Lean Into Your Creative Side

How are you designing your life on your way to financial independence (FI)? As many of you know, one of the main themes of this blog is living our best lives now, starting to take action now to make our lives more joyful, instead of waiting until some day in the distant future, when we hit our FI number (roughly 25x our yearly expenses).

Today on the blog, I’m honing in on one way we can help with the lifestyle design process now, one way we can increase our chances of living our best lives now. By getting creative! We can use creativity to figure out how we can start designing our lives, and living our best lives, NOW.

According to Sheena Iyengar, a Professor of Business at Columbia who was interviewed on one of my favorite podcasts Hello Monday, everyone is creative. She teaches a popular course called Think Bigger in the business school, where she challenges her students to rethink what they believe about themselves and argues that they are all creative.

I can now say that I believe everyone is creative, but there was a time in the not-too-distant past where I didn’t believe this to be true at all. Specifically, I didn’t believe that I was creative.

As a kid, I had always enjoyed making crafts, scrapbooking, writing, and participating in art class. All things I would now consider “creative.” It wasn’t that I necessarily thought I was “good” at art. I didn’t particularly think anything I made in art class was worthy of anything, or was better than anything anyone else made. I just enjoyed the process of making art. It made me feel free. It made me feel that anything was possible. I could get lost in the process of making art. And as a type A, high-achieving, straight-A student, it was nice to escape into creativity for a bit.

But one year in high school, I had an art teacher I didn’t love. She wasn’t like the other art teaches I had. She came across as cold. She wasn’t nurturing the way other teachers were. One day, I think we were painting or drawing or something, my least favorite way to make art, and this teacher came up behind me, leaned over my shoulder, and told me I should try to take some notes from my neighbor. I should strive to have my art look like my neighbor’s art (let’s not even think about the fact that this neighbor was a boy). She said it didn’t look like I was trying very hard, and I should consider putting in more effort.

In my teen mind, this feedback seemed to come completely out of nowhere. And it completely crushed me. From then on, when it came to “art”, I doubted myself. I lost that carefree feeling. Now, art class just made me anxious.

I didn’t give it much active thought at the time, but looking back, from then on, I avoided “making art”. I avoided creativity. And if anyone asked, I told them I had no creative bones in my body.

I forgot about art, and I filled that space with sports and school. I went on to college, where I played volleyball and continued to excel in the classroom. My goal was to get into a PhD program. I was committed to running on the hamster wheel, working my butt off to get in to the best programs, so there was no time for being creative anyway.

Fast forward a few years, I was in graduate school, and still fully on the hamster wheel. Remember “paint and sips”? Well, this is when they became all the rage. A bunch of (usually) women would pay to spend time with other women, drink alcohol, and paint the same picture led by an instructor. Even though there was alcohol involved, I wanted nothing to do with this craze. Sit around and paint in front of a bunch of people? No way! My still-self-conscious-about-art self resisted heavily.

But my friend who also worked at the university where I was getting my graduate degree loved to do art on the side of her day job, and she hosted an informal art night (basically a paint and sip but in the comfort of her home without the big price tag). My friends LOVED the idea. Me, not so much.

But to avoid being a social outcast, and since I really did want to hang out with my friends outside of work, I went. I told myself I could just skip the art part.

Everything was going great until we started to do the craft. I immediately froze up, my whole body resisting. But my friend was sweet. She was nurturing. She made me feel safe. And her craft was actually pretty cool, if I do say so myself. We were all getting our PhDs in Neuroscience (ie, brain science), and we were going to make brain molds and then paper mache them. Everyone was super into it. I decided I would give it a try – it was a brain, after all!

Much to my surprise, once I gave in and let myself try, I found that I was getting lost in the craft, just as I had when I was a kid. I made the mold, and I decided not to paper mache my brain, but to paint it and then paint/write quotes I loved all over the gyri (the “bumps” on the brain). I loved that brain.

When I got home later that night, I remember being pretty proud of myself that I hadn’t let fear/the past stop me from participating, but I didn’t think much beyond that. The next day, I went right back to happily running on the hamster wheel. 

Well, long-time readers of the blog know this next part. The hamster wheel led me eventually to my “dream job” as an academic professor, and it didn’t end up being the dream job after all. I eventually got off the hamster wheel and took a massive paycut to be an editor, where I could work remotely and only had to work about 35-38 hours a week.

For the first time in what felt like my whole life, I had all this extra time in my day. Time where I wasn’t studying, preparing materials for the next day, or thinking about work. I had a job where I could leave work at work.

