Working in the creative industries brings benefits denied to a lot of professionals. Dave Pettit challenges us to embrace the joy.
Can this really be working? As part of a client closeness session, I am taking part in a therapeutic teambuilding exercise in a hipster part of town.
We are making terrariums: self-contained eco-systems in sealed glass jars. We have step-by-step instructions. Make a base layer of clay beads. Sprinkle in some activated charcoal. Sculpt a landscape built from coconut coir and worm castings. Then select four or five delicate cuttings and carefully plant them into an aesthetically pleasing mini garden.
This is in every sense a creative task, but I am struggling. The stabbing feeling is not due to a slip of my giant gardening tweezers; it’s the anxious paralysis of an agency creative assumed to be confident with stuff like this. My father was a good gardener, but he hasn’t passed on his green fingers. A fear of the unknown, expectation and judgement is taking me away from what should be joyful.
It’s a feeling I recognise from the marketing and creative undergraduates I taught for 10 years – a fear of being truly creative. Curiosity and experimentation weren’t always their priority. They often settled for their first response to a creative problem and wouldn’t commit to the pursuit of something better. Their ideas could feel derivative, safe, or homogenised.
It’s not really how I remember being a student. I was excited by new briefs and driven to do something better than my classmates. I wonder why today’s students don’t buzz with that joy.
My worry is that too many have been shaped by education systems that prioritise certainty over curiosity, exploration and creative peril. As a result, they approach creative challenges by searching for the solution that won’t get them sneered at or sacked rather than embracing the unformattable or uncertain.
In a world of instant access to information and constant digital judgement, the slow, iterative nature of genuine creative discovery can feel alien. Research has become a process of validating preconceived ideas rather than uncovering unexpected insights. The outcome is work that is polished, technically competent and strategically sound, but lacking originality. In a world where AI is already delivering decent levels of craft, that should concern all of us.
After recently leaving lecturing to return to the agency world, I have to remind myself to keep fighting the tendency to avoid the unknown. As an industry, we are too focused on certainty, so we miss the opportunity to play with ideas. Will we never again see a gorilla playing drums or a fat man painted orange slapping another man in the face? When was the last time work really made you jealous?
Creative work means tackling something you may not fully understand, being unsure what to do next but committing to make small incremental decisions to build to an unknown end.
So the inner whisper I tell myself as I shovel teaspoons of soil in a big glass jar is the same mantra I offered my students: Work on it. Mull over it. Experiment. Observe. Reflect. Enjoy.
My terrarium now lives on a special shelf at home; all I have to do is remember to water it every now and again. I hope that each time I look at it and see some growth a little creative joy will sprout in me.
