I’m going to say something that might be controversial: I fucking hate ROI talk in creative industries.
You know the conversations I’m talking about. The LinkedIn posts. The TED talks. The “successful” people who tell you that if your passion isn’t your job, you haven’t found the right job yet. The influencers who claim work-life balance is a myth—that if you just find the right job, work doesn’t feel like work anymore, and your job becomes your life becomes your passion in one beautiful unified thing. The career counselors who measure the value of an art degree by how much money you make within five years of graduation. The articles that celebrate creative professionals who “made it”—and by “made it,” they mean landed a director position at a tech company making six figures.
Don’t get me wrong—making money is great. I like money. I need money. But somewhere along the way, we collectively decided that Return on Investment is the only metric that matters for evaluating creative career paths, and I think that’s absolute bullshit.
The ROI Trap
Here’s the narrative we’re all fed: Go to school (preferably a prestigious one), get a degree (preferably in something practical), land a high-paying job (preferably at a big company), climb the ladder quickly, and boom—you’ve won at life. Your education had a positive ROI. Your career is successful. You’re doing everything right.
But what if you went to art school for ceramics? What if you got an MFA in creative writing? What if you studied photography, or sculpture, or experimental theater? Suddenly the ROI conversation gets awkward. Creative fields don’t pay like business fields. The job market is smaller. The “director level” positions are fewer and farther between. And according to ROI logic, this means you made a bad investment.
I call bullshit.
The problem with ROI thinking in creative fields is that it reduces your entire life, career, and practice to a single question: How much money did you make? And that question is so reductive, so narrow, so utterly missing the point that it makes me want to scream.
Introducing ROP: Return on Passion (or Practice)
So here’s my proposal: Let’s talk about ROP instead—Return on Passion, or if you prefer, Return on Practice.
If ROI measures how much your financial investment grows over time, then ROP measures how much your happiness, fulfillment, and engagement with your practice grows over time. It’s about whether you’re doing work that matters to you. Whether you wake up interested in what you’re making. Whether you’re surrounded by people who share your values and curiosities. Whether you’re building skills in something you actually care about.
ROP asks fundamentally different questions:
- Are you more excited about your practice than you were five years ago?
- Do you have opportunities to work on projects that challenge and fulfill you?
- Are you learning and growing in ways that align with your interests?
- Do you get to collaborate with people who inspire you?
- Would you keep doing this work even if the paycheck was smaller?
These aren’t soft, touchy-feely questions. They’re about the actual substance of your working life—the thing you spend 40+ hours a week doing.
A Tale of Two Directors
Let’s say two people graduate from the same design school.
Person A goes on to become the Director of Ceramics at a material science studio. They spend their days experimenting with clay bodies, mentoring emerging ceramic artists, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with the medium. They make a comfortable living—maybe $70-90k a year depending on the organization. Not wealthy, but stable.
Person B gets an MBA, pivots into UX, and lands a Director of User Experience role at a financial technology company. They make $180k a year plus stock options. They oversee a team of designers working on interface design, user research, and product strategy.
Now here’s where it gets interesting: When you look at these two careers through the lens of ROI, Person B is clearly the winner. They’re making more than double the salary. Their education “paid off” faster. According to every standard career metric, Person B has the better outcome.
But when you look at these same careers through the lens of ROP, the picture changes entirely.
Person A’s Return on Passion is incredible. They’re doing exactly what they went to school for. They’re deepening their expertise in the material they love. They’re part of a community that shares their values. Their practice is expanding and evolving.
And here’s the thing: Person B might have equally amazing ROP. Maybe they discovered UX in school and fell in love with it. Maybe they geek out about user research and talk about interaction design patterns with their colleagues all the time. Maybe they genuinely find the problems they’re solving fascinating. If that’s the case, Person B also has incredible ROP—they’re following their passion, they’re engaged with their work, they’re building expertise in something they care about.
Both of these people could have fantastic ROP. The key difference is that only one of them “wins” when you measure by ROI.
The problem isn’t people choosing tech careers. The problem is when people sacrifice their actual passions for the higher paycheck. When someone loves ceramics but pivots to UX because the money is better. When someone is genuinely excited about experimental theater but goes into product management because that’s what “makes sense.” That’s when ROP plummets—and that’s the trap ROI thinking creates.
