Creativity Career

Career Seeking a career that has a creative component but also must be managed as a results-driven business can be challenging. Creativity cries out to be unfettered by constraints on time and resources. Yet no business can survive if attention is not paid to practical matters like budgeting inputs and outputs. Combining practicality with creativity, and managing the two together, becomes the ultimate test for the creative entrepreneur. All businesses entail a creative component. Even the most mundane business ideas require foresight and creative thinking.

Managers need to remain focused on the future, considering how to market to new customers, retain existing customers, and how to expand the business. These are questions that cannot be answered without creative thought. Therefore, all businesses depend on the ability to blend creativity with practical management. Likewise, creativity thrives in an atmosphere of structured freedom. Unfettered creativity can result in unfinished projects. In some cases, unbridled creative energy leads to poor quality results.

An artist needs to spend time and discipline focusing on results, and also needs to understand his or her audience. The needs of the market do not necessarily need to drive creative output, but creative output does need to be carefully curated to account for target market demands. Writers, artists, musicians, and designers do not like putting constraints on themselves for time or resources. Yet the "starving artist" cannot survive long, and there is little romance in being frustrated and broke at age thirty.

The young creative person needs to develop entrepreneurial and business skills early in his or her career. If business skills are mastered early, they can become second nature. The creative individual can later decide to hire someone else or outsource the accounting and other administrative duties that help the company remain results-oriented. One of the things a creative entrepreneur can do to combine practicality with creativity is to develop a strong mission statement. The mission statement should be as specific as possible, but brief enough to share with others.

Included in the mission statement will be a vision of its ultimate goals. For example, an artist might have a vision to transform the community and raise its quality of life by designing and implementing large-scale public art projects including murals and massive sculptures. By developing a strong mission statement, the creative person blends practicality with creativity and manages the two on a daily basis. Each decision that is made will reflect the core goals of the business.

Understanding the importance of a strong mission statement has allowed me to combine my inner artist with my inner manager. Another important key to combining creativity with practicality is to develop a reliable team and communicate effectively with all team members. No company can survive long without a team, and no company can thrive without teamwork. Therefore, the creative person needs to remain especially cognizant of his or her personal strengths and weaknesses and allow other people to do things to help the company reach its goals.