Should I quit my 9 to 5 job to pursue my creative passion?

You may fall into one of two camps.

You have contemplated jacking in your job to work full time on your hobby or artistic interest. The thought of immersing yourself every day in a creative pursuit that you love fills you with thoughts of freedom, joy or fulfilment.

Or you may be in the other camp. The thought of giving up your job is too frightening to contemplate. You may not feel fired up by what you do for work every day but packing it all in to chase an artistic vocation could be summed up as irresponsible. Too risky, too unpredictable and perhaps, too indulgent?

In his latest book The Creative Act, preeminent music producer Rick Rubin advises putting the art first and removing the expectation for it to support you financially.

Rubin says: “You may yearn for success as a way to leave an unfulfilling job and support yourself through your passion. This is a reasonable goal. However if the choice is between making great art and supporting yourself, the art comes first. Consider another way to make a living. Success is harder to come by when your life depends on it.”

I’m curious, is there something in between? How do you create more time for your passion when your time is very much tied to making a living? How do you deal with the difficulty of uncoupling trading time for money?

The In-Between I propose is working on a time-boxed project. If you want to consider making your passion a part-time or full-time gig, it is natural to focus on the Creative Making and underestimate all the done-for-you that your job brings. Someone pays for the electricity and equipment, attracts the customers, fields your taxes to the authorities and makes sure there is a sick-pay policy in place. So to turn your passion into an enterprise, it would be great to simulate what both working on and working in your creative field looks like.

This quote from The Creative Act proposes a good baseline for what an internship, for example, can offer:

Underline: the industry and its infrastructure. Fundamentally, understand how money is made. There is no getting away from this.?

But what if you have social proof? Your family are proud to show off the things you create and your friends are incessantly nudging you to sell what you produce. Does being the master ceramicist, florist or barista mean that turning it into a business is the next obvious step? In The E-Myth, Michael Gerber gives us the reasons for small business failures through the cautionary tale of the seasoned technician (insert your creative passion here) working more and more hours to perfect their craft and produce more and yet struggling to make it a viable business. That, in addition to the stress and anxiety that the passion was supposed to stave off, not create.

Your time-boxed project needs to give you direct experience of how creative entrepreneurs make a living doing the thing you want to do. But rather than an open-ended pursuit, I suggest setting a time, place and deadline then put as much time and effort as a professional in the field would.

Personal learning…

In 2020, COVID year 1 (no reminders needed!), my friend Heather Kaputalamba BSc, MCIPS, Scrum Master and I saw the opportunity to work together on a creative venture to offer virtual corporate Christmas parties. We set ourselves a 4-month project time and naturally had a forced deadline of completion in December. We agreed on our terms of work and Cambridge Big Small Events was born!

I was in full-time employment so I committed to a specific amount of hours I could work on the project each week topped up with annual leave days. I also had a set budget I was happy to spend on the experiment and the willingness to approach my contacts. Heather, one of the most resourceful people I know, dedicated more time to the venture, on research, sourcing supplies and approaching prospects.?

Working together on the event format, content and marketing for CBSE was a thrilling creative process. We threw many ideas on the wall. We spoke to entertainers and sampled food. We tested digital tools and assembled festive gifts. We also crunched the numbers, simulated logistics, created contract documents, built contact databases and planned sales activities. Our test was a simple one - Don’t Lose Money. We had limited time and resources and we were happy to test small by limiting ourselves to Cambridge. We decided that apart from fully funding a test event, we would not borrow money.

We aimed to offer fun quality entertainment, source quality products while supporting independent shops and pay all the performers a fair price. We wanted to have a great time offering something much more than a Zoom social? and we thought we found a promising way to make our efforts pay.

What happened next?

We hosted a test event with our audience of friends and family and a set of great performers - musician Matt Strafford , magician Chris Hall and cocktail artist Guilia Cuccurullo. We collated the items for our hampers-to-be including food items sourced locally, playing cards, a cocktail maker, a plant and even a mini glitter ball. We learnt a lot from the test event and received positive feedback but…we couldn’t sell the concept at an attendee minimum that made the event profitable. The project didn’t pass the test.

Was it worth doing?

Absolutely! I had the opportunity to play to my strengths which is being creative in developing a concepts, connecting people and resources and delivering a product. I had an amazing time building something with someone who not only has complementing strengths but improved on my ideas. We both learnt a lot and had a great time. We also learnt that it was hard to build a brand quickly and demonstrate value during the transient and uncertain Covid period. Encouragingly, we know that many people did versions of virtual events, just with an emphasis on different things - keep it cheap or simple or let teams self-organise. As you may have guessed, that was the end of Cambridge Big Small Events.

Back to the money - there is not just one way to do things. If we are serious about our play, it is worth exploring and testing other business models that can support creators in making a living. It could be teaching and selling online to licensing content and building subscription businesses. There are many in-between experiments to help decide whether to separate your creative passion from work or make your creative passion your work.