It’s easy to get caught up in trying to measure your progress towards goals – whether you’re achieving them or not. How many books have I published? How many people have bought a print from my Instagram account? How many followers do I have? How many awards have I won? What ‘success’ looks like is different for everyone, and it changes with every new goal we achieve. So, some wise words from Coach Eric Taylor from Friday Night Lights resonate with me when I start to get distracted by whether I’m being ‘successful’ or not:
Success is not a goal, it’s a by product – Coach Eric Taylor, East Dillon Lions, Friday Night Lights
It’s easy to think of each artist working in your ‘industry’ as competition – we’re trained to think of things that way from when we’re very young. But, as I’ve written before, one of the greatest things about art-making is that the only competition is ourselves. It’s up to us what we want to focus on – that might be hitting 128k followers on Instagram, or it might simply trying to stay on the f**$!&g bus.