With this time and space, I started to de-identify myself from work and reconnect with the parts of me that had gone neglected since I was a kid. I started to figure out who I might actually be outside of work. I started to journal more, exercise more, get out into nature more, see friends and family more. And maybe most importantly, I started to feel what I now call creativity whispers. One of those whispers even led to starting this blog!

In one of my favorite books, Big Magic, author Elizabeth Gilbert writes about how we need to be light and carefree in order to be our best creative selves. I was living proof that this quote was true. It’s one of my favorite lines from the book, and it’s something I come back to time and time again when I find myself getting too busy with life and work, getting too lost in the day-to-day, when I don’t feel creative anymore.

This was also around the same time when I discovered slow FI, which is the idea that we can design lives we love on the way to FI, rather than grind it out and work our lives away until we hit the magic number. So when I felt a little stuck, like I couldn’t get any more creative while I was still working full-time, I participated in the Design A Life You Love course led by Jess of The Fioneers (who coined the term slow FI). Through that process, I realized that there are practically infinite ways to be creative. By having a core group of folks to share my ideas with and to hold me accountable, we even got a little silly with our creativity. In one session, I shared a pie-in-the-sky, ridiculous-to-me sounding idea of leading singing retreats in the mountains, where’d we learn and sing songs from The Sound of Music. They helped me see that no idea was silly if it was coming from my heart, if it was something I really wanted to do, if it was something that spoke to my true, authentic self.

You see, my friends, we can start designing our best lives, especially if we have even just a little creativity. If we think outside the box, of the norm, of what society tells us we “should” be doing. We can get creative with our time, our money/spending, our work, our family lives. The list goes on!

And the best part? We have nothing to lose! What’s the worst case scenario? Getting creative, trying something new we think we might like, only to learn we don’t like it after all? That’s just a learning! Then, we can pivot and move on to the next idea.

Let’s walk through some examples to get you thinking.

Getting creative with our time

Or, said another way, getting creative with our schedules.

Another of my favorite podcasts, called SPARKED, talks a lot about creativity and creative pursuits in every episode. On one particular episode, the hosts were discussing how many people complain that they don’t have enough time for their creative pursuits.

I used to feel this way too. And then, I got creative.

I mapped out my day and figured out every chunk of spare time that I could, if I chose, to use for my creativity. Note the importance of this tactic. This step is ultimately up to you! You don’t have to use every spare minute of your day. The important part is figuring out where you have extra time, so that you can use if you want to. There are plenty of days where I choose to rest and relax during times where I could be working on my creative pursuits.

You don’t even have to be like me and get up at 5 am (which gives me a whole 4 hours before I start my work day to fit in time for myself, time for my creative pursuits like this blog, and time for exercise. Could you get up even just 1 hour earlier than usual? You might be surprised what you can do with a whole hour.

Do you have a lunch hour? Author Elizabeth Gilbert (again in her book Big Magic) talks about how she used to write during her lunch hour at work.

I’ve found that I can also use the precious hour between when I get off work at 5 pm and when Mr. Dink and I start cooking dinner at 6 pm to work on creative pursuits, especially if I set good boundaries at work.

One quick, final note here: If you are new to this process and/or you’re not even sure what to start or what your creative pursuits could even be, read this previous post. Then, you could use this new-found time instead to explore, to get to know yourself, to open up to the possibility of creativity. Start journaling during this time, or meditating, or taking a walk (I find I have my best creative thoughts when I’m on a walk). Start small and see where it goes.

Getting creative with our work

No matter whether you are a freelancer, work a full-time 9-5, work part-time, or something else, you can make work work for you.

Once you let your creative side out, you might find that you want to spend less time working at your job and more time working on your creative pursuits. This has been true for me, at least. And depending on where you are on your FI journey, you may or may not be able to step down or step completely away from work.

But can you get creative with your work?

If you think you may want to transition your creative pursuits into income, can you take time off from your “other” job to do some test runs of what this might look like for you? If you’re full-time, could you take a sabbatical, take extra time off (paid or unpaid), or take a leave of absence? If you’re a freelancer, can you save a little bit extra, enough to take a month off from that work?

You may not know what could happen during this time off, you may be scared to take the leap, but think about the worst case scenario and ask yourself if it’s worth it. Make a pros and cons list. You may be surprised by what you find.

Another way to make work work for you is to get creative with the job you already have! Maybe you’re bored at work, but you like your company and don’t want to risk starting over somewhere else. You could use the time creativity we discussed above to start to figure out what sparks you, what makes you come alive in work and life, and see if you can fit that into your job. There was a great story on the Hello Monday podcast recently about someone who took on a new role at work after learning that what she really wanted to do was help people solve problems. Like we’ve been discussing, she did the work on her own to discover what it was that she wanted to spend more time doing, had a conversation with her manager afterward, and over time, they found ways (and eventually a new role) to incorporate that work into her day-to-day. Remember, possibilities can be endless when it comes to creativity!

