Paying the bills vs feeding your intellect

Productivity or creativity — What is it that you desire?

When is productivity enough?

If it’s a hand-to-mouth situation, productivity is enough.

⁍ It is industrial. You know exactly what to do.

⁍ It is predictable. You know what to expect.

Productivity pays the bills.

How does creativity come into the picture?

When you’re past the lower levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the ignored creative child within you craves to break the monotony. It finds respite in vacations, hobbies, and side projects.

Unlike productivity, creativity is not predictable:

❥ You don’t exactly know what to do. There’s no formula but a framework helps. You know you need to write/sketch/compose music/etc. every morning/afternoon/evening/etc. No one’s going to tell you what exactly to write/sketch/compose music/etc.

❥ You don’t know what exactly to expect. Creativity is full of new ideas and surprises. You might mix and match ideas from different domains and your life experience and then come up with something novel. The unpredictability makes it all the more exciting.

Creativity feeds the intellect.

If you’re living 💯 on creativity, you are already sorted.

Most of us need to strike a balance. We need productivity in creativity. We need to get comfortable with chaos. We need to ditch instructions and adopt frameworks. We need to shush the distractors and work in a flow state. We need to reflect and grow.

If we do it long enough, creativity will become a habit. It will start paying the bills.

Isn’t that what we desire?

We are the life-hacking, productivity-seeking, creativity-starved humans of the Information Age.