Side Projects Are Killing Your Practice
Side projects are killing your practice. They make you discount yourself and your ideas and get in the way of self-authorship.
When you move with conviction but no ego, you allow yourself to learn and change without being beholden to a personal brand someone else told you to craft. The ego-forward creative looks to increase the perceived value of their veneer, building status through nihilistic appeal (without care, "this is all there is"). It is the shift from increasing the value of your persona (a cut-out of your full self into whatever other people call what you do) to enrolling people in your place of thinking.
Complaining about their clients on the weekend ethics workshop, while celebrating the work for said company going live on their portfolio on a Wednesday. It is a question of belief and faith. In the self, and in an alternative. This belief is hiding in whatever is inspiring you to start a side project.
It is disembodiment all the way down, and does nothing for the planet. Because, like natural resources, your attention is also limited, and a personal economy of attention is the only thing that matters.
If something calls your attention, you must listen; otherwise, you will end up making a living resenting your clients and wasting your time. Write what you notice; prompt yourself to find the meaning behind it (example of prompts), connect to the living idea behind it, establish a consistent practice, and create spaces to bring it to other people (not companies, because companies are just people). When people meet other people (strangers, not friends) with value, it necessarily means that they went through the process of economically-articulating something about the world.
I am writing longer pieces about these ideas. If you want to do some of this but don't know how, comment or get in touch.
Related ideas and books:
- Creativity exists before language; everything else is production.
- Changing on the Job, Jennifer Garvey Berger
- You can get it from the CBS library in New York.
- Self-Actualization is being seen by others the way you see yourself
- Utterances and meaning are not the same
- In your next designer lunch, ask everyone what design means to them
- Derrida on deconstruction and reconstruction
- Meaning and economic value are the same thing
- Think of the last thing you bought, and why you chose it over all other options.