Some of My 2 Cents on Being a Creative

This idea of being a full-time content creator is really appealing to nearly everyone I've ever talked to. When you talk about the lifestyle, people perk their ears up and some even come out of the woodwork to ask you a zillion questions about how they too can find themselves in this "amazing" and "free" profession.

Well, I wish it was that easy.

I wish it was as easy as just talking about the things you love, but it's not.

Being a content creator or a "creative" as I prefer to call it, is very hard. To be successful you have to know yourself well.

You have to motivate yourself. Nobody is going to hold your hand and tell you what to do. Nobody is going to tell you how to find your passion and then take that passion and turn it into amazingly entertaining content.

Nobody is going to then tell you later on how to monetize your content so that you can actually earn a paycheck and quit your job.

Nobody is here to help you. That's my first lesson to aspiring content creators.

My second lesson is this: if you want to be a content creator, you have to be willing to take a lot of shade from others. What I mean by that is that you will get talked down to, berated and downright disrespected.

It's an inevitability. It will happen, prepare yourself for it. People will try to drag you down. You just look them right in the eye and tell them to shove it and take their negativity elsewhere. Those type of people are anchors in life. They're anchors that are trying to keep you in line.

They're anchors that are trying to keep you from leaving the dock and sailing your ship into the horizon and enjoying life. They're trying to keep you from your dreams, whether they consciously know it or not.

Lesson number 3 is a simple one: be consistent. No matter what happens, stick to the schedule that you know is right.

You know if posting 6 times a day is right and you know if posting 1 time a day is right. You know how many words to write and you know how many pictures to take. Don't get lazy and don't give up. Stick to your daily quota.

For some odd reason I have a lot of stuff that I like to write about and thus, I'm able to ship out words like nobody's business. I used to tell myself that I had to write 2000 words a day - that's how I started.

After several months of doing this, I began to notice that I wrote WAY MORE than 2000 words a day. As in, I was writing 5 or 6,000 words +.

That's when I realized lesson number 4: listen to your gut and don't be afraid to adjust your approach. If you find something that works, press on it like a gas pedal in a drag race.

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Are you an aspiring creator? What have you chosen to be creative at? Writing? Painting? Flying Kites?