How Doing Math Made Me a More Happy, Productive Artist

People who knew me as a typical right-brained artistic type who shied away from numbers and linear thinking were shocked when they found out I was in business school. I joked that in order to do the work, I had to grow another brain. Little did I know that this was exactly what was happening, until I had the biggest breakthrough in my artistic and business life simultaneously.

About a year into my MBA, I was working on a design project for a client. After working peacefully for a couple hours on a new concept, I suddenly realized that all the usual stress and anxiety of facing the blank page and having to create on demand was absent. I wasn’t questioning my value as a designer or stressing about what the client would think of the work (or me) or how it (or I myself) might not be good enough. I was simply, miraculously, working away without negative comment from my inner critic and without feeling overwhelmed. This was so contrary to my usual experience that it startled me.

Trying to figure out what had happened, I remembered something from my psychotherapy training in Carl Jung’s work. He said that when you strengthen your nondominant capacities, what you are naturally good at gets stronger. For me, this meant all the math, quantitative analysis, and linear thinking required for my coursework not only gave me new skills but was also working behind the scenes, strengthening my natural powers of creative intuition and imagination—all the things that have come easily and naturally to me. Exercising my nondominant functions not only helped me do the math—literally—but opened up new worlds of anxiety-free creativity.