A beautifully produced video of a beautifully produced garment.
A reminder that this is what we can get to if we put in the work.
That beauty is transcendent, and we have the power to make it.
The capacity for beauty lies within us.
Sweep away the chaff and allow it to shine.
*Complete sentences are for days that are not Saturday.
I’m in the midst of a massive transition. Wrapping up an old job, getting started with a new one. Defragging my possessions and moving to a new town — with no place to live yet. (Not for lack of trying.) Living in the midst of chaos, as my two roommates are also packing up and moving out.
God has very clearly laid out the path, but it is surrounded with chaos and uncertainty and newness.
Today, I am feeling it. All of the tasks I feel I have to complete before I’m “allowed” (by whom?) to finish. All the things that I “should” (according to what?) do before I leave town. What is the “proper” way to sort, to clean, to pack?
There are two options: recalibrate, or distract. Focus, lean in, do the work. Writing this blog post is helping some, but I bet doing the work of packing will help even more. Forget should (one of my top 5 most-hated words) and just do. It doesn’t have to be right, just done.
Focus, and make it through.
I’ve been listening to Jordan B Peterson lectures on YouTube again. (Always super motivating and super depressing at the same time. Reality has a way of doing that to you.)
One of the hardest things to learn about creativity (and anything, really), is that potential means nothing. What matters is what you produce; your body of work.
For those of us just starting out on our creative journeys, it’s important to define what success means and cobble together some metrics to judge whether or not we’re heading in the right direction.
JBP and Shelly Carson created the Creative Achievement Questionnaire to test creative production (not merely creative potential!), and it turns out that it could make a perfect objective measure for achievement in creative pursuits.
My score is 11, which places me at the top end of the Novice Creative category. Mostly of those achievements happened in during my teenage years; I neglected to cultivate my creative talents in university and afterward. There are a couple of scores I could fudge to push myself into the Maker category, but that’s edging into “lying to myself” territory.
Now, as far as using this as a metric: looking over the scoring system shows that each creative domain is scored in a logarithmic scale of difficulty. It will take an immense amount of work to bump up my total score even 1 point, let alone a whole category. However, 1 more point will push me over into Maker–which I could make happen by next year.
If I really double down, I could push myself into the Creative category. I’ll have to formulate some concrete systems and goals to make that happen.
But! We now have a measure for creative output. Let us watch The Gap again and put it to good use.
Read on for the full questionnaire with my scores.
I feel like there’s a new genre of writing that has taken off in the past few years. It’s nonfiction, and yet the reward it provides is almost the same as a fairy tale.
I’m talking about all the self-employed, entrepreneur-ish books. I read a lot of them. You probably do too. Tim Ferriss. James Altucher. Tony Robbins. Even smaller names like Mike Cernovich.
It’s not even books–this type of content pops up on social media and youtube as well. All the vloggers and youtubers who support themselves off of their youtube income streams, or who showcase how they run their own lives through freelance work, direct sales, and youtube or patreon revenue. I’m thinking about the Casey Neistats and Frannerds of the world here–not just people who support themselves on youtube, but people who vlog about supporting themselves on youtube.
The subtext of all of these things is: you can too!
And maybe you can. Probably you can. You and I have just as much potential as most of these people. They’ve taken risks and figured out how to leverage the internets in a way that works for them (instead of destructive ways like crippling youtube addictions).
At the end of the day, though, these people make money selling the dream to you and me. They show us how they live the lives that they live. On the one hand, hey–it’s an instruction manual or guidebook or map or whatever. Showing us the way.
On the other, it can be all too easy to fall into the trap of voyeurism, of sitting back and watching these people out on the playing field. Maybe we should start a fantasy entrepreneur tournament.
I say “these people” like a pejorative, but I don’t mean it that way. I admire them, and envy them a little bit, and know that I could potentially maybe be one of them, but also equally know that the way I’m living my life right now will never get me there.
