On The Nature of Creative Work

I was at a writer’s workshop last weekend, and we were prompted to write about ‘balance’ and what it meant in our lives. I remembered the word, “Funambulist”- which is also the name of my blog. (blatantly inspired from Shahrukh Khan’s speech at Yale University)Being a creative person is indeed like walking on a tightrope. My life in the last several years has revolved around this act of balancing my creative self and my pragmatic self, the self that recognizes the value and the need for financial independence and all other things associated with worldly success, and the self that wants to express my creativity - to perform the play that hasn’t been performed, to write the poem that only I can write. No, I don’t say this out of pompous self-obsession, but rather I believe this is precisely one of key distinctions between what we call creative and non-creative work.In creative work, the nature of the output is dependent on the nature of the very self that produced it. No one else could have written Pride and Prejudice except Jane Austen, no one could have played Michael Corleone like Al Pacino did, no one could have produced songs like Let It Be but The Beatles.I was once told by the writer Jerry Pinto at a workshop: “All the stories in the world have already been written. The only thing that makes your story different is you.”Isn’t that why we watch the same love story, tragedy or underdog story trope over and over and again? The stories essentially are all the same after all, it is the creators that make the difference, adding their own unique treatment and their unique lens of viewing those age-old stories or concepts. And this ‘treatment’, stems from pieces of the very self creating it.“Sing the song that only you can sing, write the book that only you can write, build the product that only you can build... live the life that only you can live.” ~Naval Ravikant