How Start a Creative Career in the Latter Years.
Do you believe you can still pursue a creative career when you are much older?
There are many popular lies that have made many to associate creativity with children and youth. That past a certain age, the creativity is gone. Once one has retired they have expired. This is perpetuated by the media’s obsession with the youth and the celebrity culture.
Yes, one can miss opportunities to express their creativity while in pursuit of their career goals, but we serve a merciful God who restores and creates new opportunities. If we look at creativity as part of human identity, purpose, and calling, then the is no right or wrong age. Some things do not have an expiry date until death. Creativity is one of them.
Who is a Christian Creative?
The creative industry is flooded with lies, deception, and discouraging stories. There are even strange ones of the sacrifices and rituals in order to succeed in that industry.
It is time to offer an alternative narrative!
As a Bible-believing Christian, I know and I believe the Bible has all the answers. The only thing is to allow the Bible to inform every aspect of the creative process.
3 Types of Workers in the Marketplace
For clarity, I will use the term ‘worker’ broadly to refer to all of us in the marketplace: employees, employers, and entrepreneurs. When starting, we are taught the rules of the market. This advice and induction become part of the informal job descriptions. For many, they never stop to reflect on who they are or how they were meant to interpret their work until they have retired. This is why it is possible to discern identifiable patterns of behaviour across professions. For instance, you can identify some by their sharp dress code because their work demand they do so, or how they speak. And this is how many end up unwittingly multiplying patterns of whatever category they chose to be identified with.
Alternative Storytelling in the Marketplace
Our identity and convictions are nurtured by the stories we have been told, and chosen to believe in. A random conversation with colleagues on integrity, excellence, wealth, money, ethical practices, and success is a display of the stories we carry. Because of the numerous negative stories we encounter, we are under great danger of believing the dangerous single story that one has to be corrupt to succeed.
Today, in Kenya, to publicly identify as a Christian, declare one’s faith or convictions, let alone talk about excellence and work ethics, is an invitation to be mistrusted and ridiculed. Yet we continue to soldier on because there is truly an alternative, and we must not give up.