Resilience in Creative Field Careers: “Labor of Love” vs. Other Motivation Types
It is a well-articulate pattern in assessing one’s creative career success from the perspective of the high resilience stemming from the love and passion for the occupation. For example, the cases of successful writers, musicians or other people employed in creativity-demanding fields are addressed from the points of view of the obstacles they experienced in their career and had to overcome to succeed. Therefore, several notions emerge to be analyzed, along with how they correlate with each other. These are resilience in career, types of motivation in workplace, and the specific relation of these to the creative field jobs (not necessarily arts) to trace the correlation between passion for what one does, their motivation in work, and their resilience. Here, resilience is in fact in the focus of the analysis, and how passion increases it in creative jobs. As far as the assembled research and analysis demonstrate, being impassionate about one’s creative output in a career increases resilience in work.
Creativity and Creative Jobs
The first thing to do in a defined analysis is to find criteria for judging careers ‘creative.’ According to John Holland's theory of occupational choice, there are six career types (Truity 2018). There, creators are estimated to constitute a type that gravitates to such core values as originality, creativity, and individuality (Truity 2018). There, the most typical areas are not only arts, but also the fields of web design and software development, which are very topical today as newly emerged career choices. The jobs that are marked as creative one are usually designers, writers and authors or reporters, musicians, interpreters, architects, editors, actors, and the web developers, animators, web designers etc. (Truity 2018).
Schein distinguishes creativity as an anchor for career choice too, along with pure challenge, which may probably be associated with creative tasks, and autonomy among other anchors (Schein 1985). In general sense, creativity is something that is usually thought of as unstable, inspiration driven, and talent consuming. This is also linked to the modern perception of the creative jobs that are very often freelance, which means less stability, work in bursts, and income being distributed unevenly throughout projects. This means that creative jobs make it relevant to analyze resilience in its relation to the field of creative occupations, and how it can be managed there through inspiration and internal motivation coming from being passionately interested in the subject.
Resilience in Career
Resilience is a notion that helps to understand and conceptualize an individual’s ability to cope with obstacles and sustain a certain pace or functionality throughout the hardships of life. In career specifically, resilience is defined as, “resilient qualities are protective factors or developmental assets that help individuals survive adversity and involve a range of variables identified in the field including self-esteem, self-efficacy, subjective well-being, self-determination, locus of control and support systems” (Bimrose& Hearne 2012). This definition demonstrates the importance of the concept to the career studies, as resilience explains that individuals in real world face unpleasant phenomena and have to learn how to cope with them in such a way that would benefit themselves, and realize their potential. Resilience is also among the central concepts in addressing the issue of stress in career, as well as workplace environment, goals, and performance in career.
Hypothetically, creative careers are as pressuring as those that are traditionally associated with high pressure, as the former require from an individual a certain persistence in continuing working, especially when no or little rewards comes in return. Writers, musicians, or other creators are very often underpaid until they achieve success, and therefore for them resilience is a very topical issue. Being able to live by little money, and get wages for projects unstably, many of these people do achieve success in their field because they continue trying and honing their skills. Here, it is important to analyze what exactly might push them forwards in their work and in their persistence to a certain career without qualifying for some more practical occupation as many of them do.
Types of Motivation in Workplace
The classic approach divides motivation into internal and external, or intrinsic and extrinsic (Amabile 1993). As for the extrinsic motivation in creative careers, it most probably includes rewards and income level, and probably search for acknowledgement or fame. The external motivation sources do define the environment of the workplace, yet, regarding the hugely freelance character of creative jobs today, in the digital era, the external motivation fades in comparison to the internal. Hence, what seems more relevant as regards the resilience boosted by impassionate interest in profession is intrinsic motivation.
As for intrinsic or internal motivation, creative jobs are usually what is called “labor of love.” This phrase, commonly used in everyday life, contains much information and popular wisdom on how people choose careers to be successful and/or happy doing what they do. Under Holland’s theory, people seek environments where they can apply their values, therefore, search for creativity, freedom, and originality is indeed a kind of motivation in work for those involved in creative works, along with challenges they posit. Among the factors defining career choice, there are also listed pure challenge, “concern for self-direction (autonomy) as opposed to belongingness (security),” and self-expression (Nordvik 1996). These are very representative of creative career motivation, with their unstable environment and lack of guarantees of success for those who persist in them.
