How long can you sit with your eyes closed and do nothing? 1 minute? 2 minutes? 30 minutes? Why is it so difficult to do nothing? Doing nothing should be the ultimate, shouldn’t it? Isn’t that what’s at the bottom of the ‘more efficiency hyper-capitalism’ well? What we get to do when we have enough money and no debt? We wouldn’t have to go anywhere, think about anything, and we conserve plenty of energy. We could do whatever we want, which, I hear, is nothing. Doing nothing is the opposite of work. Isn’t it? I’ve heard many people say that when they retire, they’ll do ‘nothing’. But having watched my parents’ (and their friends) go through that, it’s never true.

Nothing makes us panic.

Doing nothing is so hard, that doing anything is a better alternative. Scrolling through Instagram or Facebook or Twitter. Something. Watching endless series on Netflix or YouTube. Something. Refreshing email. Something. Or is it?

If we need to do something to save us from nothing, the question becomes what’s the best type of something we can do?

There are two types of illustrators: Chameleons and Peacocks.

A chameleon is not instantly recognisable by their work alone. They are regularly playing with mediums, styles, and materials. Trying on new looks. They adapt, whole-heartedly, to the text or environment that they’re given. Their range varies widely. Ann James and Bruce Whatley are good examples of chameleons.

A peacock, on the other hand, stands out. They are instantly recognisable through their work, no matter what subject matter or context in which they’re working. They often work in consistent mediums, styles, or materials. People say they ‘have a look’. Quentin Blake, Anna Walker, Oliver Jeffers are all excellent examples of peacocks.

But, just like peacocks and chameleons in the natural environment, neither one is better or worse than the other. One’s strength is another’s weakness, and that’s OK. In a world that rewards extroverts and ego, it’s easy to aspire to be a peacock. To have a ‘style’, an easily recognised ‘brand’. And a brand is easily confused with a ‘voice’. But it’s possible to have a long, flourishing career as either one. And it’s also possible to begin a career as one and become the other.

When it comes to art-making, what’s most important isn’t whether you’re developing yourself as a peacock or chameleon. What matters is that you’re making work you’re proud of, and making it often.

Circus performers have two modes; practice and performance. In practice, they fall off the high-wire, they drop the flaming clubs, the animals don’t always listen. No one is there to watch, so it’s OK that these things happen. In fact, they’re supposed to happen in practice. That’s how they learn new tricks, train each other, get better.

In performance, there are fewer mistakes (sometimes none). The big-top is filled with wide-eyed families with handfuls of popcorn and soda who are expecting to get what they paid for: feats of strength, daring, and bravery, all executed to near perfection because of all the time and effort they know the performers went through, behind closed doors. The audience doesn’t need to see the practice, the performance tells them whether practice happened or not. In fact, what makes it feel magical is trying to imagine what sort of practice happened to make such a performance possible at all – the hours, the grinding, the grit – is all behind closed doors at a circus.

The two streams, practice and performance, are critical to any creative work, especially the work that feels like magic.

The algorithms, however, demand more performance every day. It’s what sells ads for them. If the circus master put on twice the number of shows this week, they’d sell twice the amount of popcorn and soda. Word will spread twice as fast, too. But there are only so many hours in a day. And if more time is spent performing, there’s less time available for practising. It’s likely that, over time, the show will get stale because the troop hasn’t got time to learn new things, to innovate, to train. Performing takes energy and focus, so the troop will likely get tired, make more mistakes. They’ll probably start to get bored, so they’ll try things they’ve never done before while everyone is watching. They’ll mess up – a lot. Eventually, the crowd who came to see the performance, not the practice, will be disappointed. There’s no magic anymore. Word will cease to spread, the popcorn and soda sales will slump. The circus may not even survive.

And so here I am, sitting alone in my studio practising, I think. I’m wondering whether the sketching I’m doing right now is for me, or ‘them’. I felt like sketching, I really did. But now this little doodle I’ve drawn is really great, and I’m *really* happy with it, it *could* be a performance piece. A quick snap of a photo, three taps, and it’s gone from practice to performance, just like that. Or, I could keep practising, in private. Now that I’ve found a thread like this sketch, I can pull on it and see what else it leads me. Follow the thought, in private, and maybe, after hours and hours of practice, it’ll make it into the performance in some way. Maybe it’ll make the performance feel more magical for everyone.

How do you choose a wine if you’re not into wine? Standing in front of a shelf of over 1200 wine bottles, all of varying prices, designs, flavour profiles or sizes, the choice is overwhelming. If you know nothing about wine, awards help. If something is awarded, and something isn’t, perhaps the awarded one is a ‘safer’ bet. One that most people will like.

The problem with the one most people will like is that it’s very rarely the one that a few people will love. To be the one that most people like means it’ll never be a cult favourite, it probably won’t surprise. If you buy an awarded wine, and you don’t like it, then there’s only disappointment. Is it you? Or the wine? Or the judge who awarded it, that got it so wrong?

So what’s an award for, anyway? Maybe it’s better just to make the work that you love, whether others like it or not. Maybe it’s OK to be an unsafe bet.

The work of illustration is deep work. It’s difficult to chip away at it in-between other things. It takes a while to get into a flow state and to stay there for a period of time. Illustration work requires stretches of time and concentration in the realms of 2-4 hours per session, minimum. Schedule even a half-hour phone call during this type of time and it can blow a whole half-day of work by breaking up the time in to chunks too small for deep work.

The other stuff that illustrators do–the marketing, the emailing, the accounts, the phone calls–isn’t deep work, it’s bitsy. It’s possible to fit them in between other things: respond to an email on the train on the way home, make a phone call while out walking.

