Disentangling Career from Creativity

My first job in high school was as an intern at a local college radio station (RIP KBTC). It was about what you’d expect of an internship, until they realized I knew how to use Cakewalk. That’s when I became the “bumper guy”. If you’re not a terrestrial radio die-hard, bumpers are the short transitions between segments or coming in or out of commercials. Often the ones you’ll recognize the most are the mandatory “station IDs” that remind you what station you’re listening to. I recorded many variants of “You’re listening to KBTC 91.7FM, Tacoma’s home for Classical Rock” (don’t get me started on the term “classical rock”; I had to live with it, so can you). I would cut up clips from my favorite songs and movies, avoiding talking all morning so I could record with my gruffest (for a 16-year-old) morning voice. Was it art? Probably not, but it was absolutely creatively rewarding.

When I look back through my CV, I’ve always gravitated towards jobs that gave me a creative outlet. Building websites, logos, labels for microbreweries, and even building networks and servers scratched that itch to create in some way. As a teacher I was not only constantly creating resources, activities, exemplars, and just fun stuff for my students, but I also got to thrive in the afterglow of their creative endeavors. When I first transitioned to Code.org, I lived in creative mode nonstop, and when I had to step back from direct creation to invest more time managing my team, I dumped my need to create into building a curriculum development platform for them. Every time my role was pulled further away from direct creation, I’ve found ways to force creative output into my work.

It wasn’t until I hit a role where there was just very little practical room for creative expression in my day-to-day that I realized how I was outsourcing my creative fulfillment to my employer. It is an easy trap to fall into, especially when your job involves building things, solving problems, or designing systems. You tell yourself that because you are “creating” from nine to five, you are satisfying that internal itch to make things. You feel productive and useful, so you assume you are also being creatively nourished. But looking back, the times when I was most creatively productive at work were also the times when I was least creatively fulfilled at home.

When I was moved, without a real say-so, into a role that did not have that same constant demand for creation, I was miserable. I fought to make the new work look like the old work. Not because the new work was inherently bad, or I wasn’t good at it, but because it just felt like something was missing. Suddenly, the tap was turned off at work, and I hadn’t maintained plumbing of my own. I had let my personal creative muscles atrophy because it was so much more convenient to just flex them on the company clock. When the professional outlet shifted, I was left with all this stored-up energy and nowhere for it to go, which was a deeply uncomfortable realization to face in my mid-career.

I would guess that a lot of us do this without noticing. We give our best ideas and our most focused hours to projects we do not actually own. We trade the joy of pure, unoptimized exploration for the structured “creation” of a roadmap or a feature set. It’s certainly a safer way to be creative. It’s creativity supported by the stability of a paycheck, and comfortably decoupled from your own personality in a way that protects a fragile ego. There is nothing inherently wrong with being creative at work, but when it becomes your only outlet, you are essentially planting all of your energy in a garden you don’t own. If the landlord decides to replace your plot with a townhouse, you might lose not just what you’ve grown, but your opportunity to grow anything at all.

Forward Bias is my attempt to start planting on my own soil again. It is a deliberate, maybe somewhat stubborn space where the output does not have to serve a business goal or fit into a slide deck. It’s also riskier and more vulnerable. When I fail here, I don’t get to hide behind the decisions of a higher-up, but when I succeed I get to own that success in its entirety. Rediscovering the love of creation for its own sake has been, and continues to be, a slow process. But it is the first time in years that I have felt not just like I want to make things for the love of the art, but really that I can’t help but make them. This is the new baseline, a way to make sure that no matter what happens in my professional life, the shop is always open and the lights are always on here.