The Two Ways Artists Can Compete
My tips to avoid burning out competing against others.
avoid environments where my productivity is measured in volume. I’m not a factory. I’d instead try to do things no one else is doing and be the best in that space by default. That immediately makes me the most productive person in that field! In coding, you occasionally had the idiot manager who thought you could measure productivity by counting the number of lines of code written.
That is a terrible idea.
Copy, paste, paste, paste, paste, paste, paste, paste, paste, paste, paste, paste, paste, paste, paste, paste, paste, paste, paste, paste, paste, paste.
I was active on Instagram years back. At that moment, the mantra was that you had to post every day, and tutorial carousels did well. The problem was that making a tutorial carousel took me more than a day, which quickly led to me burning out. I said no to that and started a weekly newsletter, which means I only have to produce one-seventh of that.
It’s so much easier when you find an environment where you can work on your own schedule and make it as good as possible. You can figure out a very easy-to-maintain schedule, with oodles of time off to rest, recharge, and do other things.
There are two ways to compete: you can make more for less than your competition, leading to a downward spiral profit-wise as price becomes the differentiator, or you can make something different from what your competition makes. I prefer to focus on the latter.
My Instagram posts were subject to the former: to compete, I had to make more and better posts than others.
Practice Drawing This, on the other hand, is about offering things you can not find anywhere else. You can find them on the site overview page.
People don’t search for it because they don’t know it exists and that they want it. This means I have to show them, possibly on social media. But not by making a copycat tutorial.
When the game Quake came out, it became a huge success, and many gaming studios wanted to license the Quake engine so that they could also make successful games.
ID Software had shown that the Quake engine, a new development at the time, could be used to make successful games.
The problem with creating new things that didn’t exist before is that you cannot predict beforehand whether they will be valuable and successful.
When you create something new, you show people its benefits, and if they see the value, it can take off in a huge way. You are the best offer by default because you don’t have competition.
For artists, that can be an art style. When you spend years designing your visual language, and an audience finds it and falls in love with it, others can’t easily copy you. You’re not competing. You’re the best and, initially, the only one working in that style. If the market wants it, you dictate the schedule and prices. If your style is what they want, you are the only game in town.
Often, new ideas are not good, but when they are and you acted on them, you’re the only one offering.
The only way to find out is to try.
Yours sincerely,
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