How a Kmart Paint by Numbers Changed My Life
I bought a paint by numbers from Kmart for $9, and it’s taught me more about life than anything else ever has.
I started this piece of trash back in September of 2022. At the time I was a working musician, barely making enough to get by, and I had a LOT of time on my hands. I would work Friday and Saturday nights, and the rest of the time was mine to fill. I bought four paint by numbers because I felt like it would be a fun thing to do with my mates. We had one initial painting session, and then I was the only one to continue painting afterwards, naturally.
Mine was a particularly intricate and difficult paint by numbers. I would just pick it up every now and then and paint for half an hour. Each time I would add more little bits to it, and it still looked like nothing. About four months passed and it was maybe at 10% completion, and literally was just lines of paint. It felt like the endless staircase trick in Super Mario 64 — the trick being that the more you climb, the more there is — it felt never ending.
Then something amazing happened.
After about five months of consistently revisiting and painting this stupid Kmart canvas, the first actual image appeared. It was a boat! It was impressionistic and kinda cool, AND looked somewhat like the image was supposed to. The further away from it you were, the more it looked like the real deal. Suddenly the painting was at 40%! It wasn’t finished, but you could see everything there, and you could tell that if the path was followed to completion, the painting would be there. Progress from this point was still as slow, but there was this hope borne from potential. The consistent act of doing the thing had actually worked to make the image — who would’ve thought! But that’s the thing-
Whenever undertaking a task of any significance and difficulty, it always feels impossible.
When you are in it, attacking it every day, and making no observable progress, you are flooded with thoughts of pointlessness, feelings of boredom and desperation, and fantasies of giving up.
I realised that for most of the pursuits I had undertaken so far in my life, I had let those thoughts, feelings, and fantasies get the better of me. I had always thrown in the towel at about 10%. Even when I’d made it to 40% and seen the potential, I would fall back into old habits. I would look at the 40% and not appreciate it, and become disheartened by the lack of visible progress. But the journey from 40% to 80% is almost the same as 10% to 40%. Progress is difficult to perceive until it is impossible to ignore. And, if you care about what you are doing, your self esteem, beliefs, and motivation will always be assaulted — by the outside world, by yourself, and by the unchanging nature of the task at hand.
But yet, this painting eventually gets done? And I am happy with it. Proud of it. So what does this teach?
Everything worthwhile requires faith.
It doesn’t matter what religion you do or don’t believe or what your worldview is — faith is the only thing that can get you from 10% to 40%, and then get you all the way. Because faith is unyielding in the face of harsh evidence. Faith withstands when the logical processes of the brain pick apart every choice you’ve made to end up in the terrible position you’re in now. Because the truth is, when you’re 40% along the way of a scientific dissertation, to get from 40% to 50% could require you to discover that the initial experiment was flawed and needs to be redone, meaning that almost everything you’ve worked on so far is useless — that will not feel like progress. That will feel like a death sentence. And your brain, with all of its logical capacity, will find a million reasons for you to escape. Maybe to explore a different hypothesis; maybe to find a different career pursuit entirely. If you aren’t equipped with faith — a faith that you are on the right path, and that this setback is actually an important moment on the journey to 100% — you will fall.
So find faith in something. Even if it is just doing a $9 paint by numbers from Kmart! It taught me what I needed to know about faith and changed my life. Not bad value for money I reckon.
“Progress is difficult to perceive until it is impossible to ignore” — thoughtsfromazoomer
