No time to read this? TL;DR:
Watch my podcast interview below. Creativity is an antidote to burnout and a key part of personal resilience. You and your creative output are not fuel for the economic engine… the creative process is part of your own lifelong learning. If you start to feel burned out around creative work, use these key strategies: ignore genre constraints; abandon the search for a “perfect” process; and use creativity as a path to resilience (and download my 11 Paths to Personal Resilience).

Creativity and burnout were among the many topics I discussed with Michael Evans recently. Michael is the founder of Creatorwood and developer of Movie Machine, an AI filmmaking tool. But we didn’t talk much about AI filmmaking.

Instead, we talked about creative process, burnout, and living a creative life in this very weird, disruptive, and confounding time.

The Link Between Creative Expression and Mental Resilience

I met Michael at the San Francisco Writers Conference. I didn’t expect to be so inspired by someone building an AI tool to help authors turn their writing into films.

But Michael isn’t some tech bro pitching an impossible, magical vision of an AI-fueled future. He’s got a rich creative background. He’s written a dozen science fiction thrillers and worked on MrBeast’s strategy team.

So when he invited me to his podcast, I knew we’d have an interesting and inspiring conversation.

Right out of the gate, he wanted to know how I kept my creative flame alive over the decades. Many creative people burn out or get demoralized by the economic pressures of industries that are designed around big financial success. It can be easier to quit than keep creating when all the gatekeepers on the road to riches keep closing their gates in your face.

I’ve written a different story for myself, though. Being creative has been my antidote to burnout. Creativitity has taken different forms for me over the years, and I’ve struggled with motivation just like anyone does, but in the end being creative is part of my own lifelong learning. It’s a huge part of my own resilience.

Being creative is one of the most important anti-burnout tools you can put to work for yourself.

A few key points from the interview

Check out the full interview at the YouTube link or in the embedded video below. To give you a taste of what you’ll get, here are just a few of the key takeaways:

You are not fuel for the economic engine

When someone hears I have a new book, the first question they ask is always, “Is it on Amazon?” Being available for sale on Amazon is not a measure of value. It’s a measure of availability. I don’t fault people for asking; it’s how our culture has conditioned everyone: we see economic relevance as the only measure of value. Don’t treat yourself as nothing more than fuel for the economic engine, even though everyone else will. You and your creative output have inherent value.

You don’t need to stick to one genre

Many writers worry about switching genres, but that’s almost always a fear that has no basis in reality. Even if you have a lot of readers, you owe it to yourself to follow your heart. Life is short, and your creativity is yours to deploy in whatever way you want. If you doubt this, see the first point above.

There is no perfect process

Don’t get hung up on searching for the perfect or “right” process. Forget it. The only thing you have to do is start creating. If you’re not creating, no process will fix that. Except for the one shoe approach. If you’re stuck, that will probably help.

11 paths to resilience

Doing creative things is an important tool for resilience and for overcoming burnout. In the workshops that Antoinette and I do on burnout and resilience, we talk about 11 paths to developing your own personal resilience. You can download the summary here.

Create something today.

If you’ve gotten this far, I want you to create one thing today. I don’t care what it is. It could be a single sentence that’s an idea for a story. It could be a photograph of something you’ve never photographed before. It could be a 7,000 word essay or short story. It could be a film from a piece of flash fiction you wrote years ago.

It does not have to be big to be significant.

It does not have to be significant to be of value.

And it does not have to become fuel for the economy.

You can share it with someone else or not. None of that matters. All that matters is you create something because acts of creativity engage your brain in different ways, and that will build your resilience over time.

Want to accelerate your creativity and learn how not just to survive, but to flourish? Let’s chat.

And maybe watch the interview

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