4568 Consecutive Days
“Doing anything is better than doing nothing” — Beeple

Mike “Beeple” Winkelmann is a graphic designer and one of the creators of the Everyday art movement. Every single day Beeple creates a CGI image, from start to finish, and posts it online. He hasn’t missed a day in 4568 days, or over 12 years. As someone who struggles to do something consistently for even a week, this blew my mind.
I found out about the everyday art project and Beeple when he was featured in a YouTube video by Corridor Crew. They had an Everyday challenge in the studio. Everyone was given 45 minutes to create and post an “Everyday”. Throughout the video, we checked in with all the participants over their 45-minute challenge. Beeple’s mini-interviews were laced with profanity, and proclamations of creating “hot steaming butt trash” but, he also provided an insight into his process that resonated with me.
“People‘s expectations are too high”
Beeple continuously referred to his piece as “trash”, and it didn’t bother him in the slightest. Why? Because he was only spending 45 minutes on it, and you can’t create perfection that time frame. According to Beeple the only way to keep up with something, especially a 12+ year art project, is to take your expectations down to a realistic level.
This hit home with me big time.
I am a perfectionist and my own worst critic. The last blog that I wrote was the first time I had sat down and written a story probably since high school. I didn’t think it was very good but it was late and I needed to post it. After I posted it and began to beat myself up over the quality (yay anxiety!), I remembered what Beeple said. This was my first attempt at blogging, of course, it wasn’t great. Nobody writes a masterpiece in the first attempt. I needed to lower my expectations to a realistic level and give myself a bit of a break. I tried it and learned something. The next one will be a little better, and the one after that better still.
“Doing Anything is Better than Doing Nothing”
Learning a skill takes time and practice. Experts agree that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become a master at anything. Why would I expect my first blog to be anything other than “hot steaming butt trash”? As a person who has never tried to create anything out of fear of being not good, aka failing, keeping my expectations realistic will be a struggle. Doing anything always comes with the risk of failure, but with failure comes learning. If I have learned something than I am further ahead than if I had just done nothing.