The day my creativity died. I was working for my church. And I was starting to get tired of the arguments I was having. Staff meetings were filled with people who disagreed with me. My ideas were shot down left and right. It seemed people just weren’t getting it.
So I gave up. I decided I’d sit back in my seat, check out, and play some games on my phone during the meeting. If I did it right, I knew it would look like I was taking notes.
That’s the day my creativity died at my church. As soon as I let apathy creep in, I stopped caring about my job and I stopped caring about our level of creativity.
It took me a while to get dissatisfied with that apathy. And everything I was producing was complete crap.
I was tired of fighting but I knew I couldn’t just “not care”. I didn’t realize that carefully choosing my battles and not caring were different things.
When I was an immature creative, I thought everything was a battle of utmost importance. Every project had to be absolutely perfect. Everything had to be epic. Every design…every song…every project had to be exactly as I wanted because it contained my fingerprints.
Not every battle needs to be fought. But that doesn’t mean you let apathy creep in. Things won’t always be ideal. They won’t go quite as you’d like. Limitations might seem restricting and suffocating.
But if you can find the ability to care when you want to give up, that’s when some of your greatest creative breakthroughs can come about.
Well said. This was a well thought out post, never stop caring!
Don’t stop! 🙂