When your work is play, so often it is hard to see it as valuable.
Our culture teaches us that hard work is noble and suffering is required for growth. Yet, watching children explore the things that fascinate them demonstrates how untrue this #adulting assumption is.
A child that wants to feel in control might play with dolls, instructing them where to sit and how to behave. A child who wants to create a different reality may draw a world and inhabit it with monsters who scare him away at night. A child who doesn’t understand the way things work around her might take something apart just to see.
None of these explorations is deemed ‘childish’ or even immature. It shows the developing mind of the child focuses on where it wants to go next.
Yet when it comes to our creative contributions, we feel like it needs to arrive fully packaged and ready for market on delivery. That’s where business brain might kick in.
Business brain is great (and will create long term financial stability for you if you let it).
Creative brain needs freedom and exploration to craft the realities it needs to build the thing it most needs to explore next. It is this exploration and curiosity around possibility that draws audiences, critics, and buyers alike.
Think about how in a piece of great jazz music, it’s not the notes that matter. It’s the way they get to the notes or the feeling that the notes stir when they land, or the emotion that propels the notes that turns a jazz classic into a unique expression of the musician.
The exploration is the value.
