Creative slack

It’s much easier to be creative when you’re not constantly worried about tradeoffs. In order to relax, and actually create, you need to be able to experiment. And not every experiment will turn out successfully. Many will fail. You need to be able to make mistakes. Let’s call this creative abundance: you feel light-hearted, free to create and play and take creative risks. As a result, you make interesting work. If the consequences of experimenting are too high, then the pressure might block you. You may worry about what happens if nobody buys this work, or if you don’t have enough time for another draft, and so on. You won’t be able to relax. If you rely on your creative work for income, you’ll experience a sense of scarcity. A day job helps alleviate that pressure, which helps unblock your creative flow. (So does unearned income.) Creating room for these mistakes to take place is the first step to creative abundance. And the word for that is slack. Some potential adjustments to…