How To Earn A Living And Still Have Time For A Creative Life

how to earn a living

How To Earn A Living And Still Have Time For A Creative Life

how to earn a livingThe matter of how to earn a living in a way that doesn’t consume all your time and energy used to be a tricky one for creative people. Got a book in you? or maybe an album of amazing songs, a groundbreaking work of art, a stunning collection of landscape photographs? No matter what your creative outré happens to be it needs the time and attention it deserves. These things come in their own time. They don’t like to be forced and they don’t care how you’re going to put bread on the table meantime. The question of how to earn a living if the art itself isn’t yet providing that remains.

For most creative tyoes what that means is sacrifice. Sacrificing time and opportunity on the alter of realism. Since the first cave man dragged a sooty stick across a wall this has been the quandary facing the artistic soul. If he took too long about it the sabre tooth was upon him. If he neglected his hunting duties to develop his stick man images he would starve. Not so much a question of how to earn a living as how to keep on living.

But then where would we be if the odd Neanderthal hadn’t stuck with it? If his work hadn’t inspired others to improve on it and to find other means of self expression. No Cistene chapel, no Van Gogh or Shakespeare, no Beatles, no Led Zep IV?

How to Earn a Living and Still Have Time FOR LIVING

Art and business have always been uncomfortable in each other’s company. Artists aren’t generally motivated by money and like/need to work at their own pace. Business people like to make money and they want to repeat the process as often as possible. The result is that the artist usually has to sell out to some extent, or starve.

Until technology got to the stage where it is now – an art in itself I would argue – the artist had few options in the create vs eat scenario. They could go down the breadline/freezing garret avenue or they could suck it up and get a job to pay the bills. Neither being ideal.

But that’s all changed now. No longer must artist, musicians, photographers – creative’s of all stripes “Suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”. No longer must they sling burgers, deliver pizzas or let the western necktie strangle eastern thought while sidelining their true purpose in life.

How To Earn A Living That Doesn’t Kill Your Creativity

burgerBy leveraging the Internet – mans greatest invention to date – time freedom can be won back. Running an online business is a much more comfortable way to marry creativity with business. The art itself in whatever form it takes can be integral to the business or just used as a means to brand it. You can work out how to earn a living now in lots of different ways without sacrificing your artistic ambitions.

Online entrepreneurs can stand out from the crowd by using original art in their work. They can sell the work online or create related income streams around it. It’s a business model that doesn’t take 8 hours a day. It can be run at times that fit with the muse. It can be run from anywhere.

It’s work but not in the way we know it. It’s sad to think of how much creativity has been stifled over the years by the limiting ways of earning income we have known. How many potential Beethovens’ or Lennons’ have given up because they were just too knackered after a day toiling in the fields or factories?

Find out about how to earn a living online and the new ways of living the Internet has made possible in today’s world on the link below. We are living in very enlightened times it but some of us just don’t know it.

 

How To Earn A Living And Still Have Time For A Creative Life

By Dave Menzies

 

how to earn a living