I defined creative independence as a set of criteria as part of the 2013 Groundhog Day Resolutions project:
- To be my own boss: mastering process, making money directly from work I produce under my own name.
- To have the time, freedom, and money to operate my business without anxiety.
- To act according to my values as a human being, friend, and maker in the pursuit of mastery and success.
- To live according to my values with a community of like-minded self-empowered, positive-minded, conscientious and competent people.
- To be respectful and mindful of others, while not being swayed from my path by their expectations.
- To document the process so the path can be followed by others.
The related process I defined is the "creative cycle" of exploring, learning, building and sharing. This is a way to produce works that can be seen by others. When one's work is seen, that creates a moment of opportunity. This idea that work has to be "seen" is at the core of my productivity tool design.
Later, I realized that creative independence was not a sufficient condition for feeling fulfilled. The revised concept is called creative interdependence
References
On my old site page Dave and the Search for Creative Independence, I defined it as:
- To be my own boss: mastering process, making money directly from work I produce under my own name.
- To have the time, freedom, and money to operate my business without anxiety.
- To act according to my values as a human being, friend, and maker in the pursuit of mastery and success.
- To live according to my values with a community of like-minded self-empowered, positive-minded, conscientious and competent people.
- To be respectful and mindful of others, while not being swayed from my path by their expectations.
- To document the process so the path can be followed by others.
The earliest reference to the term I can find on my website is The Printable CEO Revisited in 2005. It became the active theme in GHDR 2013, the result of reflecting on 7 years of failure. I need to review this material...it's been ten years.
Captured Notes
_from #talk-productivity December 22, 2022
I think you have also helped me clarify what I was trying to explore when I said I would "think of myself as a "writer" instead of a designer/developer" for the rest of the year even though I didn't think it was quite the right label. I've described what the pursuit as "seeking creative independence" (being able to make money through following what interests me so I can continue to follow what interests me) but have stalled on what to call that for purposes of telling people what I do.
After some googling, I think the mainstream term is "creative" (as in someone who works in a job that creates media, designs things) but I never liked the association with working for the man or serving a large scale market demographic. But getting back to tracking, it strikes me that the needs of tracking are very much dependent on the notion of what 'a sustainable life' for them, and perhaps broadly whether they are in a "creative" industry or whatever a "non-creative" industry is. There is a tendency for people to conflate the various connotations of the word "creative" however so I'm going to stop using the term. Brett Terpstra is a good example to emulate. I believe he made the decision to become an independent creative as a programmer many years ago. I was on his podcast once but haven't kept up with him, so I should see what he is up to.
On a related note, there is also a path that productivity bloggers of that era took, which was into life coaching and the building of consultancies. This is a path I did not want to take, though at the time I wasn't sure why. I think it comes down to wanting to make things that people could also have in their homes or in their minds that made their life a little better. I believed I could make stuff that would be self-selected as the right fit for one's situation, but I could not believe I could provide a guaranteed fit for any person