Lately I’ve been working on un-learning a few things that have become part of my default process over the last decade.

1. Create things that resonate with your audience (or else no one will pay attention to you)
2. Create things that the market demands (or else no one will buy your stuff)
3. Create things that can be monetized (or else you won’t be able to support yourself with your creative work)

Don’t get me wrong. These things still apply in a lot of cases. And I still use them on a daily basis inside my agency.

However.

Applying them to my non-work creative work was draining all the joy out of it.

The funny thing is, I didn’t even realize I was doing it.

I would want to shoot and edit a short film because it seemed interesting. But instead of making something for the fun of it, I tried making films I could use as part of my agency’s portfolio. [they remain unfinished…]

I would want to do some creative writing. But instead of playing with humor or science fiction or some other weird thing that would get me excited, I tried writing essays about topics I thought would be easy to get published. [they, too remain unfinished…]

There are more examples. But they all came down to the same problem.

Instead of building a creative practice that served to inspire me, I was basically just trying to force myself to do more work. No wonder I couldn’t stick with it.

Since I’ve started thinking of those three principles at the top as factors in the process as opposed to just being the way I did things. Now, I ask myself first, do I care about audience, demand, or money with this activity? And when I don’t, I totally let those things go. As a result, I’m having soooo much more creative fun.

Tell me. Does feeling like you have to 1. play to an audience, 2. create something people “want,” or 3. make money with a thing ever get in the way of you doing creative work that should otherwise be fun?