Are you a workaholic? Are you always hustling and building your business? Do you feel guilty if you’re doing something that doesn’t feed into your personal and professional goals?

If you’re the sort of person who needs an ‘excuse’ to do something creative or fun, here it is.

Creativity Transfers To Every Area of Your Life

The act of being creative transfers to every area of your life… including your bank balance. For example, if you took a class on how to write a short story you’re learning a lot of transferrable skills which improves your ability to communicate and connect with your customers.

Let’s look at what you’d learn.

Short Story Mastery = Bankable Skills

A short story teaches you to be concise. It forces you to work within time and space constraints. Think about it. You have to set up the premise, describe the surroundings, introduce characters, create conflict and then resolve it all, and you’ve only got three short pages to do it. It’s tough work. It requires discipline. It required learning the art of brevity and clarity. Which is exactly what you need in business writing, too.

Writing a good short story teaches you how to remove the extraneous fluff and anything that is unclear. When you’ve got a limited word count suddenly you have to be concise. Instead of writing wordy sentences full of tautologies and repetition*, you’re forced to keep hacking away at your copy. You have to keep on refining your story until it’s a finely honed blade of imagery and meaning.

Plus All The Other Business Benefits

As you learn how to write short stories you’ll also become a master at communicating your business message. You’ll become adept at delivering your razor sharp brand message; you’ll write better sales copy; you’ll be better at selling clients face-to-face; and you’ll manage your staff better by giving clearer directions.

And It Doesn’t End With Short Story Writing

The creativity transfer principle doesn’t stop with story writing. It’s endless. For example, the author of 4 Hour Work Week, Tim Ferris, believes that learning anything creative is a wedge in the door to improving other skills. If you know anything about Tim Ferris, it’s that he loves to minimise time spent for maximum gain. So if learning something fun and creative works for him, odds are, it’s going to work for you.

Let’s take another example, how about podcasting?

Pat Flynn, founder of Smart Passive Income, was initially hesitant to start podcasting. Like most bloggers, he’d been hiding behind the power of the written word for years. But he took the plunge as an opportunity to grow. Pat quickly discovered podcasting helped him gain confidence as a speaker and a communicator; and it didn’t just help him with his clients, it even helped him communicate with his family. So his position was, that even if his podcasting idea didn’t pay off financially, it was going to pay him back in other ways to make him a richer, better person. And that’s got to be worth something, right?

So the next time you’re you’re feeling guilty about doing something ‘non-businessy’ ask yourself ‘what skills might this transfer to?’. Trust me, it’s always pays off.

* Yes I know that was a tautology, thank you, fellow word nerds.