Am I still a Creative if I’m not actively creating stuff?

Who we are is the noun. What we do is the verb.

We are Researchers, Creatives, Professionals — these are the nouns. You can capitalise them, as I’ve done here. They’re also titles. Nouns have many forms.

As nouns, what we are doing is researching, creating, and working. These are the verbs.

Nouns describe the identity, verbs describe the action. It’s easy to get the two mixed up. And when you confuse who you are (the noun) with what you do (the verb), you could be serving yourself poorly in one of two ways:

• You create pressure to prove who you are by constantly doing.

• You overidentify who are with what you’re doing.

Let’s break down what this means.

Over-doing the noun

When we’re unsure about ourselves, we might think we have to do more of the verb to “prove” we are the noun. This isn’t necessarily the case.

In a podcast episode by D’ana Joi, she explains this neatly using the example of multi-passionate creatives — those people who have many interests and talents to match.

In the episode, she explains that once you realise that you are a multi-passionate creative and you claim that identity (the noun), you can take the pressure off yourself to embody or prove it.

Existing in life as a multi passionate creative is something that often doesn't feel like a choice. It's simply who you are. […] When we think of that as a verb, that's when we start feeling like there's something that we need to do in order to embody that. There's something that we need to upkeep; there's some action that we must be taking. And this is where we can get stuck in proving ourselves.

— D’ana Joi

This resonates. There was a long time where I was hesitant to call myself a Linguist (or even a lower-case linguist) because I wasn’t in academia or actively practicing linguistics. I felt this way despite my ongoing interest in the subject and the many years I’ve spent studying linguistics — to the PhD level. The question really came down to this:

Am I really still the noun, if I’m not actively doing the verb?

The answer is Yes.

The sooner we realise this, we can stop putting pressure on ourselves to ‘be’ anything. We already are.

The dark side of the noun

There is a flipside, however. When we focus too much on the noun, our egos can get in the way. When this happens, we make it harder to do the work. I call this nouning all over our verbing and it looks like:

• Overidentifying with our work, “This is me. It represents who I am.” This can lead to work never being done, never being quite right, never being good enough.

• Seeking validation for who we are based on what we do. “If they like this, I’ll know I’m a good designer.”

• Putting your ego on the table, alongside the work. “This concept is my baby and I’ll go down fighting for it!”

• Not letting go, not accepting feedback, and other time-sucking gremlins.

When who we are is much too present in what we’re doing, it eclipses our ability to do the work effectively. It’s one of the many examples of how we are getting in our own way.

The ideal state is when our ego is in check — when we have neither too little confidence, nor too much. When this happens, work is easier. Because it’s about the work, not about proving ourselves. It has one job, one purpose. To verb.

When you want the noun, but you don’t want to do the verb

So far we’ve explored when the difference between our identity and our work, as well as what happens when who we are overshadows what we do. There is yet another angle to all of this.

Sometimes we want the title, but we don’t want to do the work. As Austin Kleon says in his excellent conference presentation:

“Lots of people want to be the noun, without doing the verb.”

— Austin Kleon

He says, “forget the noun, do the verb.” And what he means is that by focussing on the work, you’ll go farther and deeper than you could ever get to by worrying about the title or how you “should” be.

The way forward

There is a path through all this confusing being and doing. It’s about knowing where to place your energy and your ego.

If you’re someone who frequently gets your nouns and verbs in a knot, I can help you untangle them, linguistically and otherwise. Email me at coaching@witten.kim to share your thoughts.