The Worth of Creative Work

For a long time, I carried an old belief that it was somehow bad to make money from creativity.
That creative work wasn’t “real work.”

It’s a quiet story I didn’t even realise I’d been telling myself — one that whispered that art should be done for love alone, and that earning from it somehow diluted its purity. But this week, in a conversation with a fellow artist, that belief began to unravel.

We talked about how creative work is, in fact, some of the most real work there is.
It takes discipline, courage, and emotional honesty. It asks you to show up, heart first, even when no one is watching. It demands that you keep learning, keep creating, and keep trusting that what you make has value — even before the world confirms it.

Earning from creative work doesn’t cheapen it. It sustains it.
Money is simply energy — a form of exchange that allows me to keep creating and sharing, to buy paint, fuel the van, and keep doing the work that lights me up.

Of course, it’s easy to slip into comparison. To look at others chasing numbers or measuring success differently and wonder if you’re doing it wrong. But I realised that my discomfort wasn’t judgment — it was discernment.
I value authenticity over performance, and that’s what my intuition was pointing to.

Everyone’s path is different.
Someone else’s intensity or ambition doesn’t invalidate mine; it simply shows that we’re walking different routes at different stages of growth.

This week reminded me that authenticity and ambition can coexist — but ambition needs to be guided by integrity, not ego. My goal isn’t to chase success. It’s to live in alignment and let success unfold as a reflection of that.

I can honour both rest and work, presence and progress — because this creative life is real work, and it’s deeply worth it.

Have you ever felt torn between creativity and making a living from it?

What beliefs have you carried about what “real work” means — and are they still serving you?