Are Your Creative Enough to Be Self-Employed?

You may not think you are creative, but once you strike out on your own, you will begin flexing those dormant creative muscles, which have become stunted from working for someone else.

"Ideas are floating around in the air and they simply can't find their way into corporate cubicles, so they go elsewhere," jokes Barbara Winter, author of Making a Living Without a Job. "The creative spirit may exist in all of us, but it needs to be incubated in the right environment before it will come out and assert itself. The joyfully jobless tend to live and work in an environment that stimulates creative thinking."

"Creativity is not a trait monopolized by a few fortunate souls," writes Chic Thompson in What a Great Idea! "Every person is creative, because creativity is the trait that makes us human. Creativity is just another way to describe intelligence. To be creative is to have intelligence, to be able to gather information, and to make decisions based on that information. To be creative is to be able to perceive and recognize the world around us, to understand what we need or wish to do in response to it, and to set about changing it. To be creative is to find a way, a thought, an expression, a human manifestation no one else has found and to bring newly discovered possibilities into reality."

Once you're working for yourself, you will have no fixed rules to follow. Since no one else has done exactly what you are doing, you will have to discover what works for you.

Make a mistake, keep going

You will make mistakes and the capacity you demonstrate to creatively turn the mistakes into learning experiences will help determine how successful you will be working on your own. If you send out 1000 direct mail pieces about your business and receive not one lead in return, for example, pick yourself up and try something else. Think of it not as a mistake, but as a problem to be solved. In finding out that a direct mail piece does not work, you may have learned that you need to contact people personally to market your product or services.