I was reading Meditations by Marcus Aurelius yesterday. It’s something that I do in times when I am either upset or when there is chaos/turmoil in my life. When times are especially tough I am sometimes called to just start at the beginning and start reading instead of my typical open to a random page method.
The thing I took away in this reading was where Marcus Aurelius mentions that he learned from his grandfather that he should invest liberally in education. And while I no doubt that this refers to money for any it also refers to investing time. While I am quite confident that I have far less money than the emperor of Rome did, I ‘m also quite confident that I have both more time and more resources than he did.
This past fall I’ve been brushing up on my Adobe skills through a series of workshops at the University of New Hampshire. The last one is on this coming Saturday and after that, I will have earned a certificate in Digital Design. While the series of workshops did cost money they more importantly cost time. They took away from my family, they took away from the work I do for my day job which pays the bills, and they called for practice time which cost even more.
Creativity is a skill, it leverages other skills, and all of these skills which stack upon each other require time and practice and effort.
This time on task, this deliberate practicing of our craft, whichever specific aspect of the creative arts happens to be our craft requires constant investment. We need to invest as much time and resources as possible into our continual growth.
I have found that much of the anxiety that I have seen in creatives stems from them not investing in their education. They either claim they don’t have the money or claim they don’t have the time. While time may be the truly limiting factor money can indeed buy time. You can pay someone to mow your lawn and use that time to practice. Find the time or find the money (to buy time) to invest in your education and you will find yourself enriched. And I’m in no means saying this is easy. At the beginning of this post, I mentioned that I read Meditations in times of upset and turmoil in my life.
This winter though. I won’t be shoveling the driveway. I’m paying to have it done so I can use that time to work on getting better at my craft.