ROLEY

Tag: Mid-Life

  • A Mid-Life Creative Mindset

    So, you’ve decided to jump and follow that tiny voice in your head that told you it’s time to leave a job you hated and try to make a living out of something you love. If you’re anything like me, you may have started from a place of excitement with a side dish of abject terror. Let’s admit something to ourselves: We’ve spent twenty or thirty years following a schedule, procedures, and rules someone else made.

    Now we’re in control, and if you’re anything like me, your brain had a little bit of a short circuit. So it’s likely you may have gone in one of two directions. First, you may have gone full bore into everything all at once because you were a little apprehensive about the immediate future, or you took a week off to process everything and then went full bore into everything all at once.

    Or, you’re me, who has a slight problem with executive dysfunction from time to time and got frozen by the prospects of starting. Of course, I started. Otherwise, you wouldn’t see anything here, but I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you that I wasn’t overwhelmed by the size of the task before me. It took me a little while to wrap my brain entirely around the fact that I wasn’t working for ‘the man’ anymore and that my income was going to ultimately depend on what I could pitch, create, and deliver. Even though I prepared for it on a few levels, I was not anticipating having a short circuit over it. I did, but I’m ok now.

    I’m ok now because I had to get myself into the right mindset for what’s to come. That’s not an easy task for someone of my age and previous mindset. First, I crave certainty because my upbringing and the jobs I’ve worked for years relied on certainty. There was a particular order and logic to my being raised as a Navy Brat by a Navy Chief, and most of the jobs I’ve worked were full of If = Then logic, quality and performance numbers, and KPIs. That’s all gone now, and I was looking for something to replace it in the vacuum left behind. So I had to ‘detox’ for lack of a better term, and start looking at the concept of creativity in a way that my mid-life brain could handle and begin to move forward.

    Don’t Be That Guy

    The first thing I had to do to create that new vision for my mid-life creative future was to get rid of the voice in my head that kept trying to tell me I would fail. I mentioned this in a previous article. For me, weeding that garden was not an easy task. I couldn’t just tell that voice to go away; I had to look at the life behind that voice and realize why he was telling me that. I also had to compare the end of that life to how I envision the end of mine.

    It sounds like a grim view to take, but it was the only way it would work for me. Somewhere along the way, I picked up an idea from someone to start at the end — your ideal eulogy — and work your way backward. I have some experience writing eulogies and rewriting them several times because I thought better of telling too much truth to the living. Still, every point I edited out stayed with me, and I use those points to remind me that I am not that guy. I will never be that guy, and I deserve to be my own person who can succeed in life doing what he loves, not what others force him to do.

    Four Principles

    Of course, there’s more to cultivating a proper mindset than just digging in the dirt and freeing yourself from your past inner voices. You have to create a foundation for your future. As a person who wants to be a Creative for the 2nd half of our lives, we need to live a different lifestyle than our parents did and separate from the life we lived before. I think that our future starts with the following four principles.

    Curiosity

    Since it’s trendy to do so these days, I will make a Ted Lasso Reference. The darts scene references the Walt Whitman quote, “Be curious, not judgmental.” At my age, I remember that my father would just come home and sit in a recliner for the remainder of the evening and not do anything. He had no hobbies and no interests.

    It’s possible that the day job just took all the energy out of him, but I believe that’s because he had nothing to look forward to at the end of the day. I love coming home and spending time with the family, and then once everything for the evening is taken care of, I can get to writing, or podcasting, or just noodling around with the guitar.

    When I’m not actively creating, I’m learning. Whether it’s classes on Creative Live, YouTube Tutorials, or something heavier on LinkedIn Learning, I’m doing my best to work on my craft when I don’t have the energy to sit down and make something of my own. That’s the promise and the investment I make in myself as often as possible. To learn how to make better art and then do the best work I can.

    At our age, we must maintain our energy level throughout the day and cultivate and maintain that level of curiosity — of play — that we ad when we were younger. It’s easy to become ‘set in our ways, but I think that’s the act of surrender. We still have more in the tank than we think, and I challenge you to find that reserve and make your art whatever it is.

    Boldness

    If you’re a one-person army dedicated to creating and promoting, then there’s one thing you already know: No one is coming to help you. Because so many of us have been a part of some organization and working with teammates for decades, it’s easy to trick yourself into thinking that there’s another person somewhere to give us direction. But, unfortunately, there isn’t, and the sooner you accept that, the better it will be.

    However, because there’s no one else to give you direction, that also means that there’s no one around that says no to your ideas. Let that sink in for a second, and then think of all the things you’ve always wanted to do but were afraid someone wouldn’t let you do it. For example, I made a list of all the projects I’ve always wanted to work on over the years but never had the time or the belief in myself that I could do them.

