The Creative Professional Identity

I’ve always been aware of the challenges surrounding getting work in the creative industries. However I never fully considered the difficulties involved with actually working in them until this very week. Ever since I started down this path as a Game Designer the biggest challenge that was right in front of me was “getting noticed”. I never really broke out which was a tough pill to swallow and it eventually led to me giving up. This week as I’ve taken a closer look I now realize that this is just one of the many difficulties that creative individuals have to deal with when working, or trying to get work within the industry.

I’ve included a list at the end (not created entirely by me) that I believe sums up these difficulties, however I wanted to focus on one in particular and hopefully identify why I believe these “difficulties” are a two sided coin.

When I was working with a small group as a Game Designer I personally experienced a great deal of these difficulties although at the time I condensed them into the same problem of not having a budget or not being able to ride off of the fame of a previously released title. At the time the only thing that mattered was success, we wanted to be noticed and we wanted our game to sell. However this obsession with success always distracted us from our project. We would sometimes be thinking more about selling our product than creative solutions to the problems we were having.  Darius Kazemi promotes an opposite approach to this mentality among creative individuals, using his famous lottery analogy:

• “There are two kinds of creative advice you can get from creative people, The first is how to buy more lottery tickets and the second is how to win the lottery and I think the former is of great use and the latter is nonsense” Darius Kazemi (2014)

What Darius is Trying to explain is that people can help you create something(buy a lottery ticket), but whether or not that creation will be a success is entirely random(win the lottery), and more importantly you shouldn’t bog yourself down creatively by worrying about how successful your creation will be. Although I don’t agree holistically with his approach, as in, I believe you can learn things that will help your creations succeed, Darius certainly raises a good point about focusing on your project and doing the best you can with it rather than worrying about whether people will like it or not.

References:

Darius Kazemi [XOXO Festival]. (2014, Oct 24th). Darius Kazemi, Tiny Subversions – XOXO Festival(2014). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_F9jxsfGCw

(Picture) Author Unknown. (2015). Albert Einstein Quotes. Retrieved from https://quotefancy.com/quote/2353/Albert-Einstein-In-the-middle-of-difficulty-lies-opportunity