Allow yourself to be a beginner

Someone asked on Twitter, at what point can you start calling yourself an expert, and I said (knowingly bluntly) never. The more experienced you are, the more you know how much else there is to learn and to me this makes too big of a grey area to place any arbitrary line down at which expertise begins. (It’s not 10,000 hours of practice.)

Becoming proficient in one area of art even has negative consequences. As a beginner it’s your only job to span the infamous gap of work that sucks so much you never want to make art again. When you reach the other side, it’s easy to stay in the comfort zone. Why would you ever want to return to the land of suck again?

There’s a fundamental difference between being motivated by the results and the process. It’s cliché, but life is a journey, not a destination. It’s also ironic that you can only learn this through experience — at least it’s been a slow process for me. So you start by chasing your art heroes but end up discovering that the journey of growth is what makes you an artist, not the works you’ve done along the way. You realize that you will always be one step ahead of your work. The art is chasing you, not the other way around.

Once you embrace that your work will never look as good as it does in your head — when you understand that this is fundamentally what makes you better yourself — it becomes easier to jump into new territory and not see it as a place of pain, but a learning journey worthy of traversing in itself.

Art is an adventure and you are the explorer, not the high score chart.