What We’re Missing in Our Conversations About Creative Entrepreneurship

Creative commitment is the missing ingredient.

It’s no secret I aspire to be a part of the creator economy. I’m a creative entrepreneur: I put out creative work (essays and a podcast) on a regular basis for public consumption, and I’m seeking to monetize my work through offering coaching, Patreon tiers, and hopefully soon a creative product such as a course or ebook. I’ve joined a large a growing group of people seeking to do that same thing. Competition is fierce, rewards are scarce, but that is perhaps the nature of all business ventures. That’s not my problem with the whole thing.

My problem is that I see two things getting lost in the conversation around creative entrepreneurship. The first is that the creative part of things usually gets subsumed by the entrepreneurship part. For people who are primarily business-oriented, this is fine. But for those of us who consider ourselves first and foremost creatives, we can find ourselves being distracted from what drives and motivates us: the joy of creativity, our lifeblood.

My second problem has to do with the way we talk about entrepreneurship. We are overly focused on the external manifestations of success (think social media followers, money), and of it happening on a relatively short timescale (think a year or two). For many of us, entrepreneurship is going to look like a long, hard road of frequent failures, a success sprinkled in here and there. Most of us will never “make it,” if making it is defined by riches and fame. Some of us may perhaps find modest success. Many of us will give up.

The interesting thing is that the first of these problems can provide us with a solution to the second. Committing to creativity can see us through. The first reason is that the long, hard road of entrepreneurship looks a lot like creative life, as anyone who has ever tried to publish their writing or get noticed for their music or art will tell you. I have decades of experience in not achieving my creative dreams behind me, and while that may seem heartbreaking on the face of it (it certainly felt that way often enough), it actually has been a great gift. I am now able to truly find joy in my own creative process regardless of outcome – and this is the holy grail of creative life.

Entrepreneurship is different, of course. The point is to generate revenue through providing value, so doing it for the love of it isn’t enough. But as a creative entrepreneur, I can use my hard-learned lessons in persistence and patience to keep me on the path through the inevitable failures and disappointments. I believe that success is often simply a function of sticking it out. You keep showing up, and eventually you’re the one in the room with the biggest body of work behind you and the greatest face recognition value.

But the most valuable tool in our kit is our capacity for creative commitment. By making our commitment to creativity rather than entrepreneurship, we can weather both that long, hard road of entrepreneurship and make it a little less frustrating for ourselves. Entrepreneurial success entails making money, and there are many ways this can play out over time in the life of a creative, many or most of which we can’t predict or control. But creative success entails feeling fulfilled by your creative work. It doesn’t rely on extrinsic measurements of value such as money or esteem. It is about how you feel about your work. It’s about that joy of creativity that drives and motivates you.

Commitment to creativity through thick and thin – through sickness and in health, in other words – may seem weird, because we don’t often think of creative work in those terms. Usually we think of creativity as serving some other goal, not as something that has value in and of itself. But for creatives, it is a way of life, of being in the world. Making a commitment to your creativity can be the essential ingredient that sees you through, because what it means in a practical sense is that you keep doing your creative work regardless of how the entrepreneurship part is going. On the entrepreneurship journey sometimes you’ll be up, and sometimes you’ll be down. Your balancing force is your creative commitment.