No Map Required
May we follow the direction of our creative compass
In 2011 I quit my day job to figure out exactly what was next for me. I’d been working in the industry I’d gone to school for since 2007 when I hit my quarter life crisis. Hard. (Nobody talks about this, but I assure you it’s real.)
Although I enjoyed the end result of my work (books, books, books!) and I also liked who I worked with, something wasn’t right. As difficult as the decision was to make, I knew it was time to move on; my creative compass (a term I wouldn’t discover for a decade) encouraging me to explore a new direction.
Folding Pants
Although I had some financial savings and I was living relatively modestly, I wanted to ensure that I had all of my bases covered, which meant getting a job for the time in-between then and my next career move. So for the first time in my 10 working years I dipped my toes into the retail space.
There aren’t many people out there who say that working retail is a great gig. You work long hours, standing on your feet, doing repetitive tasks for relatively little pay. I was determined to secure the best retail gig I could find and I landed at lululemon. (They actually didn’t want to hire me, rejecting me on the spot but I talked them into it, which is a story for another day.)
lululemon’s focus on employee self-development is admirable and I genuinely enjoyed my time working there, but at the end of the day I realized that I was folding pants for a living. Simultaneously, I’d never felt more fulfilled creatively in my life.
How? Why?
Before and after my shifts I was building my small business, my creative compass continuing to quietly guide my path.
First Aid
I absolutely love my career today, but there’s nothing like the excitement, anticipation and initial big wins of creating something from nothing. It’s the hardest I’d worked in my life, yet it rarely felt like work. I created a brand identity, complete with logo, website, uniform, marketing materials, and content. I had complete creative control with pages and pages and pages full of ideas for things to do, people to call and ways to grow my humble little enterprise.
I was starting a first aid and CPR training business that had nothing to do with what I went to school for, but rather it’s what I had done throughout my teenage years; work in a pool as a lifeguard and swimming instructor.
After quitting and receiving a nudge of encouragement from my then boss I decided to go all in on my new/old venture. In a few short months, I managed to secure my first corporate clients, yoga studios seeming like a natural fit, given my day job at lululemon.
Before I knew it, I had enough clients to say goodbye to the retail world, making almost as much as I had in my previous day-job, and in a few short years I would train 2500+ people in small group settings encompassing a diverse range of industries. From yoga instructors to truck drivers to primary school students to new parents, I had never before worked with so many diverse people in so many new places.
In hindsight, this time period was a teaching masterclass helping me prepare for my current career as a full-time lecturer, a step in the direction pointed by my compass.
Finding Flow
Looking back on this time, I realize that I was experiencing what renowned positive psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, calls “flow”. Flow is a highly focused mental state that requires concentration on the activity at hand. Nothing else seems to matter in these moments of flow, which can often be experienced when pursuing something athletic or artistic.
Time seems to pass with great speed and before you know it, hours have gone by. The phrase “Time flies when you’re having fun!” turns out to have scientific merit. (In fact, I think I’m currently in a state of flow with writing. The last time I looked up from my computer it was 11:59 a.m… it’s now 12:45 p.m.)
Csikszentmihalyi believes that people are happiest in a state of flow. During his life, he was interviewed extensively about this important concept and this is how he explained flow in an interview with Wired Magazine "[flow is] being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost."
This (this!) is the feeling my creative compass was trying to navigate all along.
Crafting Your Creative Compass
As I’ve eluded to, the next step on the journey doesn’t require a detailed map or a GPS giving us turn-by-turn instructions (or if you’re a 90’s kid, a Map Quest print out with turn-by-turn directions). Instead, author Adam Grant reminds us that we only a compass to helps point us in the direction of our core values and our intuition can take the reins. Even when it feels like we’re not ready, by following our compass, we’re not only giving ourselves over to the process and possibilities of what could be, but we’re also demonstrating to the people around us that they can do the same.
One of the fastest and most effective ways to establish your creative compass is through an activity I like to call “Emoji Eulogy”:
I suggest picking up your phone, opening a text messaging app and starting a message to yourself. Next identify 3 emojis that represent how you want to be remembered at the end of your life (grim, but also helpful). Your emoji eulogy helps clarify what’s most important to you in this wild and precious life.
To choose your emojis, ask yourself questions like:
What are some keywords that you use to describe yourself?
What’s most important to you in this world?
What would you say are your greatest strengths?
How do you hope to make others around you feel when you’re with them?
At the end of your life, how do you hope others describe you?
Once you’ve made your choices, expand each one into a sentence, articulating what they mean to you. No one else has to see this. No one else has to get this. This is YOUR emoji eulogy that helps make your values visually and, thus, give your creative compass form. Your decisions moving forward can be less in your head and more in your gut and in your heart.
While it’s impossible to have a ‘life map’ dictating your exact journey, it is possible to have a compass to guide the direction of travel. Allow this emoji eulogy to act as a compass, inviting clarity, acting as a filter and reminding you of your core values each step of the way.
Because once you’ve identified your ‘whys’, it becomes much easier to make day-to-day choices about the what, when, where, who and how of creative living. In doing so, you can have greater confidence that you’re traveling the path that makes sense for you (even if it doesn’t make sense to you yet).
The Moment is Right (Now)
And here’s the great news: you don’t have to start a business like I did to achieve feelings of flow that your creative compass is yearning for. Simply create. Create for creation’s sake. We need not always worry about the end product, instead focusing on the process because the act of making — and who we become during the making — facilitates growth. Also, there’s a direct correlation between quantity and quality when it comes to ideas. So there’s magic to be found in the making, with the bonus of knowing that more enables improvement, sharpening our compass’ ability to point us in our direction and accessing a state of flow found in the present.
Really, the present moment is all any of us have, which is both exciting and terrifying. From a creative perspective the present moment is especially interesting because never before and never again will there be the exact same conditions that exist right now.
You’ve never had as much knowledge as you do right now.
You’ve never had as much experience, as much collective wisdom, as much emotional intelligence as you do right now.
You’ll never again be in the same room with the same people and the same thoughts (and even the same weather outside!) as RIGHT NOW.
The conditions under which you create are as unique as your creations so take advantage and absorb the thrill of making something in this moment even if you’re not ready or you’re not sure where you’re headed.
Let your creative intuition be your guide; no map with turn-by-turn directions required.
