How To Follow Your Creative Compass To The Work Only You Can Create
We all have a feeling that drives the work we do. The better we can identify and lean into the feeling, the more truly “us” our work will be.
I always wanted to be a rock star.
As far as creative dreams go, this is my oldest and purest.
In High School, my best friends and I had a band that played Weezer, Blink-182, and Metallica covers. Once I graduated, I started a hardcore band that wrote our own stuff and played shows around town.
Most shows we played were to small audiences of 30 people or so, the biggest had an audience of maybe 100. We were about as far from famous as we could get, but that didn’t matter. The feeling of creative expression that came from playing my guitar and singing my heart out in front an audience is the purest expression of myself I’ve yet to experience.
It’s been a long time since I’ve fully lived in that feeling. The last live show I played was in 2009 and I gave up on making it as a musician a few years later. But while I’ve long since given up on that dream, I recently realized, that all the work I’ve done since then (and maybe all the work I’ll ever do) has been chasing that feeling of standing on stage with my guitar around my neck.
I don’t think I’m the only one driven by this type of experience.
I think we all have some feeling we’re chasing that informs the work we do. This feeling, I think, is what we imagine to be the most fully realized version of ourselves. Our potential fulfilled.
I call this feeling your Creative Compass.
The feeling that guides our Creative Compass is different for each of us. For you, it might be the feeling of catching the perfect wave while surfing, watching your guests take the first bite of the meal you’ve spent hours preparing or the subtle joy of watching the first shoots poke above the topsoil of your garden. It might be a feeling you’ve lived and embodied or an imagined amplification of a past experience.
Whichever feeling it is that has a hold on us, we don’t get to choose it. It’s something deeper than conscious choice…
