Disclaimer: You may or may not want to listen to me since I may or may not actually know what I’m talking about.

WRITE/DRAW/WHATEVER YOUR THING IS EVERY SINGLE DAY

Guys lemme tell you a story. Once upon I time I was about… 15 years old? And I decided I wanted to be an animator, for Disney. Now you have to understand something very important, and that very important thing is as follows: I COULDN’T DRAW. I wish I knew where my old stuff was so I could scan it in and show it to you to prove it. But I don’t know where it is so I can’t. Regardless, the point remains: I couldn’t draw. Once I decided I wanted to go into animation, I pulled out a sketchbook and tried to draw something. It was **awful**.

So you know what I did?

I started to draw

every

single

day

for months and months that eventually melted into years. I filled up sketchbooks every few months. I spent hours and hours a day drawing.

Slowly, I started to improve. It was a step by step process. I remember learning how to use basic shapes and things like circles to “build” characters from and I remember how much better everything got after that. Even then I still had a long way to go. But I was getting better and better and pretty soon my work was very much improved from how it had been that fateful day when I decided to “learn to draw”.

So by that time (I was about 17 or 18) I figured, what do artists do? They do art school stuff! So I took AP Art in high school. Looking back on it I was woefully unprepared, I’d only been really drawing for a couple of years after all, but I was game and took it anyway. At the end of the year I rounded up what I thought was my best stuff and sent it off to the AP scoring people.

A few months later I got my score: a 1. The lowest score possible.

I was insulted, and bitter.

I mean, really bitter.

So I quit drawing.

…

Yep, that’s right. Cause I got offended rather than choose to improve.

I didn’t start “really drawing” again for a good few years after that. In that short time since then I’ve seen how much I’ve improved and I wonder how much I would’ve improved if I hadn’t quit the first time.

DON’T FREAKING QUIT

I hate to break it to you but you aren’t going to become a crazy-awesome artist or the next bestselling author or the next chart-topping musician in two years. Probably not even five years. I know we all have fantasies of that sort of thing, heck, I have those fantasies all the time, but it’s just not feasible.

THIS DOESN’T EXCUSE YOU FROM TRYING EVERY DAY AND/OR MAKING A PLAN BECAUSE “OH IT’S JUST GOING TO TAKE TEN YEARS ANYWAY”

It’s really easy to procrastinate this stuff. Guess what: if you keep procrastinating you are never going to get to where you want to be.

If you are a creative person, I mean really truly one of those people who feels like they are going to die if they don’t do that thing they do (you will know what I’m talking about if you are)– well, chances are very good you’re prone to procrastination and/or getting discouraged early, since that seems to walk hand-in-hand with creativity, but you have to realize that this whole thing is just 95% perseverance. 95% realizing that yes, you’re going to have that crappy job for the next ten years but it only has to be ten years if you’re willing to put in the extra-curricular work on plying your craft.

Do I sound like a bad motivational poster yet?

No?

Okay, terrible jokes aside, I’ve had tons and tons of creative friends lately who are getting discouraged. I’m not going to tell you “don’t get discouraged” because everyone gets discouraged. I get discouraged. It’s a part of the process.

I am going to say: be careful. Don’t let “being discouraged” turn into “never getting anything done”.

If you believe you have something special to show the world, then you do.

A wise man once said that 80% of people in the creative world quit before “making it”.

To which I have two things to say:

One: Don’t be one of those 80%,

and

Two: Man, imagine all the cool stuff we’d have right now if they didn’t quit.

Just sayin’.