I know exactly what you are talking about. Before I say any further, how about if you listen to a story from Ian Cheng, a successful artist, who talks about how

I know exactly what you are talking about. Before I say any further, how about if you listen to a story from Ian Cheng, a successful artist, who talks about how he got out of this same situation. It's the 2 min 15 sec starting at 8m30s (transcript below): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRHJkKTt0mY#t=8m30s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRHJkKTt0mY#t=8m30s > After I graduated Berkeley as an undergrad in 2006 I worked at Industrial Light and Magic for about a year and a half. I met so many amazing, super talented, literally genius people there, but after a year at ILM, where they were doing movies like _Transformers_ and _Pirates of the Caribbean_, and doing all kinds of innovative motion capture research and simulation research, I found I was meeting too many people who were there since _Return of the Jedi_, who still wanted to make their feature film or wanted to make a sculpture, and that the creative burden of being at such a creative place took something out of them. > I made a very seemingly irrational decision at the time -- it seems rational now -- that I really wanted to find a way to choose *my own problems*. And so I moved to New York - I went to Columbia for grad school - and for those of you who are in grad school here, I can tell you now that I didn't do *anything* in grad school. I was totally lost, I checked my email for two years. I didn't make anything and there were people who were making prolific amounts of work -- so much work that it filled the hallways, I couldn't get into my own studio. My studio at Columbia had black mold in it, so I was kinda getting drowsy all the time. > It was only afterwards where I encountered a second set of mentors - I started working for two artists, one called Paul Chan, another called Pierre Huyghe, who both -- besides me -- really loving their work, I really learned what it felt like to live and be an artist, because I was around them so often and I really understood their "metabolism" -- that sounds weird -- but I understood, like, when they ate, when they exercised, how they needed the time in the morning to be away from people, that that was a really fertile time to make creative decisions. And I came to admire how they structured their time and their day. This became a real cornerstone and model for me for figuring out how it is I would want to make work myself. There are a few super interesting points about this story, but the bit we're focusing on now is that he was able to internalize a self-driven "artist's schedule" by working for other artists who were doing the same sort of thing that he wanted to do. I'm not suggesting that you necessarily find a mentor and imitate their schedule -- that's just cargo culting -- but that you have to find a way to internalize what they do. You mention that a job provides a "framework that exists and you purely have to execute". And that is exactly what we're talking about here but for personal work not a job. It's a common message -- see Twyla Tharp's "The Creative Habit" or Stephen King's "On Writing" or even Steven Pressfield's "The War of Art" -- a personal work routine provides the framework. However, even when I understood this consciously, for a long time I didn't have enough exemplars to internalize it. Eventually what did the trick were other routines that I had been able to incorporate into my life: writing in a journal, cooking, and daily training for long-distance treks. Every time I had a question, I just had to look at those examples for analogous answers. There were other steps involved too. Feel free to email me (contact info in profile) and/or read other comments I've made on similar AskHN posts.