Listen & Draw - How To Improve Your Art Habit
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Transcript
I was a software engineer once, and at a certain moment, from one day to another, I became a team leader! It required some mental adjustment from my side. Suddenly, I was responsible for the output of a entire team. One thing I quickly realized was that it was a completely different skill from coding.
For example, you suddenly had to communicate with people! You had to of course make sure your boss was happy, that didn’t change, but now you also had to make sure the people in your team, and your peers, were happy too.
But this podcast is not about that. As an artist, we tend to work alone, and the most important person to keep happy is ourselves, so that three sixty degrees thing, keeping everyone above you, below you, and next to you happy doesn’t apply as much.
This podcast is instead about something else; it is about a managerial mindset that is useful for artists to develop, if you don’t have it already.
I also quickly realized that the most important things about being a good manager were to:
a) make sure you feel responsible for things. If something goes wrong, even in another side of the company, feel responsible. Think of ways you can improve it, ad
b) Go into a feedback loop where if you see something going wrong, you start to think of ways to fix it. As a coder, you keep your head down and code, and deliver on time. Managing is about taking a step back, and really looking at what is going wrong, and thinking of solutions.
At first, taking a step back felt wrong. “Work” in quotes used to be defined in terms of how many hours I had coded. I coded along with my team members, but now, if something went wrong, the thing I had to do was stop coding! It felt like I stopped working. I had to take a step back and look at what was happening, and try to think of a way to improve things, and then implement those changes. I hadn’t in fact stopped working! This was now part of my work, part of what I did, and in fact the most important thing I could be doing, I was steering the ship and making sure a team went in the right direction, and remove obstacles for them along the way. It was work, too, even if it was sometimes invisible.
So that’s what I want to discuss today; applying that same mechanism as an artist; the benefits for artists of taking a step back and examining your creative habit.
Welcome to the PDT pocdast, designed to listen to while drawing.
I read about the idea I want to present in this podcast first in the book How To Win Friends And Influence People, frankly a great book to read. I think it was in the introduction where it was mentioned that a well-known person did a kind of self-reflection session every week: on Saturday, I think, they looked over what they had done in the past week, what had gone right and what had gone wrong, and they then devised a plan for the next week.
They were effectively taking a step back from their lives and looking at it from a distance. Much like I sometimes had to do when I was managing a team, when I had to take a step back and see what was going wrong and finding a solution for it, this person was managing his life instead, looking at what he had done during the week, what had gone right, what had gone wrong, and devising a plan for the next week.
You can, and should, do this for your artistic endeavour, too! You can, for example, get stuck in a loop doing the same thing over and over again hoping you will figure something out somehow. Pulling yourself out of that, hovering above it and observing it from a distance might give you the distance you need to come up with advice to yourself that you would give others.
The routine is simply to reserve time for it, perhaps during the weekend, to write down what you had planned to do the past week, what you did do, how things went, what you are happy about and what you are not happy about. Then, mull over things you want to change, and write down what you want to try to do the next week. And next week, on Saturday for example, just repeat it.
I used to do these sessions privately, in a text document that was easy to archive also, but in truth, I ended up not doing it every week. Also, it doesn’t need to be archived. It is just a tool to plan your next week. You can do it in a sketchbook or notebook also. Perhaps it is fun to look back at past entries, I haven’t tried that myself yet, but the main purpose, the main benefit is that you get to steer your creative habit like a captain, instead of aimlessly and aimlessly floating in a big ocean.
The way I am doing it now is that I use the “Accountability Buddies” section on our Discord server. You are welcome to do it there, too! That has the accountability aspect built in. One week, I missed posting there, and immediately someone nudged me to do so. And you feel that you have to do as you promised you would do. It is out in the public, and you feel the pressure to follow up on your plan more. Plus, it is cool to see how others navigate their creative journey.
The Accountability Buddies section was initially a MasterMind. Masterminds go even further; a group of people that do roughly similar things, like for example run businesses, come together for these discussions. Each person has to make a presentation of what they did the past month, what they had intended to do, and how it went, and then the group gives advice, which is why it is called a mastermind; lots of minds pitch in to help you navigate your business, and the person devises a plan for what they will try to do in the next month. Next month, they present how they did, which is a way of holding them accountable.
I found that on my discord, people didn’t give advice as much, so we renamed it Accountability Buddies. Perhaps a Mastermind for artists could work if modified slightly; maybe everyone in the group should commit to making a specific piece of finished art, and then present it weekly, and others can give advice. Something like that could work, but that is perhaps the topic of another podcast.
In the accountability buddies section, there is a channel for every month. In them, you create a thread for your own.
But you can also perfectly well do this on your own, in a text file or notebook or sketchbook, or on your mobile phone! Also, you can do it any moment of the day, you don’t need reference. You can use it as a moment to relax, to contemplate your creative habit, to look up and see where you are on your journey and to reflect on it. It can be a very relaxing way to work on your art habit, if you don’t turn it into something stressful about ambitious goals. The art journey should be a mostly enjoyable one.
The benefits are significant. Maybe you are stuck in a loop, doing attempting the same approach over and over again, not being satisfied with the result. Taking a step back and seeing the bigger picture might suggest different approaches, or different goals even or it might suggest taking a temporary break. Look at it from different angles, scrutinize it, contemplate it. Also, you don’t have to solve it in one session. It might take weeks or months for you to start to see patterns, routines you want to break.
