Photo Credit: Bev(Sugarbloom Cupcakes) @Flickr

People often mistakenly separate meaningfulness from creativity.

The choices made within the creative realm originate from meaningful decisions. If the ability to make such decisions, however, becomes diluted or is taken away, a person loses all investment in the idea, project or matter at hand.

Side Note:  Although, I am just as guilty of applying it to myself – I know, hypocrite alert.

Meaningfulness allows you to take ownership in the decisions you make, you become even more connected to the problems you are trying to solve or the work you want to produce. When you feel more connected with those decisions, you become even more creative.

So, if you are feeling like your creative sensibilities are being wasted, you are most likely in a position where you feel the decisions you make are not meaningful and, therefore, unimportant.

This, I imagine, is of more urgency than whether or not you can choose if someone has an L-shaped desk, red walls, or robin’s egg blue Helvetica-font typeset.

The reason is simple: creativity is a matter of concepts and ideas – not merely art or aesthetic value (although, they happily inhabit the Creative’s universe).

There is an unfortunate bias amongst those who consider themselves creative-types. Yet, beginners and amateurs alike give themselves away every time they groan about the dominating restrictiveness of jobs they’ve pre-judged as lacking creative opportunities or value.

Creatives are creative no matter what. Just like people who enjoy painting, writing and singing are painting and writing and singing no matter what. You don’t need a job with specific duties (or titles) to grant “permission” for you to tap into inner creativity (or strengths and talents).

Even if you are enduring the most dead-pan, boring job in the universe, you are channeling creative value from other avenues–if you’re smart.

In other words, your job is just your job and creativity is your way of life.