Practice and Share Your Creative Craft to Improve

When anyone looks at my artwork today and says that I'm talented, I say "thank you" and then show them my progress over thirty years, show them my first drawings, and ask them if they see talent in those. Typically they don't. Some people like Mozart and other child prodigies are born with the wiring that gives them an edge - and that is rightfully called "talent." That is not what I have. I found something that I liked to do (keep visual journals) and practiced it - for thirty years. This is not a novel technique - it's something that teachers have been stressing for years. Malcom Gladwell has popularized the idea of it taking 10,000 hours to master a craft - the essence of practice. One of the most important aspects to that practice - is that most people need feedback from others to really improve. The plethora of platforms available today to share your craft in communities and get feedback on it has made that process much easier.

One of the reasons that I've always loved keeping journals is that they are a linear progression of images recording a period of time. They are a visual slice of my life. Sometimes they span less than a month, sometimes they span a year or two. Looking at the earlier ones and then the later ones, I see the progression of my craft, the experiments that I did, the record of my thoughts and ideas. I see myself getting better.

Typically everyone's first watercolors looks pretty bad. Mine did too. You don't know how to control the water, you don't know about mixing colors, you don't know about keeping parts of the page untouched. Mine were no exception.

As I practiced over the span of decades, I got better.

For years I filled journals and put them on the shelf, trying various ways to share the images on the web as the technology evolved. One of my first websites was one I made from the journal, photographs and audio recordings from a safari in Tanzania twenty years ago. In that, I filled a 100-page journal and shot 18 rolls of film (36 pictures each) in ten days. It was an intense experience.

When I found the Facebook Urban Sketchers group and the global community of Urban Sketchers, my creative output exploded as I saw how others were creatively capturing their worlds and I started sharing with the community and started scanning and sharing my work online on Facebook, Instagram, my blog, and with Adobe Lightroom.

When I talk to people in my career coaching on how to develop their skills, I give them this recipe:

• Practice your skill often: quantity over quality. Give yourself a creative schedule and stick to it.
• Share your work with your community using any of the free resources available like WordPress, GitHub, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, SoundCloud, Thingiverse, app stores, etc. to get feedback - and use that feedback to improve. Ask your community questions about how to improve your work. Don't worry that the first steps look bad - your community may have some tips to improve that you haven't thought of.
• Have a way to show your progress over time. When you're in the moment, you don't always see yourself getting better, but when you see the progression from first to last, you really understand how your practicing helped you improve.

I saw Debbie Millman, the creator of the popular Design Matters podcast talk at Adobe Max a few years back and she looked back at the first few years of her podcast and lamented the poor quality of the recordings. Those early recordings helped her develop her style and craft to make her the success that she is today. An important point here, is that as you get better, sharing your progress with those who are just starting a craft, helps them see that there is a path of practice that they can follow as well.

Share your progress to help others progress.

Listen to what Ira Glass, the creator of the radio show, This American Life has to say on practicing your creative work: