There are a few myths surrounding the creative life. While I love being a creative for a living, and can’t imagine my job ever being anything other than creative, the creative life is not always as glamorous as social media makes it look. It is still a job. Like any job it comes with hard work and a few bad days as well. So let’s dispel a few of the more common myths surrounding the idea of the creative life.

1.) If You’re Doing What You Love, You’ll Never Need a Vacation

While that’s a pleasant thought, it’s certainly not true. No matter how much you love what you do, it’s still an occupation and you need to take breaks. If you don’t, you’ll end up burning out.

I know it sounds counter intuitive. How could you possibly burn out when you love what you do, right? But it happens. It’s happened to me, and it’s happened to several of my friends in the creative life. Creatives tend to think we’re invincible because we love what we do. But even we have to get away from it sometimes.

If you do too much of anything, you’ll burn out. The mind needs a break once in a while. Sometimes you just need to take a day and walk in the woods. So be sure to take regular breaks, and be sure to take them BEFORE you need them. It’ll allow you to enjoy your art that much more when you return to it, and help keep it from ever really feeling like too much like “work.” And taking breaks is also a good way to keep that creative energy flowing!

2.) You Get To Choose Your Own Wage

Well, yes, you can choose your own wage, but generally the business chooses it for you. In the beginning you probably won’t even be able to pay yourself an actual “wage,” it’ll just be the business making money. You’ll take out enough each week to eat or whatever, but as far as an actual wage…that’s something that comes after your successful.

The truth is, when you’re first starting out, your friends who work at Walmart will probably be making more than you. “Minimum Wage” is a luxury the self-employed don’t get to start at.

3.) You Get To Be Your Own Boss

This one’s not a myth, so much as a misconception as to what that actually means. Yes, you get to be your own boss, but it doesn’t mean you never have to answer to anyone. For starters you have to answer to your customers. If you do lousy work, they’re not going to come back. You may not have a boss overseeing what you do, but it doesn’t mean you can do a poor job.

And you also have to answer to yourself. Creatives have a way of self-critiquing far worse than anyone else ever could. Perfectionism tends to inherent among many creatives. You might find yourself to be the hardest boss you’ll ever work for.

4.) If You’re Talented, You’ll Be Successful

Yeah, it’d be great if it worked like that, but in real life it kinda doesn’t. You could be a better guitar player than Hendrix, but if no one knows you exist, good luck making a living at it. There’s a lot of other stuff that goes into the creative life. There’s a whole business side that goes into making a living as a creative. That’s part of what separates your hobbies from your living. Hobbies you do just for fun, your living has to make you money.

Yes, talent definitely helps, but there are plenty of people with very little talent making a lot more than people with tons of talent. The reason for this is that they know how to promote themselves. Let go of the idea that someone’s suddenly going to “discover” you. It rarely happens. Yes, there are those handful of people who got stumbled upon, but for every one of those, there’s 10,000 more who no one’s ever heard of. If you’re waiting to be discovered, you’ll probably be waiting a long time. You need to promote yourself and run your own business.

When you achieve a bit success, you’ll be able to hire someone to help with the business end so you can focus more on the part you loved in the first place: creating. But in the beginning, you’re going to be wearing all the hats. And if you don’t wear them well, you’ll just be another starving hobby artist, instead of someone making a living with their art.

5.) You Get to Make Your Own Hours

Yes, you get to set your own hours. This is such a pro of the creative life. If you’re a night owl like me, you can choose to work at different times than people with “normal” jobs do. The con is, you’ll also probably be working MORE hours than most people with normal jobs.

In the creative life, making your own hours sometimes means sacrificing sleep and well-being to get a project done or an order filled. It means only being able to take vacations during the “off” times of the year, if at all. And it means still having to check your emails and do basic business maintenance from your laptop even while you’re vacationing far away.

So yes, you get to make your own hours, but they also kind of make themselves.

Written by Amber Reifsteck, The Woodland Elf

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