The Inner Strength Every Creative Needs

Everyone has slightly different reasons for pursuing a creative life. Some are hobbyists who enjoy their creativity after work. Others can’t imagine spending their days in a cubicle. Many creators dream of escaping the daily grind in favor of starting a creative business of their own.

When we make that leap and try our hands at turning our dreams into reality, we often find there’s a lot more to building a creative business than we originally thought. In light of this letdown, it’s easy to become disillusioned when nobody follows our Etsy shop or Wattpad. When nobody buys the novel we may have spent years working on, do we just give up and call it a hobby again? There’s no right answer to this question; we all have different needs and goals, and sometimes art is best kept at the hobby level.

Find Your Strength

If you’ve firmly decided to create for a living, you’ll need the right kind of strength to find success. This might come as a shock, but in creative industries, strength isn’t strictly tied to creative abilities. It’s true that we need to improve our skills continually to stay competitive and original, but strength for us is rooted in perseverance. 

We need perseverance to face criticism, sometimes harsh reactions to our work, and the continual assurances from family and friends that we would’ve been much happier with a “real job.” If our work is widely available, we’ll need to face reviews with grace and humility instead of sadness or rage. We need to understand that many people won’t be supportive of our efforts, but that’s okay because we’ll also have our supporters — those who love our work and are willing to tell others about it. This is the group of people we need to embrace and hold onto.

The most important facet of perseverance is a do-what-you-have-to attitude. When we’re disappointed in our progress, we need to remind ourselves we have options. In the writing community, there are workshops, editors, proofreaders, beta readers, classmates, agents (if we’ve got one), or anyone else who’s willing to give us an opinion on what we could change to improve our work. If our skills aren’t the problem, we can try getting our work out in front of different audiences, different agents, or just more people in general (there are conferences, book conventions, bookstore readings, ads, etc.). There are probably similar sources of assistance and promotion in other art forms.

Remember the Important Things

No matter how strong we are, there will be times when we feel like we’re failing. We will feel invisible. In spite of that, we can remind ourselves that adversity is part of life. When challenges arise, we can overcome them. When we feel stuck, there is always a way forward. When we feel belittled, we can learn what’s helpful and step over the rest as we keep walking our paths. Success may not be earned the way we had planned, but it can be earned nonetheless. Just keep going.

Ultimately, we are the best predictors of our own futures. Our careers aren’t defined by the number of sales or followers we have in the beginning. If we commit to learning, growing, and producing quality work, then we will eventually achieve our goals one small success at a time.