Man, let me tell you, for years I was stuck. I mean, really stuck. The title of this post uses “Pisces,” but you don’t need to be one. If you’re that person who spends half the meeting staring out the window, planning a novel or designing a spaceship, this practice is for you. I was working a job—a decent one, paying the bills—but it was slowly sucking the imagination right out of my brain. A pure, soul-crushing spreadsheet existence. I had to rip myself out of it.
The Great Escape: How I Started the Hunt
My first step wasn’t quitting; it was getting honest. I grabbed a stack of cheap notebooks and a few thick sharpies. No fancy apps. I decided I was going to treat my life like a messy, unorganized experiment for six months. I committed. I told my partner, “Look, things are going to get weird and possibly expensive for a bit. Bear with me.” That commitment was the very first action verb I took.
I started with a simple rule: Track everything that made me forget the clock. Not things that paid well. Not things I was good at yet. Just the things that made time disappear. This was my main data-gathering method, the core of the practice.
The Trial and Error Phase: Diving Into the Deep End
I didn’t mess around reading self-help books; I just dove in. And trust me, I messed it up completely a few times. This is the log of what I specifically attempted and discarded, because this failure is how I narrowed down the true artistic path:
- I Tried Painting: I went to the art supply store, bought the biggest canvas I could afford, and threw paint at it. It was supposed to be abstract. It looked like a toddler’s tantrum. I spent four hours on the first one. Clock disappeared. Initial Rating: High Flow State. But then the cleanup started. And the anxiety of “is this good?” That killed the flow. I abandoned painting after two weeks.
- I Wrote a Formal Business Plan: I thought, “Maybe I should start a design agency.” I opened a new document and tried to write a perfectly formatted proposal. Within thirty minutes, I was checking my phone, checking the fridge, checking my email. Pure friction. The clock was ticking so loud it was deafening. Initial Rating: Zero Flow State. Scrapped the idea entirely. That structured stuff is the death of imagination.
- I Messed with Storytelling (The Kicker): I had this idea for a video game narrative. I didn’t know how to code, so I just sat down and started writing dialogue and concept notes, completely unorganized. I was drawing maps on napkins, inventing alien cultures, and arguing with imaginary characters about their motivation. I looked up. It was 3 AM. I’d been doing it for eight straight hours. I felt elated but also physically exhausted. This was the first time I noticed the difference: I didn’t care about the final product (the game); I just loved the process of building the world.
The Log Analysis: Finding the Invisible Career
After three months of this messy experimentation, I sat down with all my sharpie-marked notebooks. I didn’t look for the most profitable activity. I looked for the longest single continuous block of time where the clock vanished. The winner, every single time, was unstructured world-building, narrative creation, and conceptualizing.
The core realization from this whole practice? The “artistic side” for people like us—the dreamers, the deeply imaginative folks—isn’t always the visible art. It’s not the painting, the finished song, or the polished novel. It’s the pre-production mess. The absolute, pure, head-in-the-clouds, what-if stage.
I realized I didn’t want to be the one executing the art. I wanted to be the one feeding the raw, messy dream into the engine.
The Final Pivot: Landing the Job Title That Felt Right
Once I identified the core action—narrative design and concept architecture—I started hunting for actual job titles. I didn’t look for jobs that said “artist” or “writer.” I looked for job descriptions that specifically mentioned:
- “Requires strong world-building skills.”
- “Ability to flesh out detailed backstories and lore.”
- “Conceptualize long-form narrative arcs.”
I ended up taking a massive pay cut initially to get my foot in the door as a junior Narrative Designer for a small studio that makes educational interactive content. It’s a completely different world from the spreadsheets. My day job now is literally imagining intricate histories for fictional governments and figuring out how those histories impact current gameplay mechanics.
It sounds chaotic, but it feels right. The salary eventually climbed back up, but I would have done it for half the money just to keep feeling this sense of flow. My practice showed me that the “true love” career isn’t something you find pre-packaged; it’s something you isolate by tracking where your brain goes when it’s completely unchecked. So, if you’re stuck, stop reading articles. Grab a notebook, and start tracking your disappearances. That’s the only log that matters.
