I spent yesterday teetering on the seventeenth step of a crooked ladder, deltoids burning, holding soffit boards above my head while another worker blasted them into place with a terrific air-powered nail gun. It was drizzly, very cold, and my ladder swayed in the wind.

I know it’s crass to discuss salary, but in the spirit of full-disclosure, I was paid about $10/hr.

As I shivered there, blinking sawdust from my eyes, a few coherent insights managed to penetrate the dense grid of profanity that formed most of my thought patterns.

Here are two of them:

First, I remembered this discursive poem that Michelangelo wrote while working under similar circumstances.

I've already grown a goiter from this torture,

hunched up here like a cat in Lombardy

(or anywhere else where the stagnant water's poison).

My stomach's squashed under my chin, my beard's

pointing at heaven, my brain's crushed in a casket,

my breast twists like a harpy's. My brush,

above me all the time, dribbles paint

so my face makes a fine floor for droppings!

He continues…

My haunches are grinding into my guts,

my poor ass strains to work as a counterweight,

every gesture I make is blind and aimless.

My skin hangs loose below me, my spine's

all knotted from folding over itself.

I'm bent taut as a Syrian bow.

Because I'm stuck like this, my thoughts

are crazy, perfidious tripe:

anyone shoots badly through a crooked blowpipe…

Obviously, our situations weren’t perfectly comparable. He was a lone genius on the scaffolding of the Sistine Chapel. I was one-fifth of a profoundly inefficient construction team working beneath the awning of the Sorenson’s cabin in Henry’s Lake.

The bond that connected us across the gulf of both time and talent was this: we were both trying to create something, and we were both enduring discomfort as a result. Following this depressing train of thought to its logical conclusion, I had a grim intimation.

The act of creation is inherently uncomfortable.

The more significant the creative work, the more discomfort must be endured. I don’t necessarily mean that it can’t be fun or easy. I’ve written earlier about how my best work seems to happen almost accidentally. However, creative work is work, and there is nothing you can do about it. Just hope that, when the day is done, the progress you’ve made is worth it.

I think businesspeople and entrepreneurs tend to hog all the credit for hard work and hustle these days. Perhaps artists deserve more. Does Jeff Bezos really work any harder at his job than Michelangelo did at his? I doubt it. Both were manically devoted to their craft. Both have left us with enduring monuments to their legacies. One gave us the Pieta and the Sistine Chapel. The other gave us a plethora of significant loopholes in the corporate tax code.

Anyway, creative work is work. If you’re good—or at least getting better—it’s worth it.

With that said, for most of us, the discomfort we endure is a little less physical than Michelangelo’s. It’s uncomfortable to spend your day staring at a blank page, or going through tedious and painful revisions, but it’s hardly as bad as sweeping the streets or working an assembly line.

And that brought me to my second insight.

White-collar jobs are great.

I remember reading a chapter in Hey Whipple, Squeeze This, where Luke Sullivan discusses the perks of working in advertising. He and his partner sat across from each other, feet atop their desks, talking about movies and wondering how to fill the graphite square on the blank sheet of paper in front of them.

He contrasts the work with a factory job, where he’d be required to do repetitive work hour after hour, punching out only for two fifteen-minute breaks and a short lunch. A slave to the whistle on the wall.

His conclusion, and mine, is that the perks of a creative job far outweigh any discomfort it might require.

I am not a construction worker by either training or disposition, and after yesterday I can’t say that it features large in my plans for the future.