney has some good advice here. She says that people make the best use of their money when they are aware of how to constructively use their personal assets and work with their own style of money management.
Update: If you’d like to learn more about investing you might try The Motley Fool.
Disclaimer: I got the idea for this post from Gretchen Rubin’s personal commandments –which she shares in her Happiness Project. I learned so much doing my Life List that I figured I have a go at this as well. (As for the title, I couldn’t resist.)