AJA Cortes reminded me of that tonight on twitter, with some cut-to-the-bone truth. He put into words a lot of my own feelings of being “stuck” along with exactly what I’ve done that’s gotten me to this place: lack of risk, seeking comfort, choosing a college degree that feels good and hoping that everything will work out.
Hope is NEVER a plan,
Assuming things will “just work out” is NOT a plan
“Something will come along” is NOT a plan
This is loser talk
The reliance on happenstance and fate and destiny somehow swinging in your favor,
Total bullshit.
Fortune favors PLANNING
Your degree is not a fucking plan,
“I’m sure it will work out” isn’t a plan
“I’ve got a good feeling about it” is NOT a plan
Why aren’t these things plans?
Because you are not taking ACTION on ANYTHING
Where’s the momentum? Where is the forward drive to create?
Hell, where’s the hustle and grind and all that cliched shit?
What’s the big picture you are actually working to create every day?
There isn’t one?
You’re relying on half luck and half mediocre skill and wishful thinking?
Stop bullshitting yourself.
I’ve reached the point where I can’t bullshit myself anymore. I am all too aware of the situation that I’ve gotten myself into (complacent job, no marriage prospects, very little creativity in my life, etc etc etc). This is not the life I dreamed for myself when I was a starry-eyed 12 year old.
And reading books about how “You can too!” doesn’t help the fact. Until I take action, it’s just more bullshit.
Right now, I know that I cannot work for myself or be my own boss or choose myself or anything like that. I know this because I know how lazy I am on my own, away from an employer with expectations of me. If I want to move toward any sort of second income stream or self-employment or freelance work or publishing my own novel, I need to learn how to manage myself.
So I’ve decided to draft a list of things I can do (ACTION) to prove to myself that I’m ready to strike out on my own.
Now, all of these things will not happen overnight. Tackling this list will take time, and self-discipline. A plan. Some of the very same things on this list that I feel I lack already. However, the things on this list create compound interest–once I’ve completed and/or maintain a substantial amount of them, I imagine that I’ll already be on the road to being more antifragile and self-sufficient.
The thing is, I must begin. Take action. DO IT.
I take comfort in the fact that doing it badly is better than doing it not at all. Doing it badly is the first step toward doing it well. Doing it badly is, frankly, still DOING.
One day at a time. One step at a time. One minute at a time.
Forward, into a brighter future.
[Trigger warning: Disney]
Back in the days when Disney wasn’t (as) evil, they produced this video about artists working production of Sleeping Beauty. It covers just as much about the nature of art as it does about the nature of teamwork on such a big project.
There are so many things to say about this piece.
Often there’s this perception that as an artist you must always have your own voice and always strike out on your own trail. Obviously this is a propaganda piece from Disney (it’s as much of an job advertisement than anything — yo, young guys who might be interested in art, it’s okay you can keep your identity and we want you to be the best artist you can possibly be but also Disney is a really great place to work join the army), but it’s important to think about artists working on such a huge project as a hand-animated movie. Every artists, from the character designers to the background artists, has to subsume his own personal style and quirks to the greater whole. The animation style has to be reproducible by all of the artists, not just one guy, so nobody gets a monopoly on design.
At the same time, there’s the sense of camaraderie, of people pulling together to work on something that’s bigger than each of them. I’m reminded of artisans working on cathedrals, or the reasons people give when they join the army. Walt Disney’s narration takes a similar view: “This entire operation puts one in mind of a symphony orchestra, where men who are good enough to be soloists in their own right are thinking only of the effect they are producing on the whole.”
While the movie is a visually stunning and cohesive end product, there’s the vast differences between each man’s individual styles. Some of the end products are very 50s looking, but that’s okay. You have the architectural/structure guy, the 3D/form guy, the personality guy, and the detail guy. You can see their strengths in the individual art they produce, and can see how those strengths would be of benefit when they all combined as a group.