Passion & Creativity as Resilience Boost: Joanne K. Rowling Case Study
The story of Joanne K. Rowling is widely known today due to the popularity of the Harry Potter books and movies. Rowling seems to be an iconic modern symbol of resilience in writing career, her interviews being crafted with writing touch to render the meaning very clearly and in a bright way. Rowling was poor when she began writing Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, the first book in the series. She said of this period, ““I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless.” (Zat 2017). She had a baby daughter, and tried to sell her manuscript to various agents and publishing houses, few of them responding (The Biography 2018). Therefore, creativity played a positive role for her resilience, as she managed to put her efforts that remained from supporting her family into hard work of writing, editing, and submitting the manuscript. Therefore, the listed factors that define motivation are perfectly relevant for Rowling’s case, as pure challenge, the need for originality and creativity and self-expression helped her overcome the depressive moods and hardships of life when one can hardly make both ends meet. This is a very representative case of the search for creativity turning into a powerful source of internal motivation that drove a person through the resistance-demanding period of their life.
In addition, Rowling today speaks and writes a lot on the price and value of a failure. This topic seems to go through various speeches and interviews she does, and shows that Rowling is indeed a modern coach on resilience. She gives advice as for not fearing failure and embracing it as a lesson (Zat 2017). It is probably a most positive fact that the pop culture has such a symbol of resilience and failures used to benefit one. Yet, her example is also a case that speaks against the academic understanding that, “resilience [is] developing from positive reinforcement in early years or in the workplace” (Goodman 1994). Not only highlighting the peculiar nature of creative careers, along with the complexity of their motivation, the example illustrates that it is difficult to categorize resilience in general. Probably, its external stimuli can be derived from workplace stimulation, yet the internal ones are still prevalent in creative careers.
Passion & Creativity as Motivation: Steve Jobs Case Study
Another example to study the types of internal motivation in creative occupations is Steve Jobs. A talented web developer, inventor, entrepreneur, and the founder of the leading cutting-edge technology Apple Company, Jobs was acknowledged as an extremely talented creator. Yet, his life was far from being cloudless, and his career choice was risky and did not make him stable income at first. Still, a most widely copied and reprinted quotation from Steve Jobs is, “I'm convinced that about half of what separates successful entrepreneurs from the non successful ones is pure perseverance.” (Rukebesha 2017). This phrase, his lifelong business motto, provides an insight into how resilience led him to success in his creative career. Incredible perseverance has been inherent in Jobs since childhood (Rukebesha 2017). He never did what others wanted, but once he decided something, he achieved his goal by any means, which represented the approach that increased resilience a lot.
This made him resilient to all challenges posited by career, as seeking autonomy (according to career theories classification), Jobs acquired special approach to work, and this let his creativity know little if any limits. Hence, the need for autonomy is also a huge contributing factor to resilience in workplace, as it defines values that promote independent work and ideas, and less dependence of others’ opinions, which reduced stress. Perseverance and passion for long-term goals are estimated to be success-associated traits (Robertson & Duckworth 2014) in career research, and Steve Jobs’ case study confirms it. The ability to concentrate on own creative activities and autonomously pursue one`s goals are success attributes, and indeed these increase resilience in career.
In conclusion, the concepts of resilience, creativity, and motivation are closely interconnected in career, especially in creative jobs. This is coherent with the modern career theories, especially with Holland’s, as what people seek in a career usually is consistent with their resilience type. That is, people seeking independence and creativity, self-expression and freedom are likely to demonstrate a high resilience due to their internal motivation. This is illustrated with the example of Joanne K. Rowling and Steve Jobs, as they both demonstrated resilience in creating things, and found motivation almost totally from their own destinations and perceptions of their career. There were initially few rewards for their efforts except for the internal satisfaction from creative work, therefore, it may be concluded that “labor of love increases resilience, and multiplies one’s chances for success. Overall, creative jobs are complex to asses in terms of motivation due to the wide range of their specific features, along with the freelance options today. The perspective of the future research is seen in the study of web-related creative jobs, which emerge today as a huge new field that unites both technical expertise and creativity.