Getting creative with our experiences

In his book Die With Zero, Bill Perkins writes about how he got creative with experiences. He used the knowledge that we only have so much time, and that we may enjoy different experiences differently depending on our age/how much time we have left, to plan a creative experience. He got all his friends and family together on the island of St. Barts, so that he could enjoy their company as well as be in his favorite place on Earth. He even called the experience Heaven on Earth!

Now, you may not be able to afford to take all your friends and family to St. Barts, but how could you use this creative idea on a smaller scale?

As my own, much smaller-scale example, I organized and paid for an AirBnB getaway trip for me and my closest friends. It was driving distance for everyone, and we cooked most of our own food. Everything is scalable.

Once you know what it is that’s most important to you, what you value, you can get creative with experiences from there.

Think about what works for you, what’s best for you, not what’s best or most “popular” according to societal norms. It’s natural for us humans to compare, but someone else’s vacation or experience may not work for you. Don’t squeeze yourself into a box just because you feel you have to take some “traditional” vacation or experience in a traditional way. Maybe you prefer car travel to plane travel (we sure do). Maybe you prefer staycations (like me). There are no wrong answers here.

Getting creative with your side activities

These could be anything from a small hobby to a full-blown side hustle or passion project. Regardless, you can get creative with them to design your life.

Maybe a side activity starts as a hobby, but the more you do it, the more time you realize you want to give to it. And then the more time you give to it, the more you realize you may be able to make money from it. And the more you make money from it, the more you start to think about turning this side hustle into a business.

Or maybe the side activity stays as a hobby, and you only want to spend limited time on it. You could choose to spend other time on other hobbies.

Mr. Dink and I recently got creative by giving pickleball a try. We loved it so much, it’s now become a regular hobby.

Getting creative with experiments

Experimenting is a great way to help you design a life you don’t want to retire from. Especially if you don’t quite know exactly what it is you’d want to do with yourself if you retired, or even if you had a little more time in the day.

I’ve written a whole post just on the power of experimentation, so today I want to share a way we recently got creative with an experiment.

I have always been drawn toward the idea of fostering. But obviously, fostering is a huge commitment and a big step, and Mr. Dink doesn’t necessarily share this calling. However, since he knows that it is something that’s important to me, he’s willing to be open minded. He asked if we could start smaller.

I suggested we try out hosting an exchange student at the local high school. They would live with us for a semester. But for him, that still felt a little too big for a first step. I had to keep thinking creatively. I also had to give it time.

Finally, I heard about a program through the local college, where we could sign up to be a host for an international student studying there. They wouldn’t live with us, but we would be a support system for them. And the whole process was very informal. Beyond the first meet-up that the college would arrange, it would really be up to us and the student to foster the relationship in whatever way worked best for us. This felt like the perfect small step for both me and Mr. Dink.

Well, we have now met and spent time with our student, and we are loving the relationship we are building so far. We’ll see what the future holds!

In closing…

Finally, I want to leave you with this important step when it comes to getting creative: don’t be afraid of failure.

Failure is a part of the creative process! Try something and hate it? Well guess what my friends, no one gets to live your life but you. You have all the power and control, and you never have to do that thing again if you don’t want to!

Going back to the SPARKED podcast for a moment, there was an episode where the hosts were discussing how all the questions they get are ultimately the same, or at least have the same undertone: that we all want to work on creative pursuits, but we crave stability. The hosts went on to argue that it’s not that people don’t have time to work on their creative pursuits (even though that’s what most will say). They believe that people are scared to give time to their creative endeavors. Why? Because it is, in fact, often scary to pursue our passions. It’s vulnerable to give time to something we uniquely care about. It often goes against “the norm” to take time for ourselves. It’s risky to put something you love so much out there into the world. What if it’s not good?

I’m here to say, don’t let those thoughts stop you. That’s all they are, just thoughts. You can have them AND you can go out and do the thing. You can have them AND still work on your creative pursuits.

It all starts with setting some goals and, most importantly, knowing what you value. From there, you can go out and be as creative as you want to be.

And remember, if you don’t think you’re creative, take Elizabeth Gilbert’s advice and try to get a little lighter and more carefree 🙂

What would that look like for you? What’s calling to you these days? Let me know in the comments; I’d love to hear from you!