    After I finished my latest project, I felt a little lost about where to go next. Then I remembered I made that list and found it. As a result, I’m writing the first work of science fiction that I’ve done in about 30 years. Unlike my previous attempts, this one comes from a place of relative happiness instead of the pretty dark place I was in my teens and twenties. With any luck, it will turn out better than anything I’ve written, but the result isn’t the point. The point is to be bold enough to try something well out of your comfort zone. I’m better for having tried.

    Discipline

    The self-proclaimed gurus often amuse me with names like the barefoot creative, the hammock writer, or the four-hour photographer. They make it seem so easy. But, of course, we know being a full-time creative is not easy. It can be overwhelming. It’s incredibly overwhelming for a person who’s lived on a schedule for most of their lives. Clocking in and out and being prepared to account for every moment they’re unproductive. The freedom from not having to account for every second of your day is lovely, but it can very quickly lead to a lack of direction and motivation if you’re not careful.

    Stopping to watch the baseball game one day can lead to hours in front of the idiot box. Checking your notifications on Twitter leads to mindless doom scrolling, and TikTok is an endless rabbit hole if you don’t put a stop to it. Wiser people than I have said this, and it’s true: If you’re consuming, you’re not creating. The day ends, and you wonder where the time went.

    Additionally, I have a problem with planners and journals. I like the idea, but my brain doesn’t want to stick with them. Instead, I go in with a basic idea of what I’d like to do on a given day or week, and I check those off the list I make in Apple Notes. I don’t overthink it, but I know I need discipline to accomplish my goals. Since July, I’ve been trying to keep a Bullet Journal again, and I’m having some success. I forget to add in my daily thoughts on some days, but I’m trying to remember that it’s not the daily that’s so important to me. What’s important to me is the whole record. I want some way to document this new journey to look back on it later and see how far I’ve come along. That seems important, and for that reason, I’m sticking to it.

    Patience

    If it was easy and I knew I’d be successful overnight, I wouldn’t have waited so long to do it. Making this choice was scary, and part of the reason was that I didn’t know if I could do it or how long it would take to make any money from it. The truth is, if you’re doing this to chase money, you will fail. I want to pursue the thing that brought me here, and it wasn’t a dead president. It was a need to be something more than a tech support agent and a need to do something I found meaningful.

    If you commit to something like this, you can’t just duck and run when it gets complicated, when you get stuck in the ‘messy middle,’ as one of my friends calls it. You have to have a certain amount of faith that the art you’re making is worth it. You have to have the patience to stick it out through the difficulties like rewriting an article for the fourth time because it’s not working, relighting that shot because it just doesn’t look right, or re-editing that podcast because something about the sound isn’t working for you.

    This enterprise takes a lot of time and work, and you must be in it for the long haul. Three months in, I seem to be making headway, but it’s only been three months. So let’s see where we are at six months and then a year. Maybe I’ll fail. That’s fine. I’ll have failed because I tried, and if I fail, it won’t be because I panicked. A year is what I’ve given myself, and my patience can last that long, especially if I know I’m working hard to change that year to Year One.

    Final Thoughts

    We had the curiosity to wonder if this would work. We had the boldness to jump. We can cultivate the discipline to make progress every day, and we have the patience to see it through to the end. That’s our mantra. Those four pillars are the foundation we need to build our lives. May it continue, and may we succeed in what we’re trying to do.

  • The Rise Of The Mid-Life Creative

    It’s 6:00 AM on a Monday, and millions of people stare at their bathroom mirrors, dreading what will happen in the next few hours. All over the world, people will clock in at a job they hate that makes them feel dissatisfied, which has taken over so much of their personal lives that they feel empty.

    Of course, it hasn’t always been this way. When we were younger, we bought into several ideas that we learned in school, that our parents taught us, and that society held as truth. If you show up and work hard, your contributions will be rewarded. In the world of our parents and those before them, that world did exist. But that world doesn’t exist anymore for many people staring at that mirror at 6:00 AM on a Monday.

    The pandemic has changed the meaning of work for everyone. That’s not surprising. What is surprising is the insistence by some companies — or, better to say, the upper management of some companies — that nothing has changed despite the evidence and would like to return to the business model that suits them best. If successful, it would be one of the only times the toothpaste has been returned to the tube successfully.

    For one group, the pandemic has caused more than just a redefinition of work but also a reprioritization of work related to the rest of their lives and the kind of work they’d like to be doing. So after years of working at jobs with little to no advancement, recognition, or reward, they leave those jobs, deciding to keep their talents at home and use them to benefit themselves. They are writers, photographers, podcasters, audio editors, video editors, graphic artists, etc. They are creatives. They are in their 40s and 50s. They have set a new course for themselves after half a life of doing something that didn’t fulfill their need to Be.

    They are Mid-Life Creatives, and I am just one of this great talent migration, and this movement isn’t going to go away. Here’s why.

    No security

    One of my grandfathers worked for General Motors for decades, the other for American Airlines. My wife’s grandfather worked for Ford. It was a different time back then when a company hired you, and you had job security. Workers had rights, and there were strong unions to protect those rights.

