Title: The Rhythms of Work vs The Rhythms of Creative Labor
Context: We all work for a living. The lucky among us also labor at something we love.
Synopsis: Many pages have been filled since the dawn of the industrial age analyzing and optimizing the efficiency of man’s work. A thousand-fold more have been devoted to our propensity towards creative labor since pages were first filled. Recognizing this distinction is the basis of a happily productive workforce. Work is the quantifiable output against which our value is measured while our creative labor is the metric from which our worth is derived. Work can be performed by anyone – it is commoditized, while creative labor comes forth naturally, and many times, of its own accord. Treating both equally and against the same tabular yardstick is futile yet widely practiced. Not because people cannot see the difference, but because they feel that it is more cost effective to goad creative labor towards the pace of “work” rather than halting the wheels of progress until an act of creativity has borne fruit. In this process we often wind up with subpar and rushed ideas that even when executed well, are still poor and without soul. At the other end of the spectrum lies art – pure creativity of and for its own sake. The happy medium represents the products that people love and desire where ideas are not rushed and creative labor progresses in a directed fashion yet recognized as an efficiency outlier. This is where good things happen and where we should all strive to work and labor together.
Best Bit: “There is no technology, no time-saving device that can alter the rhythms of creative labor. When the worth of labor is expressed in terms of exchange value, therefore, creativity is automatically devalued every time there is an advance in the technology of work.”
via 99u.com
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