Character Animator (refining the ideal character in motion)
Tree as explosion of force – reorganized into its most decorative aspect
Production Designer
Tree as a microcosm of the richness and variety of nature
“Portrait of a trunk”
Supervising Effects Animator (magic fairy dust)
Tree as a living thing, full of personality
Background Artist
Tree as engineering, structure
Personally, I find it fitting that they’re working on Sleeping Beauty, which I find to be the most beautiful of all animated Disney movies. The backgrounds (especially the animated backgrounds!) are one of my very favorite things, and the “dueling fairy dust” scene is one that I can distinctly remember watching as a child. Since there are no coincidences, of the four artworks produced in the making of this film, I favored the study of the tree trunk painted by the background scenery artist.
On a technical note, I appreciate how the script was written to both give the reader a sense of conversation, but also to explicate and narrate each artist’s focus and process. The end result does sound hokey (because it’s neither natural conversation nor a polished voiceover) but despite that it kept me engaged. Kind of a peek behind the curtain of how everyone worked together as a team, with complementary thought patterns in addition to art styles.
This is the best kind of “behind the scenes” production. It gives insight into the process of making the movie, highlights some of the people who do the work, and allows Disney to explain some of their philosophy of art. Plus, it’s interesting to watch.
It’s relatively easy to recognize good art (or writing or music or whatever).
Some people have terrible taste, but most of us do alright.
It’s also relatively easy to conceptualize the act of drawing in our heads.
Or even watch it on a YouTube video — Draw with me! — when someone else’s rendering looks so easy.
So you go to take the leap and try it for yourself. You grab a sketchpad, and a pencil, and say “Self, today we’re going to draw X.”
(Congratulations for taking that leap, btw.)
Despite what your brain knows to be true, despite all the time you’ve spent looking at reality and at artful depictions of it, what comes out on the other end of your pencil is trash.
Your eyeball neurons don’t know how to connect with your finger neurons. Your fingers don’t know how to hold the pencil. You try to see what is in front of you, but you cannot recreate it.
There is a gap.
When you are a child, it’s easier to see past it. Maybe you don’t even know that it exists, because you haven’t yet had the chance to take in great works of art. So you practice, and you improve, but you never cringe at yourself.
As an adult, you know full well what you’re producing is garbage.
Maybe you want to stop, in shame, thinking that you should be better — even though there’s no way you could be better, having never drawn X before.
There’s now a conceptual gap, not just a behavioral one: you versus what you think you should be. Nevermind that your conception of yourself is unrealistic.
The hardest part is knowing that it is impossible to jump or bridge or maneuver around the gap. The only way across is through — through all the garbage and the shame and the unknown.
I started drawing again this past week, after a very long time of not drawing. I did a practice sketch this evening.
Guess what? It was garbage.
Nobody wants to look at garbage, especially myself.
But it’s the first step into the gap. Someday, with effort and persistence, I’ll get to the other side.
Maybe then my drawings will be worth looking at.
In the meantime, I’m going to watch THE GAP on repeat.
Fran Meneses is an illustrator who vlogs about…what it’s like to be an illustrator. Or really, a freelancer of any sort. Or even more really, a “choose yourself-er.”
People who have chosen to take their destiny into their own hands instead of a mostly-guaranteed steady paycheck. The people I admire but have convinced myself that I could never join the ranks of, because I’m too scattered and/or lazy and/or lacking for time.
But I watch their videos and read their blogs anyway. I bet you do too.
Here’s a vlog of Fran’s that hit home with me.
Spoiler: her advice is BE PROACTIVE. Don’t wait for someone to tell you how or what to do, but instead figure it out for yourself.
“You only need yourself, and internet, the library and books. You also need motivation…and coffee.”
The funny thing is, as we started rounding out the video, I realized that I have heard most of this advice before. Where? From Mike Cernovich and James Altucher and Tim Ferriss. From other people who have actually done it. (Although they wrap their advice in very different aesthetics than Fran does.)
