Some thoughts on passion and creativity. This entrepreneurial thing, why do we do it to ourselves? Warning – this post is not written to be “actionable”. But perhaps it suffices as a digestable and nutritious piece of food for thought instead?

(When I started writing this post I thought I was going to share a few of my dormant business ideas. Instead it turned into some philosophical reflections on the nature of creativity and the act of creating something out of one’s ideas. Hope you like it. And I’ll save the actual ideas for a later blog post. Promise.)

I guess it’s the entrepreneurial disease. We can’t just seem to help ourselves from wanting to fix things that seem broken, can we? With a nudge back to the best definition of entrepreneurship I’ve ever seen… the easiest resource to disregard when starting to solve problems is the limited amount of our own time and energy.

“Passion” carries the original meaning of “suffering”. For someone “creative with a passion”, we’re pained in any act of creation by the gnawing sense that “while I’m in the process of making this new thing, there’s sooo many things that I’m leaving unstarted or unfinished”.

When we’re dreaming, visioning and conceptualizing up an idea from just a seed of inspiration into a physical (or digital, as it were) manifestation, then, we subject ourselves to double suffering. Not only did we forsake all the other ideas, but we necessarily chip away piece after piece from our “chosen idea” in the process of adapting and materializing the idea into reality, which is the only place where it can carry value to others than ourselves.

This might sound like a very bleak view on the creative process. Not so. We willingly plunge into the unknown, we strenuously pull that idea from an obscure corner of potentiality, and we diligently mold and bend it into a real business – because as much as the introspective part of us loves that secretly held ideal concept that WE discovered ourselves, the love of making an impact in people’s lives is a big enough motivation to keep us creating. And after we release our new thing into the world… we soon get back to creating again. Because we have a dis-ease – a lack of ease – with things that should be better than they are. Because we’re entrepreneurial.

That’s it for today folks. Did this post provoke a thought for you? Please share – I’ll appreciate any reaction!