Be a Student of your Game

I, like most people I’d guess, am plagued with the inability to focus on things I find mundane, unimportant, or boring; yet have the blessing of being able to focus indefinitely on those things which I find interesting, exciting, or curious

In fact, I would often call-out my teachers whenever they assigned busy-work or work that added little value.

“No Mrs. P. I still think killing indigenous species of bugs and pinning their corpses to a foam board for the purpose of spending 45-minutes to examine basic traits of their anatomy was a colossal waste of time.”

I say that – yet almost 15 years later, I still have those random bits of knowledge from that project floating around, as if waiting for the right time to reveal themselves and prove their usefulness.

That’s the thing about knowledge. It’s always useless. That is, until it is met with the right context.

As a child, I loved watching the History and Discovery channel, that is, until all their content focused on aliens or super volcanoes/tornadoes/hurricanes/earthquakes/etc.

I remember as a kid watching a WWII documentary with a veteran, a former airman, sharing an event where the wings of his plane caught fire. I remember quite clearly of learning that planes carry fuel in their wings.

That piece of knowledge was embedded into my mind. Is it useful knowledge? No really. Until it was.

A decade later I’m sitting in college, listening to a lecture on various compositing techniques in Photoshop. The professor was creating a scene with a plane that had crashed into the earth. She was adding fire effects to the plane when she asked, “Should I add fire to the broken wing?”

Without hesitation, I said yes. The instructor raised her eyebrow and asked why.

“Because airplanes carry fuel in their wings,” I said.

She smirked, clearly impressed by my apparent knowledge for the random, and began adding fire to the wing.

I share this anecdote not to impress you with my random array of trivial knowledge, but to impress upon you the fact that knowledge is crucial to our ability to create. At the right time, in the right circumstance, knowledge becomes our ally in thinking differently, working creatively, and creating uniquely.

In fact, knowledge is the precursor to inspiration. Inspiration is this elusive muse which seems to come and go on a whim. You cannot command or control inspiration. You can’t hold it captive and enslave inspiration. Inspiration does as it pleases.

Yet what I’ve found is that the more I learn, the more I fill my mind with knowledge, both related and unrelated to my field, the more inspiration greets me with her ideas.

Jake Parker, a professional illustrator known for starting the Inktober event, talks a lot about filling your creative bank account. It’s the same concept I’ve been describing. Essentially, he stresses the importance of learning, observing, and living to fill your mind with various bits of knowledge and experiences. Each of these become a separate point in your mind.

What happens, with more points in your mind, you can begin finding links, bridging together the seemingly unrelated to create something new. This creative bank account allows you more and more to pull from it as reference or inspiration for your work.

Inspiration muse. Creative bank account. Call it what you may, the point is the same. The more knowledge and life experience you have, the more you can create and share with the world.

Find knowledge in everything

I want to be quite clear. What I am not saying is that you should approach every bit of knowledge like an established knowledge expert who goes as deep as they can go in their field. They spent a lifetime growing their knowledge in that field and you’ve only got one lifetime to grow your own field of expertise.

What I am saying is approach everything as a student. And I mean everything.

What I find most inspiring in children is the way they approach the world. Everything is so new to them. They’re forced to ask questions, to experiment and test. They do this out of necessity and curiosity. They don’t know, and yet, it is because they don’t know that they seek to know.

Unfortunately, it seems in our teenage years that the fear of being stupid, wrong, and ignorant outweigh our curiosity. We stop being curious, stop experimenting, and stop testing ourselves and the world around us because of fear.

Fear, while keeps you safe, will keep you from growing if it rules your life.

Instead, have a mind like a child. There is a world of new and exciting things. Read books and interesting articles. Watch documentaries. Listen to podcasts. Best of all, the things you consume don’t even have to be related to your field of interest, not on the surface anyways. Often, we expand our thinking by taking what is unrelated and finding a link between the two.

Even as you consume content on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and any other platform, consume it like a student.

• What are they doing that I like and could apply to my work?
• What would I do better or differently?
• How did they accomplish that effect?
• This made me feel this emotion. How could I evoke that emotion in my work?