For me, two big realizations recently were that: there was no point to me planning precisely what I was going to do the next week, creatively, because, invariably, I would just lunge off in another direction and do something creative but completely different! And that was fine, I tended to be energized to do that thing and enjoyed doing it. I never suffer an art block. I just do what I feel like doing that day when I have time to be creative. And it is okay to not have a plan. And
And I discovered that what demotivated me the most was the “external validation” part of social media. As soon as I posted something on some platform, the vanity metrics were never enough, and that tended to be demotivating. Whereas if I focused on making things that pleased ME, that worked! It energized me.
For example, you are listening to this podcast now, or perhaps you are watching or listening to the YouTube version of it. The truth is, I find these fun to make! And I feel a sense of pride after finishing one. I get a dopamine hit from making them. I just need to remember to steer clear of the vanity metrics.
It’s those types of conclusions you arrive at when you regularly make time to reflect on your creative habit, to contemplate how it is going, to point out the road blocks you are experiencing, and to come up with plans for them.
One pitfall I would like to point out I am seeing others fall into, and I hope they don’t mind me saying this, I won’t name names, but I see some people use their Accountability Buddies threads to formulate ambitious plans for the next week, every week, week in and week out. They will draw X amount of hours a day (where X is a very high number), and draw Y drawings, where Y is again a very high number. And eventually, they miss their targets, and they want to stop doing that weekly reflection session, especially when they think they won’t have the time for such ambitious plans in the coming week.
And that’s not what I mean! That’s a road to burnout.
The goal is to simply look at what you did last week, consider what you think went right or wrong, and to then formulate solutions for what you think went wrong, and to come up with a plan to implement those solutions in the next week, to try these out.
If you come up with an ambitious schedule for the next week, that is possibly because you think you have to work hard to grow. But is that true? And does it matter if you take a longer to grow to where you want to be? Will the journey feel more pleasant if you slow down, or work mostly on the things you feel like working on in the moment? It’s those contemplations that might help you try new thing and discover things that work better for you.
You can work harder, or you can work smarter. I never understood that statement until literally now, as I write this script. You can design ambitious schedules every week with the idea that you will reach your goal if you just work harder, or you can take a step back and look at your process, and consider whether you are approaching it the right way, or whether you should be doing other things or going for different goals or generally approaching things differently.
These sessions should be about pausing, taking a break from your hectic life, slowing down, and observing, thinking, and then coming up with a plan that suits the life style you want, because ambitious schedules, week after week, burn you out. That can be the life style you are going for. Some people enjoy it, though it can be unhealthy. But maybe take a step back. Maybe you are working on the wrong things!
For me, reflecting on the past week, coming up with the plan for next week, and following through on the plan are all three fun.
To be honest, I often veer wildly off the plan I had made for myself. Just last week, I had realized that the external validation aspect of the vanity metrics on social media demotivated me, so I planned to not post anything and be private in my sketchbook. Only to then make two long-form YouTube videos, three short-form YouTube videos and a poll instead! So much for staying off platforms. But I learn from that! I rediscovered that I enjoy making podcasts, videos, I found more efficient ways to do certain things, and I found ways to help me draw more as I make these podcasts: I film myself drawing for the YouTube version of this podcast, and I have decided to try my hand at drawing the YouTube thumbnails, really illustrating them, designing them as if they were posters or book covers. Drawing one takes me a day, which is probably the reason no one else is doing that; people either post a frame from the video, or a collage of media they have, or an AI image, as a thumbnail. Which is fine, the thumbnail needs to raise questions the potential viewer or listener is interested in knowing the answer to. But drawing these thumbnails myself makes the thumbnails unique, stand out, and it allows me to draw even more.
I try to steer clear of ambitious goals. I don’t formulate something like “Make five podcasts this week!”, instead opting to just try it out, make podcasts, I don’t know how many yet, to feel how it feels. To see if I enjoy it. You can only become very good at something if you enjoy doing it, because then you will become addicted to it.
Measuring how many you made of something does not give you an indication of how it felt while making these things. Seth Godin came up with the concept of a “false proxy” a metric that can be easily measured, and that is a completely wrong indicator for your primary goal, leading to misguided efforts.
To give you an example from competitive swimming: you want to swim faster, and so, if you have a one-hour swimming session, your goal could be to swim one more lane than you did in the previous one-hour session. That is measurable, and should be a proxy for how well you are improving, or not? Well, no. That is just a false proxy. Because swimming is a lot about technique. Water resistance is something like 850 times the resistance of air, so small improvements to your technique can lead to huge improvements in your swimming speed, and the way to practice skills is through what they call drills which you need to perform slowly so that you can start to really feel what it is supposed to feel like when you are doing it right.
Let me repeat that.
So that you can start to feel what it is supposed to feel like when you are doing it right.
That same holds for your weekly plan: instead of using something measurable but useless like how many hours you drew or how many drawings you made, focus on how you feel, in all aspects of it; the preparation, where you are, your environment when you are making art, the type of art you make, the style you work in, the subject, the drawing tools, whether you feel generally rested, relaxed, et cetera. The million hours, the million drawings, will come.
So don’t use these weekly reflections to turn your life into a death march, but instead, use it to improve how you feel about your creative habit, and you will most likely enjoy the weekly reflection session.
Thank you for listening.
Yours sincerely,
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