You start a band with your friends. You write some songs. You start to get some gigs. It’s all fun and good. Then the Department of Labor calls you and demands to see your payroll, which you don’t have, nor have you ever even imagined let alone considered, and you have your first mini (entrepreneurial) heart attack.
That happened to me.
Kind of reminds me of this old joke that goes (writer’s note: I didn’t say it was good or funny or even true, but I did say it’s a joke, don’t forget that please), “Marriage takes all the fun out of dating, and kids take all the fun out of marriage.”
I’ve always thought the artistic corollary to that was even more valuable: “Business takes all the fun out of creativity, and a business getting big takes all the fun out of business.”
The core ideas are similar, because they’re like my band story. It starts off as fun. Then it gets serious, and if you follow the serious rule book, eventually it turns into just another job and you miss having fun like when you started out.
Is it any surprise most creative people don’t end up in creative jobs? If you’re reading Cultish Creative, you probably get this feeling too. There’s something structurally amiss here, and us artistically-minded people need some help. Which is exactly the kind of structural mismatch Yancey Strickler is trying to solve (as if co-founding Kickstarter wasn’t enough).