But what really caught my attention, is that I remember reading these things in the granddaddy of self-help books, Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich.
In fact, I pulled out my nearly-full pink sparkly learning notebook circa 2015/2016, where I took notes from my first read-through. Mr Hill is a lot more prolific and early 20th century feeling than Fran, but they share some very common overlapping points.
Funny how they’re almost exactly the same. Now, I have many more notes on Mr Hill’s advice (which is mostly general), and Fran has many more videos (which are very much more specialized onto freelancing, running an online shop, and illustration) so the comparisons won’t stand up to a huge amount of scrutiny.
I enjoy the synchronicity between them, and the echo of truth that rings when the same advice holds true, and actually works, in 2017 as it did in 1937.
Now, as always with the truth, the hardest part is doing it!
Dearest Reader!
This week I have been thinking about the concept of “filler.”
You know, the stuff that we stick between the gaps of real things. Like snacks. Or grout. It exists, and has to exist, to tide you over between meals, or to prevent getting your pinky toe stuck in the gap between the tiles on your bathroom floor, but nobody has ever gone into a beautifully-tiled bathroom and said, “My God that is some fantastic grout!”
(Now, interior designers are doing some cool things with grout these days so it is possible that someone has actually said this. Interesting grout, coupled with tile set in an interesting way, could in fact exist. Inside of a larger context, grout is useful and even perhaps beautiful. But on its own, grout is nothing.)
Or take meat products, since I am writing to you as perhaps the only carnivore that you know. Delicious sausages and hamburgers require no extra ingredients: meat, fat, perhaps a little salt or other flavorings, that’s it. Cook those babies up and you have quite a satisfying meal. Or if you want to get REALLY fancy, smoke ’em. I am now tempted to drift away into fantasias of smoked sausages….
No fillers are needed to make a good meat product. Some fillers might be added to say, a sausage, to create extra delicious flavors. Chicken-apple sausage is a popular variety, in which the (cheap) apples stretch the (expensive) chicken farther, but also provide a refreshing counterpoint in both taste and texture.
However, some purveyors of meat use fillers to use less meat while charging the same price-per-pound. These fillers are usually starch-based, and add nothing but cost-savings to the burger. No added flavor or texture for the end consumer to enjoy other than extra starchy things to digest. These people are why you can’t trust any pre-made beef patties and have to read the ingredients every single time. Thanks, fillers!
The idea of fillers also exists in art and music, in the form of white space, or rests. Good use of white space in a graphic design, or negative space in a painting or sculpture, can add oodles of visual interest and breathing room to the piece. In fact, I would argue that negative space is essential to good visual presentation. (Bear in mind that you can’t have negative space without first having an object for that negative space to react around.)
In music, the space between the notes is often just as important as the notes themselves. There’s a vast difference between the short, clipped notes of a march, and the long drawn-out notes in something like a tone poem. A complex rhythm is the interplay between positive and negative, in they way that the filler interacts with the drumbeats. Any specialness in the silence is a byproduct of how that silence interacts with the musical notes.
If you try to treat the silence between the notes as Its Own Thing, you end up with such ridiculousness as John Cage’s 4’33”.
The point: fillers are not necessarily bad, and can be useful or even helpful as a part of a bigger picture. On their own, fillers are neutral. The problem comes when you try to substitute the filler for the real thing.
A day full of snacks is a day at the end of which you’ll (read: I will) be unsatisfied and cranky.
A bathroom full of grout is…well, unfinished.
A hamburger full of fillers is still a hamburger, I guess, but not one that I would want to eat.
A painting full of white space is…not a painting.
And let’s be real, a “musical composition” of silence is not a musical composition at all.
That leads me, dear reader, to the topic on which my mind lingers…mental filler.
I spend more time than I should on Twitter.