Have an imaginary dialogue with the creator. Ask them about their process. Imagine being the creator and going through the steps of their work. Where did they start? What challenges and roadblocks did they face? What moments of inspiration led them to a certain decision?

The number of things you can reveal about yourself, your values, your work, all by observing, questioning, and learning are immense. But you will never discover any of it unless you’re willing to be curious.

Heck! Even the Dos Equis guy is teaching us a valuable lesson. “Stay thirsty.” Stay thirsty for knowledge, for growth, for learning, for experimentation and exploration, for discovery.

When you are thirsty, you find something to quench your thirst. When you are thirsty for knowledge and growth, find something to quench that thirst.

Discover your sources of knowledge

Where is your well of knowledge that you draw from when you need to learn more? Of course, we’ve long since had libraries to find books on various topics. And now we have search engines and YouTube to find just about anything.

But I mean more specifically. Where do you go to discover things you would have never thought to explore? What email lists do you subscribe to that offer interesting anecdotes, thoughts, tips and tricks? Do you have a favorite podcast you like to listen to that brings in different professionals?

The goal is to have a source that continually offers new information, and adds to your creative bank account. You need to find your core sources that will not only educate you, but will inspire you.

Part of the joy in finding these sources of information is you may also discover your mentor.

Not a mentor in the traditional sense of the word. But someone whose message resonates with who you are. These are individuals who regularly put out content that motivates, inspires, guides, and influences your work.

They’re everywhere, you just have to look for them. For some, they may be big names like Gary Vaynerchuk, Brené Brown, Oprah Winfrey, or Tony Robbins. Alternatively they can be creators of various levels of fame and success. It doesn’t matter who they are. It matters what their message is and if it moves you to create.

I mentioned Jake Parker earlier. I’ve never met him. I’ve never interacted with him online either. Instead, I listen and watch his content as a silent spectator. And yet, because his message in part resonates with me, I listen, I learn, and I strive to grow and create. Because he’s willing to teach others through his channel, I have the benefit of learning from him directly.

That is the power of today’s social channels. You can learn from industry experts wherever you are and often for free.

Find your mentors. Devour their content. But here’s the important part: apply their content.

As I stated in the beginning, knowledge without application is useless; so apply what you learn to your creative endeavor.

To recap:

• Be curious
• Approach everything as a student.
• Find sources of information and inspiration
• Discover your mentors

If you want to learn more, you can listen to our conversation on the subject on YouTube.

For those who are curious, I’ve included a brief narrative about how I discovered one of my earlier mentors:

About a year and a half ago, I was looking to get back into illustration. I knew I had a long way to go but thought that a good place to begin was to discover my art style.

So like any beginner, I went straight to Google and typed “How to find your art style.” I came across an interesting article which recommended finding three artists whose style resonates with you.

“Huh,” I thought. What did I do next? I searched “Best Illustrators.” Brilliant I know.

A little digging around, along with some discussion with friends, led me to identify more specifically the kind of art I liked: ink.

Going down that trail, I began discovering various artists I liked. One of them being Jake Parker.

Now Jake Parker has a YouTube channel, so I checked him out there. He had various art tutorials which were interesting. But what really got me excited were his videos which talked more about his methodology, his mindset, his work philosophies.

One of the video was Jake Parker interviewing various artists, asking them for one piece of advice for those striving to become art professionals. One of the creators was Sean McCabe (better known as Seanwes), and his advice was to “show up everyday.”

From there, I started following Seanwes, consuming his content, and taking his courses.

Honestly though, he wasn’t really saying anything new. Most of what he talks about are things I already knew.

Yet for some reason, whether it was the right timing, me being more receptive, or his way of saying it, he lit a fire under me to be courageous enough to dare to do my own thing.

And that’s the whole point. Even the topics we discuss at Bigbad aren’t new. You’ve probably heard similar points elsewhere. But that’s not the point. For some, our content will be like the rest. You’ll consume some then move on. Others will connect with us and will stay for a long time.

Seanwes’ message resonated with me personally, and that’s what mattered. Who do you resonate with?

Again, I’ll repeat what I said earlier: It doesn’t matter who they are. It matters what their message is and if it moves you to create.