Marketing is my thing. Like this is what I sell to my clients every day. And I’m so impossibly shit at doing it for myself; it’s really pathetic. So, what did I do today? I planned to rectify this situation a bit. Let’s just say that I’m my worst enemy sometimes, and my harshest critic.
I am terrified of social media. There I said it. I’m scared of the very thing that makes my business possible. But it’s not in the way you may think…
Stop on your way to work for 30 seconds and look around you. What do you see? The postman is out delivering mail, people are rushing past you on the busy street to get to work, Amazon delivering a midnight order of nappies, construction workers continue to toil on, a child is throwing a tantrum with a frustrated parent, cyclists whooshing by, and impatient drivers blowing their horns in traffic like it would make a difference.
When you stop, the world continues around you. No one has really noticed that you stopped moving. Nothing happens. No crisis at the office as happened because you took 30 seconds to breathe. Look at how insignificant you actually are in the massive world we live in.
I believe that everyone who writes professionally and has a full time job has this issue with writing on a personal level. We just don’t have the time or energy or willpower for it. So the passion suffers, and then the work suffers because the passion is suffering. It’s a chicken and egg scenario, really. We work because we have to pay bills and we’re tired after juggling life’s expectations around, and we don’t fuel the passion, which fuels good or better work. Finding the balance always feels impossible.
One of the reasons why I started this blog thread of the War of Art is simply because work and passion always feels like a war, and it’s always with one side having a little more power or advantage than the other. Sometimes it’s work, sometimes it’s passion. But it’s always a war. The scales are never balanced and one side always has power until the passion dries out and thus begins the cycle of creative burnout…
From TILT Creative