On The Nature of Creative Work

*originally published on my blog

I was at a writer’s workshop one weekend, and we were prompted to write about ‘balance’ and what it meant in our lives. I remembered the word, “Funambulist”- which is also the name of my blog. (blatantly inspired from Shahrukh Khan’s speech at Yale University)

Being a creative person is indeed like walking on a tightrope. My life in the last several years has revolved around this act of balancing my creative self and my pragmatic self, the self that recognizes the value and the need for financial independence and all other things associated with worldly success, and the self that wants to express my creativity — to perform the play that hasn’t been performed, to write the poem that only I can write. No, I don’t say this out of pompous self-obsession, but rather I believe this is precisely one of key distinctions between what we call creative and non-creative work.

In creative work, the nature of the output is dependent on the nature of the very self that produced it. No one else could have written Pride and Prejudice except Jane Austen, no one could have played Michael Corleone like Al Pacino did, no one could have produced songs like Let…