I dream of a life not tied down to a desk job, where I have the freedom to design my schedule based on my own peculiarities, where I can follow my own curiosities without roadblocks, where I don’t have to fit into a “culture” that relies on me being inauthentic. I want to move at my own circadian pace, to develop my own strategy. I want to work with my creative friends.
A month ago, I launched the Memphis Creative Index and asked everyone who signed up a few questions about that same dream: how long they’ve been creative, how they earn, what gets in their way, and what would help them get closer to the life they want. 150 of them opted into the research.
I figured time and money would top the list of what holds Memphis Creatives back. I was right about those (and they definitely hold me back). The barrier I did not see coming outranked them both, and it’s the one that’s reshaped how I think about what this city’s creatives need. More on that below.
I know I’m not the only one with this kind of dream. I know there are so many creatives out there who want to do what they choose with their innate talents and creative drive on their own schedule, with time to think deeply. I wanted the data to tell me where the dream breaks down.
Much of creative living gets sucked dry by the constraints of daily rules we are supposedly supposed to follow, rules that were drilled into us through schooling based on a curriculum that maximizes productivity over the inherent need to develop our own interests. Most of us are playing a game we continually lose. I think that affects our self-esteem without realizing it.
Maybe my motivation for finding my own way, to being my own boss, is as simple as this: I hate being told what to do, in the creative sense. Don’t insist one way works better than my intuition. Don’t tell me what colors to choose.
Of the 150 creatives in the research, 138 answered the income question. Of those, 52 (38%) make their art part-time around a day job, and 84 (61%) don’t make a full-time living from their art/creative inclinations.
The biggest barrier to creative fulfillment in Memphis
I’ll start with my own: time. I have a day job. I’m good at my day job. But I hate hate hate (hate hate) that I have to be in one location for 8 hours a day at a set time every day. I feel trapped and have felt this way since entering the workforce, via McDonald’s, at the age of 15. I have tried to be at peace with it, but the anxiety of the claustrophobia can be unbearable sometimes. My real work—building Like Really Creative, writing, visual art—is demoted to after-day-job hours or the weekend. As someone who is naturally inclined to rest (look up Human Design Projectors), I don’t often get to rest as much as I need. It is a risk (a sacrifice, if you will) I take to fulfill the dream I mentioned above.
Next would be money. I would love to hire a team, but I need more time to make more strategic decisions to make more recurring revenue. That is something I would hire someone for: to figure out how to do this sustainably. Anyway.
What is the number one barrier for the 150 Memphis creatives? Reaching an audience/marketing reach.
We live in an attention economy guarded by a tricky, fickle algorithm across multiple platforms that takes daily investigation and experimentation to figure out. Every week, the head of Instagram releases a new feature that is somehow more confusing than the last and requires a strategy overhaul in order to gain maximum reach. But that’s a whole other article. Social media strategy is its own booming job field for a reason.
Memphis has so much talent. So much talent that even the most brilliant things can get buried in endless scrolls and short attention spans. How do you reach an audience when strategies to reach an audience can be as complicated as figuring out the Fibonacci sequence (which I assume was complicated to figure out)?
Daily social media upkeep is also exhausting. It’s time-consuming. We could do more public things without social media, but again, the lack of time eats away at that goal. And it makes sense: time and funding are tied for second as the biggest barrier behind reaching an audience. According to the Index research, when someone says they have no time, you can follow the thread and see that the connection is to having a day job that’s needed to pay the bills.
What would help the most?
Of the 131 who answered “What would help the most?”, half named paid gigs, more than any other option. Right behind it was exposure and features, named by 48%. Because people could choose more than one, these aren’t first-place votes so much as a show of hands: half the room raised theirs for paid work, and nearly half for being seen.
We want to be seen. Being seen builds creative confidence. Having creative confidence decreases social anxiety. Decreased social anxiety can lead to finding and being part of a community. Being part of a community reinforces our creative living. This is a crucial cycle that keeps us connected to our True Creative Selves. External validation, in healthy doses (speaking to myself more than anything), contributes to our social and biological health. We open up more; we fear less.
When we fear less, we take more risks. We follow our creative curiosities, and naturally, more paths open because we have the time to deepen these skills. With greater skills, we can get paid gigs and eventually pay the bills with less stress. I’m not saying the larger goal is to commodify our skills to feed the machine. The goal is more freedom to be ourselves, free from arbitrary constraints and mandatory schedules.
The grant question
What was really interesting to me was the results from the grant question, especially since funding was selected as what would help the most.
Of the creatives who answered the grant question, 86% have never been funded by one. Even more telling: 77% had never even applied. And of the 44 who named funding as a top barrier, 32 have never once applied.
Why is this? Probably the reason I scroll past grant opportunities. I’m intimidated. I don’t want to go to a mandatory one-hour meeting about how to apply for the grant. I am overwhelmed by all the questions, by the lack of resources, by the fear that someone with more experience is a lock for it. The whole thing feels like it runs on rules nobody handed me. Just like there’s a reason that running social media is a full-time job, there’s a reason that “Grant Writer” is a job title. It’s complicated. I don’t have time for more complicated things. Frankly, I don’t want to learn how to write a grant, and I definitely do not have the funds to hire a grant writer.
Make it easier. Take the preciousness out of art funding. It’s not that hard.
Moving forward
I did not see that exposure/reaching an audience would be so highly wanted. This means we need to come together as a community to develop infrastructure that gets more creatives seen.
Not only seen, but remembered. This is a long game that requires consistency.
I opened up this by saying I want a life that is not tied to a desk. It’s hard for me to sit still. I think that increased visibility, by being seen, is how we can get there. Visibility is what turns talent into paid work, and paid work is what can buy the freedom, the schedule, the room to think for ourselves, to make what matters to us the most, to be of service to a creative community.
As this is a growing database of Memphis Creatives, I am excited to see how the dataset changes over time as more creatives sign on to the platform (which is free at www.memphiscreativeindex.com).
The clarity from the data gives me some marching orders on how to help creatives live a more sustainable creative life.
A quick note on methodology
How I asked: everyone who opts into the research answers the same questions on the Index listing form: years actively creative, whether creative work is their primary income, their income sources, biggest barriers, what would most help right now, and whether they’ve applied for arts grants before. Not every person answers every question, so the numbers above are drawn from those who responded to each one. The Index is free and always open at www.memphiscreativeindex.com.