Recharging Your Creativity

When you are a nomad, or a trav­el­ing loca­tion inde­pen­dent pro­fes­sional, where you locate your­self while you are trav­el­ing can be, and some­times needs to be, more than just an inter­est­ing place.

Being a cre­ative per­son is hard work, espe­cially when your busi­ness depends on your being cre­ative for extended peri­ods of times and over an unend­ing stream of projects. Add to this the effort required to keep up-to-date with con­stantly chang­ing tech­nolo­gies, keep an eye on chang­ing trends and client demands, as well as re-establishing your­self in new sur­round­ings every few months.….and the poten­tial for cre­ativ­ity blocks of var­i­ous lengths and inten­si­ties seems almost inevitable.

What do you do when you find that the cre­ative flow isn’t flow­ing as eas­ily as it should?

One thing that you could do is to look at what cre­ative indi­vid­u­als look for in a com­mu­nity or a city that they plan to set­tle into, and then plan to spend some time in those loca­tions. Cre­ative indi­vid­u­als, accord­ing to Richard Florida, look for com­mu­ni­ties or cities that offer “…abun­dant high-quality ameni­ties and expe­ri­ences, an open­ness to diver­sity of all kinds, and above all else the oppor­tu­nity to val­i­date their iden­ti­ties as cre­ative peo­ple.” (The Rise of The Cre­ative Class, page 218). For exam­ple, in Toronto there are a cou­ple of ‘cre­ative dis­tricts’, Queen Street West, Lib­erty Vil­lage, St. Lawrence Mar­ket area, The Beaches, and a few oth­ers, where cre­atives and cre­ative entre­pre­neurs congregate.

This is great for cre­atives who want to set­tle into an area, but what does a cre­ative that just wants to spend a few months in the area actu­ally get out of being in a cre­ative com­mu­nity instead of any other community?

For starters, you get to be sur­rounded by cre­ative peo­ple and that energy that cre­ative peo­ple seem to gen­er­ate. Spend­ing time in cre­ative com­mu­ni­ties is like a pro­fes­sional attend­ing a pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment con­fer­ence. These pro­fes­sion­als gen­er­ally come away from pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment con­fer­ences feel­ing recharged and excited after hav­ing spent some time learn­ing about what is new and upcom­ing in their field, dis­cussing tends and oppor­tu­ni­ties with cohorts, com­mis­er­at­ing with peo­ple who under­stand their field and speak their jargon.

Sim­i­lar kinds of expe­ri­ences can be gained when cre­ative peo­ple spend time in cre­ative com­mu­ni­ties. For exam­ple, if you are a graphic designer, look for an area in a city where a lot of graphic design firms are located. Spend­ing a cou­ple of hours a day in the local cof­fee shops, or pubs, or other gath­er­ing places, lis­ten­ing to con­ver­sa­tions can give you the ‘water cooler con­ver­sa­tions’ that you miss by work­ing solo — infor­ma­tion on new trends; gos­sip about clients and their demands — that kind of stuff. I always come away from spend­ing time in the cre­ative areas of Toronto feel­ing really cre­ative — as if I had spent sev­eral days at a pro­fes­sional conference.

If you are an out­go­ing extro­vert, then start­ing con­ver­sa­tions with other cre­atives could result in poten­tial busi­ness part­ners, poten­tial clients, and a poten­tially expanded tribe. At the very least this con­tact with other cre­atives should re-validate your iden­tity as a cre­ative person.

How do you cope with keep­ing up with chang­ing tech­nolo­gies, chang­ing trends, and chang­ing client needs while trav­el­ing — and main­tain both your cre­ativ­ity and your sanity??

TTFN

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