    Today, job security is an illusion. The days of working 40 years for one company for a gold watch and a pension at the end is gone. Not only that, but the world of at-will employment now means that we can arrive to work one day, and they advise us that our services are no longer needed. Not for any performance or disciplinary issues but simply because the company needs to cut its budget.

    So, why continue to believe that lie and that worker protections will ever be strengthened, and unions will be reinvigorated? That job security will ever be more than an illusion?

    No retirement

    The previous generations had the security of Social Security and Pensions to fall back on in their retirement years. Then, in 1978, Congress established 401k plans. But unfortunately, while 401k plans offer workers the ability to save for their retirement, we have often seen how less stable they are compared to pensions over the past twenty years. That’s because 401ks are tied directly to market performance, and defined benefit plans like pensions aren’t.

    The market would like to tell you that overall the performance of the market is bullish in the long term. Still, we’ve seen stories of people on the verge of retirement having their savings wiped out, as well as stories of the fees on withdrawing money — even after retirement — taking up to and over half of a retiree’s savings. The very design of 401k’s lets the gamblers play with the house money and keep as much of it as possible.

    In addition, the previous generation had Social Security to add to their income in their golden years. So we all pay into this system. Still, people of my age and younger can’t expect Social Security to be there when we retire as the previous generation continues to deplete it faster than the tax base pays to keep it solvent.

    So, knowing this, why continue believing in the illusion of retirement when the system won’t be there for us?

    No equality

    The American Dream is just as much a melting pot of ideas as America is a melting pot of people. However, the overall concept is that everyone has an opportunity to succeed. You’re promised the same shot as the person next to you. However, that’s not true for a myriad of reasons.

    We live, whether we choose to admit it or not, in a classist, sexist, and racist system. A ruling class has set up this system to benefit themselves by transferring wealth to their coffers and keeping it through monetary and social policy. That same ruling class tells us that we can have a seat at the table if we follow the rules, but the rules keep changing. They also tell us that the reason we don’t already have a seat at the table is that there’s a set of people trying to take that seat away from us. So instead of fighting the ruling class, we fight that set of people. In truth, they aren’t fighting us; they’re trying to follow those same rules. The ruling class sets us against each other, and when we fight, they win.

    There will never be class, gender, or income equality in our system. Despite years of happy talk about the American Dream and have equal opportunity to sit at the table, the ruling class doesn’t want that to happen. So why continue to believe the lie, and hope that the people in power will do anything about it?

    Now, that’s a lot of negativity thrown at the Powers That Be. It’s harsh, and some of you may not take the same view I do. But, we can agree that whatever you believe, the pandemic has changed much about how business works.

    After 18 months of the world on pause, we’ve learned a few things. First, the pandemic made us realize that:

    Businesses are not families

    The corporate line that “We’re a family” is hogwash. It’s time we stop believing it. We’re cogs in a piece of massive machinery, and we’re replaceable. I’ve had to learn this lesson twice.

    You can work over 40 hours a week for a company habitually, have excellent performance reviews, participate in corporate activities, volunteer for corporate initiatives, be appreciated by your colleagues, and still be on the chopping block if the company decides you’re no longer needed.

    There is nothing ‘family’ about that.

    The Status Quo is gone

    Had they made an effort to keep their human capital during the pandemic, the status quo would have been maintained. But, now that things are angling back towards normal, they would like you to forget that for the past 18 months, we still did the job. It doesn’t work for them, you see. It doesn’t work for them because this ‘family’ doesn’t trust you any farther than they can throw their server room. No, they need you back here in the office so they can ensure you’re doing the job you’ve been doing all along. That’s what works for them.

    But, what works for them doesn’t necessarily work for us. This long-term experiment in telework, which many businesses swore was not feasible, became a success. Millions of people learned they don’t have to spend hours in traffic, spend thousands on daycare and gasoline, or eat the gas station sub for lunch. Many of us no longer have to punch out to go to the bathroom, to be interrogated afterward about why we’ve spent so much time being ‘unproductive’.

    We choose to live

    We’ve finally realized that the final element of this Information Economy that we live in is the shedding of one of the Industrial Economy’s last elements: The need to centralize. You and I get it, but business hasn’t grasped it yet. Until they do, the Great Migration will continue, and many more people like me will find something else to do because we’ve realized that we can choose to live a life where our career doesn’t suck the life out of us. We can choose to do something for ourselves if the career path we’ve been on no longer brings us joy. We can choose to live and do something that calls to us and fulfills our need to Be.

    Final Thoughts

    Now is the time for the work-from-home employee. The independent worker. The freelance worker. It is part of the future promised to us but never realized. It is a future we need to fight for now because, with no protections, no retirement, and no equality, the risk is the same. If that is true, then we should act in our self-interest precisely the way a business operates in theirs.

    It’s our time now. Let’s embrace it.