Paul Graham writes about the manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule. He gives us all a really good framework for optimising our time. And while he wrote it for the context of software development teams, it’s easily applied to the work of an illustrator. Freelance illustration requires both of these modes of working, the deep-work schedule of a maker, and the changeable, agile schedule of a manager. Being aware of this means we can structure our days and our mindsets for it so that we can do both better.

Chances are you’re good at some things and bad at others.

As humans, we naturally bias toward improving our weaknesses because they’re easy to see. If someone says, “You look beautiful in every possible way today, but there’s some blueberry on your teeth” we focus on the blueberry, and not how beautiful we look in *every other way*.

In school, I was terrible at maths but good at drawing. So, naturally, mum enrolled me in after-school maths (not after-school art) to try to improve my weakness. With a lot of work, and a lot of time, I went from terrible at maths to slightly-less-terrible. Meanwhile, other students who were naturally strong at maths just got stronger. No matter how hard I worked, I could never equal their mathematical prowess. I hated every minute of that maths tutoring.

School measured us all individually. It focussed on personal gain and achievement. It promoted the belief that each individual should and could be great at everything. It trained us to believe that we shouldn’t (and couldn’t) rely on one someone else to help us achieve great things.

But now, as an adult, I know better. Now, I take a collaborative and strengths-based approach to the work I do. I spend all of my time getting better at the things I’m already good at. What about my weaknesses? Well, it’s important that I know them so that I avoid wasting time trying to improve them. But I don’t need to be great at everything. No one does. Instead, it’s far easier, enjoyable and efficient to seek others who are great at what I’m not, so we can use each other’s strengths and work together to produce exceptional work. Work that can’t be produced by a single person. Work that is greater than the sum of its parts; work that matters.

It’s possible that I can share an idea with billions of people in seconds. But how long does it take to hone a craft? To get really good at something? To build an audience of any size that’s interested in listening? That could take a lifetime.

It’s easy to be convinced that through our connectivity online, we’re able to shortcut our way to an audience. A subscriber a week feels painfully slow. Making one or two 32-page picture books a year seems as though it may not be worth all the effort. But these achievements are only slow because we imagine them to be fast. The headlines feed us stories of ‘overnight success’ only to later reveal that any overnight success is really 20 years in the making.

Progress is only possible with generous persistence. Drip-by-drip. One subscriber a week means 52 a year. And there’s likely a compounding effect where one subscriber who values what you do tells 5 others. Suddenly, one subscriber a year means 250 people a year. No fancy algorithms needed.

So chip away, drip-by-drip, and enjoy yourself. People will listen eventually, if what you’ve got to say is worth listening to. One day you might wake up to your own overnight success. And if you don’t? Well, at least you’ve enjoyed yourself anyway, and lost nothing.

It takes approximately 2 seconds to draw a circle. Chances are, the first one won’t be perfect. But, at 2 seconds per circle, it’s possible to draw 30 circles a minute. That’s 180 circles an hour. I bet you, that by the 180th circle, they’re getting better. Near perfect.

On the other end of the spectrum, it takes authors about three years to write a novel. That’s three years before they can start to learn from what they’ve done, to find out if it’s any good, or how they can improve it. Chances are if it’s their first one, it’s not going to be very good. It often takes at least 2 or 3 tries to make a good version of anything, whether that’s a creative pursuit, or something more like making bread, beer, or pancakes.

If an author wants to write a novel, but they haven’t done so before, then perhaps the best way to start is by writing a short story – a beginning, middle and end in 2000 words and less than one weekend. Then write another, and write another. By the end of the year, that author could have written 52 short stories. That’s 52 opportunities for learning from how readers read it, what works and what doesn’t, what parts are hardest to write, and what the author finds easiest.

By keeping feedback cycles as short as possible, we’re able to learn as quickly as possible. The faster we learn, the more we’re able to see (and correct) mistakes, amplify what’s strong, and improve at the skill we’re trying to master. It might also turn out that we find satisfaction in short stories and circles, and the novel doesn’t matter so much in the end after all.

It’s easy to blame ‘the other’. Them. They don’t understand me. They don’t see what I see. They missed the point I was making. It might be a publisher, after a rejection. Or an editor, on a submission. It might be a reader in a review.

But what if it was me, and not them? What if, instead of blaming the other, I looked at how I could change for them? Maybe they had a point? Maybe it wasn’t right for the age group? Or maybe it does need more clarity? If I made the work for them and not me, maybe, just maybe, this once, they could be right. Don’t we owe it ourselves to see what would happen if they were?

Roald Dahl doesn’t have an Instagram account. He passed away in 1990. But there are over 300,000 posts tagged #roalddahl and the ‘official HQ account’ on Instagram has over 57,000 followers.

Managing social media, along with all the other stuff I have to do in life, is hard. It’s a time-suck. The algorithms that drive visibility demand us to be sharing high-quality content, 3 times a day, 7 days a week. And they aren’t designed for us, they’re designed to benefit the ones who pay: the advertisers. Who’s got time for that when the alternative is to write the next book?

Sure, there are tools that ‘automate’ the process for us. They say things, “post like a pro”. But they don’t really automate it. We still need to capture, curate, and, at the very least, schedule the content. Some ‘professionals’ advise that we “do it in batches” or “schedule several weeks in advance” to try to reduce the overwhelm. Which is fine, but it still takes away from doing the work.

Maybe another approach is to just make great work, like Roald Dahl did. If we strive to make great work, work that matters, work that can’t be ignored, then we don’t need to share it on social media, because if it’s good enough, others will. We’ll have a lot more fun along the way, too.