Why Does Being in Corporate America Feel like I signed a record deal?
I give up my ideas and creativity in exchange for pay, but how much creativity do I have left for me?
We have to make a living and much like record deals we get pay in exchange for our creativity.
I listen to Rick Rubin's podcast “The Broken Record” from time to time and I like the podcast because sometimes these artists deal with success in many different ways and crazy as it sounds it's hard to recover from success.
These artists reach the highest point in their career and as fans, we ask them to keep creating and capturing a feeling from a song or album that we loved and that's just not possible. The moments are fleeting and when the inspiration comes you have to act on it, but even then nothing comes from it.
This leads me to the episode that I always go back and listen to all the time and that’s the one with Andre 3000. Rick Rubin asked if he had been working on new music and he said he tinkers a lot and that his confidence is not there. He goes on to talk about how his previous success is keeping him from creating new music. It makes sense because OutKast has hit songs and hit albums that can’t be recreated even by them.
He talked about how they started in what they would call the dungeon. The dungeon is where they honed their skills and became better writers. Just making music and not thinking about too much because it was new and you can just rap, create and make mistakes with no judgments.
He gave an example of when you are in the room and maybe playing with wrestling men or anything that allows imagination and when someone walks in and calls your name that world just stops. That’s exactly how corporate American has felt to me. Me being creative involves a paycheck and I’m being creative for someone and not myself and that’s where the low point comes in. That could have been a metaphor for a record label coming in disturbing the creativity because they want to use it for their own.
How can you go in the studio and top songs like “B.O.B”, “Hey, Ya,” “Mrs. Jackson”, “So Fresh, So Clean” and that's just to name a few? I think he is scared just like anybody else would be that If we drop a project now and it comes out and it doesn’t match up to what we previously released it will tarnish everything that we did before. Those albums were created with passion and when creativity was at its highest. How long can you create before someone comes in and tries to mess it up?
When I get off work and try to start on a coding project it's hard to do. When I was in school, I was always working on different projects and just having fun creating. When classes were out I was always into creating something new with my friends, whether it would create a simple website or app that we could just upload to our phone using Android Studios.
We were happy to accomplish the small things and small goals we had for our small project. We weren’t thinking about interviews for jobs or internships or impressing anybody at networking events, it was just us using our creativity with confidence and no fear.
Fast forward to the present day, looking for jobs and interviewing has become that person coming in the room and stopping your imagination and creativity because they want it. We have to make a living and much like record deals we get paid in exchange for our creativity. Most of the time that payment is not enough much like entertainers, they try to milk us with the least pay possible all the while they are making 10 times the money for a project that I worked on.
These companies even make you sign agreements not to work on projects while working for them or some type of agreement that says you can’t create something and put it out within this timeframe after leaving the company much like a record label.
How can I get my creativity back and all the time I have given away in exchange for money?
You pay bills and take care of yourself and your family, but along the way, you lose much more than time and creativity.
You ultimately lose a huge part of yourself and what makes you YOU.