As a Creative, the phrase “Follow your passion!” is both really good, and really horrible advice. Most of the things we’re passionate about are not money-making ideas, because most creatives aren’t passionate about money- we care about art, music, literature, and improving people’s lives in aesthetic ways. This severely limits what we have the resources to do.
The flip side to this, “just give people what they want” and “if it makes money, it’s good” are components of what’s called Pragmatism. Record companies are notorious for this, as are large publishing houses. They make vapid pop music, because vapid pop music is what sells. “If it makes money, how bad could it be?”
Well, if you’re the artist trying to make their vision become reality, it could be disastrous.
We’ve seen plenty of movies that were obviously made just as an exercise in making money, and not to fulfill an artist’s vision. We’ve heard songs on the radio that would barely even qualify as music. We’ve all read books that were written like they were copied and pasted from a formula with just the names changed.
If you consider yourself a creative artist, what does Creativity mean? You can be a musician that just does gigs at bars playing covers- it requires skill, but it’s not very creative. You can imagine all sorts of worlds and stories, but if you never put it down on paper (or in a word processor) then you’re still not really creating anything.
Where we as creatives need to be is at the intersection of art and work.
That’s right- right where creative and productive meet.
Passion, and Practicality.
What does this mean?
If you don’t want to make money with your art, you won’t.
Nobody is going to just hand you stacks of money because you made art for yourself. If you do want to make something for yourself, there’s nothing wrong with that. But you will never make a business out of making art for yourself.
Drawing, writing, music, whatever it is- becomes “art” when you share it with people. Otherwise, it’s just a hobby. And hobbies cost money, not produce it.
I debated with myself for quite a while before I created a Substack account. Same thing when I created a Bandcamp account. “I’ve been making content for years for free!” I thought to myself. “And I never made any money with it.”
See the problem here?
The truth is, I wasn’t blogging to make money, and it isn’t free to host, so that means I was doing it as a hobby. At no point was I going to make money with it, even if my traffic suddenly shot through the roof. Which, because I was doing it as a hobby, was certainly never going to happen.
If you want to make money with your craft, you have to treat it like you do.
Sometimes that means making art that you know people will want to pay to use. But sometimes, it just means believing your art is worth something to someone besides yourself.
“What if nobody buys what I make?” Well, how is that any worse than what you’re making now? But if you don’t offer it for sale, you’re guaranteed that nobody will buy it.
If you really want to create- and I’m assuming if you’re reading this, you do- then you need to take it seriously like you would any other job. The main difference is that it requires you to make something that’s consumable by other people, by definition.
Where do you draw the line?
That’s up to you. Do you really want to create for other people? Not everyone does- and that’s okay. But if you really want to put yourself out there, make money and build that into something- that requires intentionality. It doesn’t have to require compromise on what you believe, or what you create. It just requires you to change the way you think about why you make it.
If you’re making art for other people, even though you’re pouring your own soul into it, there’s always the understanding that it’s going to be received by someone else. You might not want to change what you make, but by changing how and why you make it, it will in turn affect the outcome.
Instead of thinking about it as “Making what someone else wants”, think of it as “Making what I want but in a way that other people will appreciate.”
And maybe, you’ll learn to be passionate about making art for other people.
That’s what artists do.