The age of the creative multi-hyphenate

Making, producing, developing, creating, publishing. It feels exhilarating bringing an idea to life, shaping it through all its phases, accompanying it to maturity in the real world.

During our studies, we dream of hustling as a team and part of a company with a creative pulse. We want to add to the tribe, contribute our own buzz to the collective effort and product. We need to learn from others, finetune the skills we learned in university or design school. We need others to guide us and help us discover our talents.

Later, we may feel that being a creative worker in someone else’s vision is not all that it could be. Or we begin exploring new creative fields, developing what may become our own special blend of talent. We’re hungry for experimentation. So we begin hustling on the side.

The side project. It’s like a personal creative outlet. Who knows what will become of it. Or how many different outlets you’ll discover over time. Or if it will change your career, and if so, how.

Over the past year, we’ve discovered that every guest has developed that creative appetite and decided to hustle it to life. Today’s hustle culture makes that possible. Everyone is constantly creating, making, launching, shaping something that fascinates them.

I don’t remember when I last spoke with a creative that had only one single creative thing going at that moment (their full time job, say). Creatives are getting hungrier, and as our appetites keep growing, we are blurring the lines between professions.

Our Linkedin profiles and CVs are becoming more nuanced. Designer-turned-videographer-podcasting on the side-full-time architect just to name one example. The professional hypen “-” is the becoming a movement.

What ten years ago would have been called unfocused or being side-tracked is today the prototype of the creative professional. And although this sounds exhausting to some, we creatives know that it simply represents a process of maturing and evolving.

Creatives are becoming more multidisciplinary than ever and our culture is beginning to embrace it (finally or again). Only thing to do now is to better interconnect between the different disciplines and collaborate to bring creative diversity to the world.

Image credit: Vinicius Amano