To me, work is a deeply personal and creative process.
I find purpose through creation, it’s a form of expression, it summons my inner world onto the outer world. Creation is therapeutic, exploratory and playful.
Creation is challenging, it brings up all sorts of vulnerabilities and fears. Am I good enough? What if I put myself out there and my work is rejected and I am ridiculed?
I’m an imposter! What if people look at my work and realise that it’s not that good and I’m exiled from society?
What if I can’t create anything that I’m happy with? Will I feel like a failure?
Am I the kind of person who is capable of creating something worthwhile?
Even once you get past the fears, actually building the thing is a whole other story. You need extreme grit and determination. It’s not just motivation, it’s long-term discipline.
You have a finite amount of time in your life and in your days. How are you going to fill up your life? If you spend the time required to build something meaningful, what are you trading? Time with your family, friends and partner? Physical fitness?
To create anything meaningful requires going head to head with your deepest fears and vulnerabilities.
For me, I was constantly not applying myself because if I applied myself, I would have nothing to fall back on if I failed. I’d have no excuses.
I’d tell myself that “I’m not the kind of person who’s good at cooking” and then I’d never end up learning it. Once I began to confront those things, the fears slowly shed away and I became more comfortable.
It forces all of your trauma to come bubbling up to the surface and if you don’t confront it and deal with it, you won’t get anywhere.
You can spend a lifetime becoming technically proficient at your craft, but without proper introspection and being able to sit with yourself, you will never create anything of substance or value.
Then there’s the question of what you want to create? Without proper introspection, you won’t create something that you truely care about. You need to really understand your values and motivations, the things that make you get out of bed in the morning, before you can begin to grok what would truely inspire you.
Ok, so let’s say you’ve done all that work, now you’re going to need to take away some safety blankets so that you have enough time to dedicate to your deep work.
Maybe you have some money saved up and you can bootstrap it for a while. You’re probably going to feel pretty uncomfortable seeing that number go down, you’re also going to probably realise how much you tied your own self worth with the validation of an employer. Yay more self work.
Eventually you’re going to need to find a way to make that work sustainable long term. You can make it a side project and do freelancing / part-time work to pay the bills. I’ve never been able to pull this off though, the side work ends up distracting me too much from doing the work I care about.
You can start trying to monetise the work, but it can often be very difficult to find a business model that doesn’t feel gross, like it’s compromising the core vision of what you’re trying to create.
These are the real hurdles to overcome when trying to create a life filled with meaningful work. The technical challenges are easy, it’s the emotional and introspective problems that are the hardest to solve.
I don’t think this is a journey that many people choose, it’s often something that someone is drawn towards and it’s impossible to live any other kind of life.
If you’re willing to put the work in it’s incredibly rewarding, but be prepared for a bumpy ride.
