Do Your Work, Love Your Hobby

Posted by Edwin on Jun 8, 2009 in Blog | 1 comment

I’ve a love/hate thing going on with my creativity. I enjoy making websites and I like teaching at Uni but I love making films and making music. The first two give me an income and I get a little bit of pocket money making documentaries for DADAA. But I’m also working on this film which takes up a lot of time. Time during which I don’t get paid. We all have the job we have to do and the job we’d like to do. With creative people, it’s a constant battle of attentions between the two. If you read about the great artists; authors, painters and musicians, it’s the same story. Most of their income was derived from teaching or doing other inglorious work.

I was reading about the great pianist and musician Béla Bartók the other day. Bartók’s music wasn’t well accepted in Hungary, so he had to seek fortune elsewhere. It was only in 1939 (when he was 58) working in Hollywood that he happily wrote back to his Son, “Since 1934, I have worked exclusively upon commissions.” It took over 50 years for him to make a living from his true love. Writing and making music.

I have a new way to look at this money / art problem. I don’t like doing any one thing for any stretch of time, so that one thing I will call work. And as we all know – work needs to be broken up with spatterings of love. So, I have relegated my first love, film, to the lesser status of hobby. If I were making films every single day – I know I would become worse at it, maybe even tired of it and I’d almost certainly, eventually even despise it. It would become, in a word, work! By calling it a hobby, it stays special. It’s something that is inextricably tied in with my personality. A hobby can’t be bought or sold. It’s yours. In Australia, you are even allowed to make money from your hobby and the income derived is not called income. Filmmaking is my joie de vivre – mon raison d’être. By bringing it down a notch – by not doing it every day and thereby making it something to look forward to, it stays magical.

And I don’t get bored.