MANIFESTO!

A letter to young artists, and creative beginners of all ages.

(credentials: me as an elephant, in public, circa 2004)

The most enduring and common question I get as an artist is "What would you tell a young artist getting started?" My feelings about the question, and my answer, have changed over the years, but here is the TL;DR:

Listen. You don't learn how to swim by reading about water, ok? You learn by getting in and figuring out what your arms are supposed to do while your legs must do something else entirely.

That's the whole thing. That's the manifesto. Get in. 

Do something, do it again tomorrow, and then do more of what feels right. Do it scared. Do it broke. Do it wrong. Do it in public before you're ready, because you will never feel ready. Never. The time is going to pass anyway. Don't worry about how long it takes. Worry about never starting.

Make bad art. The first step to being good at something is being terrible at it. It's not hard, it's just new. I'm going to say that again because just that phrase has given me so much brave energy. It's how I learned Shopify. It's how I learned silk screen and risograph. It's how I learned to paint. It's not hard, it's just new. Get used to being bad at things. Get used to feeling embarrassed. The road to mastery goes straight up Cringe Mountain before it gets anywhere worth going. You will post the thing that flops. You will say the thing that lands wrong. You will build the thing nobody uses. This is not failure. It builds grit. There are just no shortcuts around Cringe Mountain, and anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you fools gold. 

While you're climbing, people will have something to say. They always do.

Here's a filter that will save you years: don't take criticism from someone whose advice you wouldn't take. And don't take advice from someone whose life you wouldn't want yours to look like. 

The other voices are background noise.

An important cheat code for your journey: No matter how public you get, no strangers are thinking about you for longer than a minute. Not the way you think they are. Even if your thing goes viral for a day. They already forgot. They scrolled past. They're back to thinking about their own stuff, same as you.

You are only in competition with yourself. 

Stop caring now. Not later. Not once you've "made it." Now. The permission you're waiting for is never coming.

One more thing.

Something I overheard recently is that "playfulness" doesn't scale, and it really got my hackles up. I jus6t don't think that's right. When I first learned to swim, I was playing, not training for the Olympics. Same as most of us. Same as most Olympians, probably. This also applies to art and creative pursuits in general.

Playfulness is the thing that keeps you in the water long enough to learn to swim. The fun and the joy is what makes all this survivable. Once, with a dead truck on a windy road through the mountains of California, my travel companion, also an artist, for longer than me, taught me a phrase that applies here, and I want to share it with you too, because it helps me all the time. Before we even survived the overheating motor ordeal, on the literal side of the road, he gave me half of his tuna salad sandwich and said: "If we'll laugh about this later, we can also laugh about it now." And we did. And we survived. And so will you. 

Jump in!