The Creative Field Compensation Problem
Let’s address the elephant in the room: Creative jobs don’t pay as much as business jobs. A Director of Ceramics will never make as much as a Director of UX at a tech company. A working photographer doesn’t make as much as a product manager. A sculptor doesn’t make as much as a software engineer.
And you know what? That’s part of the problem.
Creative work is undervalued in our economy. It just is. But the solution isn’t to tell creative people to pivot into higher-paying fields. The solution is to acknowledge that if your passion is ceramics, or photography, or sculpture, or experimental theater, you’re going to hit a financial ceiling that your MBA-holding peers won’t.
And that’s okay. It sucks, but it’s okay.
Not everyone needs to make $200k a year. Not every career path needs to optimize for maximum financial growth. Some of us would rather make $80k doing something we love than $180k doing something that makes us miserable.
The ROI framework can’t account for this because it only measures money. But ROP can.
What Creative Communities Actually Value
Here’s what I’ve noticed: When creative people talk about other creative people’s careers, we don’t lead with how much money they make.
We talk about their work. Their projects. The shows they’ve been in. The publications that featured them. The collaborations they’re part of. The techniques they’ve mastered. The ways they’ve influenced the field.
We say things like:
- “They’re doing really interesting work with sustainable materials.”
- “They just got into that residency program—it’s super hard to get into.”
- “Have you seen their latest series? It’s so different from their earlier stuff.”
- “They’re teaching at this amazing workshop next month.”
Money comes up, sure—freelancers compare rates, people discuss grants and funding, we talk about the practical realities of making a living. But it’s not the primary metric of success.
The primary metric is: Are you doing work that matters? Are you growing as a practitioner? Are you contributing to your community?
That’s ROP.
The Tech Bro in the Creative Space
I’ll be honest: I’m a super computer nerd. You could probably call me a tech bro (😔). I work in technology, I’ve spent my career bouncing between creative and technical roles, and I’ve definitely benefited from being comfortable in corporate tech environments.
But I also run in creative communities. My friends are designers, artists, makers, writers, musicians. And I’ve watched the collision between tech culture and creative culture for years now, and it’s been… rough.
Tech culture imports ROI thinking into everything. Every decision needs a data-driven justification. Every project needs clear metrics. Every role needs to demonstrate measurable impact. And when this mindset enters creative spaces—art schools, design programs, creative agencies—it warps the conversation.
Suddenly we’re evaluating education programs by job placement rates and starting salaries. We’re measuring creative success by follower counts and brand partnerships. We’re treating artistic practice like a startup that needs to scale.
And I get it—institutions need funding, programs need to justify their existence, people need to make a living. But when ROI becomes the dominant framework, we lose something essential. We lose the ability to value creative work on its own terms.
Optimizing for the Wrong Thing
Here’s what really gets me: When you optimize your career for ROI instead of ROP, you’re probably going to end up somewhere you don’t want to be.
Maybe you go to art school, discover you’re good at something marketable (like UX design), and get pulled into a lucrative career path that takes you further and further away from why you went to art school in the first place. The money’s good. The ROI is great. But your ROP is plummeting.
Or maybe you skip art school entirely because the ROI doesn’t make sense on paper. You take the safe path, the practical path, the path that maximizes your earning potential. And ten years later you’re making great money and feeling completely disconnected from the things you actually care about.
This isn’t theoretical. I’ve seen it happen over and over again. I’ve watched creative people take “good opportunities” that were really just well-paying jobs that slowly drained their passion. I’ve watched people optimize themselves right out of the communities and practices they loved.
So What Do We Do?
I’m not saying money doesn’t matter. I’m not saying everyone should quit their corporate jobs and make pottery for $30k a year. I’m not even saying ROI is always bad—it’s a useful metric for some decisions.
What I’m saying is: Stop letting ROI be the only metric that matters.
When you’re making career decisions—especially in creative fields—ask yourself:
- What’s the ROP here?
- Will this opportunity help me grow in my practice?
- Will I be more or less engaged with the work I care about?
- Am I optimizing for money or for fulfillment?
And if someone tries to tell you that your creative career path isn’t “worth it” because the ROI isn’t great, here’s what you tell them:
“I’m not optimizing for ROI. I’m optimizing for ROP—and by that metric, I’m exactly where I need to be.”
A Question for You
What are you optimizing for? If you stripped away all the external pressure—the career advice, the social expectations, the comparison to peers—what metric would you actually use to measure your own success?
Because I’m willing to bet it’s not just about the money.