I was at an event today and met a lady who was interested in drawing caricatures for a living. I love helping people or pointing them in the right direction so I gave her my contact info. Back in the days I hesitated doing this but after a while I realized I was safe.
Why? Because almost NO ONE did what they said they were going to do. Most the artists I came across either knew better than I did—so they weren’t coachable. They wanted immediate success or they found another shiny object to go after.
And some just wanted a “hook up”. I met a kid who was 19 and after one meeting he just straight up asked for a job. Nothing wrong with that but he didn’t have the skills. I told him I’d point him to where he could work on his chops and suddenly meeting me was about as fun as shopping for a vasectomy.
A lot of people get scared of the work. They want success like my buddy in high school wanted his women, fast and easy.
But us unreasonable peeps in the Artist Paradigm know better. We do our work because we enjoy it. It’s our voice. It’s a piece of who we are. I love that Megan Macedo closes most of her emails with, “keep doing your work.” Again, it shows that we need to run TO the work, not FROM it.
And the more work that you do the better you get at it. So become SO skilled and SO good at what you do that no one can deny you. And by ‘no one’ I mean YOU. Doing the work is the first step in showing YOU that YOU can do it.
So when your head trash speaks up and tells you that you’re not good enough or that you can’t do this. You can answer back with confidence that…
“I got this.’
Adam