farming
I’ve been known to spend some of my free time playing video games, and particularly when I’ve had a creatively productive day I enjoy turning on a console and booting up some gaming action.
But if you’re picturing me right now playing some first person shooting adventure rampage, this week you’d be way off. I’ve been relaxing with a title called Farming Simulator, where you harvest virtual crops and deliver them to the grain elevator and track the economics of commodity prices while saving up for new and better equipment.
A gaming recap would not have much place on this blog, however, except as I’ve been playing I’ve been thinking of the parallels between farming, virtual or otherwise, and a career in a creativity-driven profession.
In simple terms, as a farmer you take an initial investment at the beginning of the season and you spend time, resources, fuel, and energy planting a crop into the ground. Weeks pass and those seeds turn into seedlings. Months pass and those seedlings turn into mature plants. And more time passes before your plants turn into something that you can harvest and sell. You make no money from any of your work until you pull the wheat from the ground and sell it. Months of work for one payoff at the end of the expended effort.
As a creative you take an initial investment at the beginning of your career too. You plant lots of seeds, of a sort, making your art or writing your words as you spend time, resources, brainpower and energy making a lot of things. Time passes and you edit, refine, accumulate, and build a collection of work, and very likely during this time you are not making any money from any of your work… until one day you do. Months or years of work for a payoff at the end of an extended effort.
Who says video games can’t make you think big thoughts, huh?