The Will to Creativity
Three Point Essay #48 | How to not get stuck in a life of soul-killing drudgery
Jeff Sullivan’s Three Pointers
I.
One semester left of college.
The real world awaits. Time for the grind. Time to put on a suit and tie and sell your soul. Time to take on work that you don’t enjoy, and ignore all those silly ideas about ‘chasing your dreams’. Time to live the drunken existence on the weekends so you can forget all the misery your boring job causes you.
That’s the ‘real world’ right?
It’s disturbing how many college seniors I know who accept this as inevitable. The idea of making a living off of doing something you enjoy is like a joke to them. They don’t believe it’s possible. Or, they don’t care—all they care about is making money, no matter the cost to their mental state. Now, everyone has different circumstances. But both of these attitudes will prove disastrous in the long-run regardless of your situation.
I've already had a glimpse into corporate America. After my sophomore year at Umass, I needed money. One of my brother's friends helped out me and my friend P Rock, giving us a contractor position at a large company. I'm still thankful for this. I made some decent cash. But that was the only reason I took the job. Money.
We got hired to plug cameras into machines and then tap a couple buttons on a computer to download software onto it. Rinse and repeat. All day, every day.
It was a nice campus. There was tasty free lunch. My co-workers were nice people. But I began to understand what Nassim Taleb meant when he said “they are born, then put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called “work” in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they go to the gym in a box to sit in a box; they talk about thinking “outside the box”; and when they die they are put in a box.”
I don’t want to be stuck in a box.
"Is this all there is to life after college?" I thought.
It was a 40 minute commute every day. P Rock and I would cry laughing on rides home about how soul-crushing the job was. The best moment that whole summer was when I went to his computer and we watched Jeff Bezos go to space live.
I had powerful realizations while working there. Though it’s certain there’s better corporate jobs within that company and elsewhere, I got a peek into what the lifestyle is like. The lifestyle of working as an employee in a big company. The lifestyle of monotonous tasks, getting told what to do all day, and having no creativity or ownership over what you do.
The Office is my favorite show of all time. But it’s sad to think about people signing up for corporate America subconsciously expecting there will be some quirky, loving, group of co-workers who have the time of their life as employees. When, in real life, there's no camera crew following you around. You're not Jim, and there is no Pam. Just you, your thoughts, your shitty job, and your biological clock, ticking ever closer to death. Upon closer inspection, a central reason the office is comical is because of how miserable of a situation it is.
II.
Enter caffeine. I had never drank coffee before the big company life. They had a Keurig, so I started indulging. What a great drug. “Coffee, the sober drink, the mighty nourishment of the brain” Jules Michelet wrote, “which unlike other spirits, heightens purity and lucidity; coffee, which clears the clouds of the imagination and their gloomy weight; which illuminates the reality of things suddenly with the flash of truth.”
The flash of truth coffee gave me was that if I don’t start planning what I want to do with my life, I will wander into a soul-killing work trap like this. It may be a different shape or form, but I saw the lifestyle of people who don't create things.
Around this time I discovered the Naval Ravikant podcast. In between coffee sips hearing him say things like “You’re not going to get rich renting out your time.” (being an employee) got the wheels turning in my mind. I became obsessed with learning how to invest my time more intelligently.
But the caffeinated epiphanies hit hardest when Naval said “The internet has massively broadened the career space. Most people haven’t figured this out yet. You can go on the internet, and you can find your audience. And you can build a business, and create a product, and build wealth, and make people happy just uniquely expressing yourself through the internet.”
I thought, why don't I just write about ideas from great books and my own experiences, while expressing my genuine loves (like basketball and learning languages)?
As Naval said: “The way to get out of the competition trap is to be authentic, to find the thing you know how to do better than anybody. You know how to do it better because you love it, and no one can compete with you.” No one can compete with me on writing articles like this and posting videos speaking Spanish and playing basketball, because there’s no one who loves doing that strange combination of activities more than me.
You, too, have unique skills and interests that looks like work to others, but feels like a fun game to you. Ones you could combine into an original venture, grow through social media, and find a way to make a living off of. Ones that no one could compete with you on, because no one else is you.
The problem is, people either don’t believe in themselves or are too self-conscious to even start. I was stuck in that mode for a while. But you can get out of it. Just lift heavy weights, read a lot of books, and stop caring about what people think about you, because they aren’t thinking about you.
III.
I'm not some guru preaching that 9-5s are a scam. Or that if you’re an employee you’re a slave.
But in your ONE life, it’s a no-brainer to work on your own thing. A creative project, side hustle, whatever you want to call it. Something where you’re expressing yourself or making stuff and have a chance of impacting others and profiting off of it.
Maybe you start your own business. Maybe you design and sell clothes. Maybe you make music. Maybe you draw or paint. Maybe you create a podcast. Maybe you become a comedian. Maybe you write. That thing. That thing you know you should do, but you talk yourself out of it for ‘the smart route’ instead. All a ‘smart route’ is, is spending your life on someone’s else’s dream instead of yours.
Bet on yourself.
Social
Find what you love. Sometimes it takes a few tries. I always knew I wanted to teach. 😊
Love this! As my grandfather used to say, "You are going to work the rest of your life, so find something you love to do". I was fortunate to be blessed with the love of helping people. I continue to work in my field even after retirement.