World 1-1, or, How to Begin Again
The legs on my daughter’s crib are upside-down. I know this because I built the crib. I was exhausted when building it. I noticed the mistake after the crib was completed.
Is it safe? Yes.
Does anyone notice? Well, my daughter doesn’t care, she’s demanding waffles right now.
Should I start again? Disassemble the entire crib just for aesthetics? Absolutely not.
Despite my keen eye for detail I’ve learned to pick my battles. Making a living as a full-time creative requires me to start again over and over.
Computers have crashed on me causing manuscripts to evaporate. Hard drives have fried— burning hundreds of gigs of footage. Software has become outdated and not the industry norm anymore. I’m currently teaching myself Blender, an open-source 3D graphics software, so that I can stay ahead of the curve and build cool things, for clients and for myself.
The Art of the Restart
The only way to survive as a creative is to learn to embrace the beginner’s mind. Stubborn artists who refuse to have this mindset die a slow and miserable death. Every time an artist sets out on a new project they begin again. They learn to start from scratch.
This is true for individual projects or an artist's style.
Picasso had several styles throughout his career, from the Blue Period to Analytical Cubism to Surrealism, ending with more expressive and whimsically colorful scenes. Bob Dylan, the king of folk music, shocked his fans at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 when he came on stage with his electric guitar.
This may be the part where am I supposed to say you have to learn to love the blank page. That’s BS. It sometimes sucks. But I've learned that this pain stems from the body's subconscious response to resist change. To begin again is to expose yourself in a new way.
What I've done is take the learnings from each experience and apply them to the next project. This way I'm never really starting at zero.
There have been so many instances of restarting my career as a creative. I've learned to embrace these restarts by accepting that all I have control over is the work and the lessons I have from previous projects. I do not have any control over the result of how it's received. This has allowed me to, as Bruce Lee said, move like water around obstacles and be open to where the art takes me.
Be Like Water
In 2015, I built a snooze button for Gmail. Three years before Google came out with the one you use today. I thought surely this plugin would be featured in Hacker News or Wired but nope…people used it, feedback was good, but it didn't go viral. However, from that experience, I now knew how coding works. This allowed me to become proficient in building websites with custom email capture tools.
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Years later I was working with a client and discovered their outsourced marketing team was lying to them. I inspected the code on the client's website and proved it.
In 2019, I wrote a sci-fi novel and partnered with a digital artist called Beeple to have his work in my book. In 2021 he sold one of his pieces for $28 million, sending him out of obscurity and into the culture. I thought— “okay maybe that’ll boost the readership of my book!” Not quite. But it did teach about digital art and made starting the next project much easier.
In 2020, my short film Spirits won a couple of awards at film festivals in Tokyo, Montreal, LA, and New York. I figured this could steer me toward studios to fund the feature film I'd written. Instead, I had to start again, armed with the resources I gained from that film and used it to launch my commercial production company.
Every time I thought I was going from point A to B it was point A to 音.
This perpetually placed me back to some version of square one. Or World 1-1 in Super Mario Brothers, the first level of the game.
The way I’ve learned how to not lose my mind with these constant restarts is by telling myself this is what a creative does. This is the process.
Careers are seldom linear. It’s only looking back that we can connect the dots.
And so, as this new year starts, I am back at World 1-1 once again, facing the blank page, and working on a whole slew of new projects that I’ve never done before. The way I stay on top of it is by breaking the steps down into smaller and smaller tasks. Granularity flattens complexity. ?
If you’re starting something new just tell yourself “This is what I do” and push through what Seth Godin calls The Dip. That’s the best way I’ve found to complete things.
?I’ll see you at the starting line.
Community Manager - Business Owner - Neighbourhood Builder
8 个月Nicely said!