Productivity or Creativity—What Is It That You Desire?

Paying the bills vs feeding your intellect.

If it’s a hand-to-mouth situation, productivity is enough. It’s industrial. You know exactly what to do. It is predictable. You know what to expect. More importantly, productivity pays the bills.

But when you’re past the lower levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the ignored creative child within you craves to break the monotony. It finds respite in vacations, hobbies, side projects.

Unlike productivity, creativity is not predictable. It is full of new ideas and surprises. The unpredictability makes it all the more exciting. Creativity feeds the intellect.

If you’re living 💯 on creativity, you are already sorted. Most of us need to strike a balance. We need productivity in creativity. We need to get comfortable with chaos. We need to ditch instructions and adopt frameworks. We need to shush the distractors and work in a flow state. We need to reflect and grow.

If we do it long enough, creativity will become a habit. It will start paying the bills.

Isn’t that what we desire?

We are the life-hacking, productivity-seeking, creativity starved humans of the Information Age.