It’s is fun! It’s full of novel content that makes me (mildly) amused and makes me (shallowly) think. There’s always something new!
But social media is primarily a connector–grout, if you will. Some people are doing good work of providing premium content on social media (this tweetstorm by AJA Cortes is a good example), but for the most part, all the content on social channels is dependent upon the primary media that tweets link to. Or references, in the case of many of the parody or esoteric accounts.
Twitter is very good for connecting things, for discovering, for bridging from one content creator to another, but as a “meal” in itself? It’s ultimately unfulfilling.
It can be very easy to fall into the trap of wanting mental snack food all the time. It’s easy, it’s amusing, and it’s very readily available. (And often wrapped in brightly colored, single serving containers!)
But I have to remind myself that single-serving snacks, be they mental or food, won’t build a good body. Whether it’s a body of work or body of thought doesn’t matter.
One can’t build a solid, delicious hamburger out of starchy filler.
And if I (or you) don’t want to end up blown away like a pile of dried up starch on a tile counter made of actual tiles by people who Did The Work, can’t focus on the filler. We have to focus on the substantial things. Meals. Tiles. Meat. Good art and music. Solid thought: books.
We must relegate filler to its proper place–to fill in the gaps.
It can be a beautiful, delicious, or amusing way to fill in those gaps, but it must exist within the proper context of Real, Solid Work.
So do the work, dearest, and enjoy the fleeting space of filler in its own due time.
(If you thought I was giving you advice, my dear reader, you might be wrong. I am mostly giving myself a lecture here. This is a common failing on my part.)
With all my love,
@fortelabs posted quite a good tweetstorm on twitter today.
1/ There's a very clever procrastination strategy I've noticed a lot lately which I call Obstacle Generation
— Tiago Forte (@fortelabs) July 19, 2017
He goes on:
It involves generating lots of “non-negotiable” requirements that you “must” do before you can do what you want to do. As in, “Before I do X everybody knows I have to do A, B,C,D, E, F, G, etc.” It’s clever because it sets up an unlosable game. If you fail, you can blame immediate steps for putting the goal out of reach. If you reach X but it took too long, you’re justified because you “followed the correct process.”
There’s more–and I highly recommend clicking through and reading the whole thing–but this sums up the basic premise.
I recognize myself in it. Like, way too much.
“Before I start writing Batfort I need to hone my writing skills and learn how to be disciplined to do something every day and get a real camera and sketch out a whole editorial and business plan and and and”
“Before I can get a car I need to get a new job that pays better and live in a place where parking doesn’t suck and and and”
“Before I can be healthy I need to stop eating carbs and sleep 8 hours a night and stop worrying so much and exercise more regularly and and and”
“Before I can date that attractive man, I need to get a car…”
You get the drill.
It is SO EASY to use the guise of “building a plan” and “doing your research” as an excuse to do nothing of consequence. Yes, plans and research are necessary, but they are not DOING THE WORK. It’s frittering away time and creative energy on small-potatoes things that feel just productive enough that we don’t realize that all of the sudden we ate an entire bag of chips for dinner.
Do that enough times in a row, and you’re going to feel sick.
With all respect to Scott Adams, I have a negative reaction to his “systems, not goals” approach to life. For the longest time I could never figure out why, exactly, but I think this is it.
If you bury yourself in systems, even good ones like going to the gym every day, without having a goal that you’re pushing yourself toward, it’s really easy to settle into the groove of the system. The system becomes your end product, instead of what you designed this system to move you toward.
You work your muscles, but don’t get stronger or build out some sweet pecs.
Sure, goals don’t always work out. There are things that are beyond our control. That’s life.
The resilient pick up, dust off, and keep going. The antifragile incorporate those lessons into their next attempt.
You set a new goal, and move on.
A system alone won’t work: you need something to work toward.
Goals alone won’t work either: you need daily practices to propel you toward them.
Get you a plan that can do both.
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