Time is the only thing we can’t make more of. That’s it. That’s the lesson. Use it wisely.

It’s tempting to make projects that shoot for the broadest appeal – something for everyone. After all, if there’s something in it for everyone, then everyone will want it, right?

But the problem with ‘something for everyone’ is that it’s never everything for someone. And in a world of hyper-personalisation, where ads and products are being ever more targeted based on likes and interests, if it’s not everything for someone then it’s just irrelevant.

Because the internet can help us reach billions of people on any given day, shipping everything for someone is more likely to have that person pass it along to someone like them. And if that happens enough, if the work is specific enough and connects with enough of those people for whom you’ve made it, you’ve got an audience.

Depending on what you make, that audience may not be big enough to run a business or get the green light for a publisher, but even if that doesn’t happen you can sleep better at night knowing that you’ve made a difference to a few. It’s better than making a ho-hum difference (or none at all) to many.

Eighty percent of what comes out of my head is rubbish. Or at least, that’s what it feels like. But, it comes out regularly, and I suspect that’s more important.

To work consistently, rather than sporadically, means the feedback loops inherent in learning are exactly lack, loops. It means they can build on one another rather than fizzle off into an ether and be forgotten about. If we forget about what happened last time, the mistakes made once before are more likely to repeated again and it’s much more difficult to see improvement. If we don’t see progress, it’s more difficult to remain motivated. And without motivation, we stand still. Out in the cold. And freeze.

Keeping warm

To work consistently requires an acceptance of vulnerability. To admit to ourselves that, most of the time, what we produce isn’t good work but the work that’s needed to make the good work.

In sport, or in the theatre, we have training and rehearsals. These are the private arenas where athletes and performers spend 80% of their time making mistakes. The pole vaulter fails to clear the bar. The performer hits a bad singing note. But they keep going. They try again. They train at regular intervals – 2 times, 3 times, 4 times a week. They show up to the track or the theatre. They pick up their pole or the microphone. And they work, again and again, to learn from how they failed last time. And what for? So that when it comes time to enter the public arena, the work is as good as it can be; not perfect, but work that is as good as they can produce at any given time.

Visual art is no different, but the arena is. With pole-vaulting or theatre, the achievement is in the moment. For 20 seconds – you either clear the bar, or you don’t. You either hit the note, or you don’t. The nature of the work goes, generally, unrecorded. Maybe a coach or director watches with intent so they can provide guidance, but you can’t see yourself, most of the time.

With visual art, any attempt to clear the bar in our rehearsal is left on the page or canvas – etched in stone, to confront us with our vulnerability: we got stuff wrong.

This is a double-edged sword.

On one hand, the preservation of our failure can be useful because it provides us with something to go back to. Something to compare against when we produce the next thing, or the next thing after that.

But, on the other hand, it can derail us. Preserving failure is a good reminder that we’re not perfect. And, if 80% of anyone’s attempts to ‘clear the bar’ show us, in plain light, that we haven’t, well, that hurts.

We have two options, just like the pole vaulter or the performer. We can stop trying. We can decide that we won’t show up to training today, or rehearsals tomorrow. We had a bad day yesterday and now we just don’t feel like it. It may make us feel good in the short term, but in the long-term, no one benefits.

The second option is to keep showing up. To accept that, with most attempts, we won’t clear the bar. But occassionally, when things go just right, we will. We’ll sail over it. We’ll hit the big, spongy mat on the other side, look up, and see that the bar is still up there, wobbling away high above us but it won’t come tumbling down. And then, we’ll say to ourselves, “Maybe it’s time to raise the bar up a notch. I reckon I can go higher next time.”

Sometimes, curiosity can be overwhelming. There’s so much I want to know about. The vastness of visual art is just one of those things – to have a deeper understanding of how to work with oils or acrylics would be amazing. To make my own watercolour pigments, or craft my own paper. To work on animation cels, or have a deeper understanding of sumi-e japanese painting. To understand the art of comics and visual storytelling seems like a bottomless pit of lifelong discovery to me. It all sounds so exciting.

And, if that’s not enough, my curiosity often extends to realms beyond visual art. I’d love to understand more about contemporary dance – the language of movement. I’d love to understand plants more – their names, their structures, how they work. I’d love to understand music more – to play an instrument; cello or piano. I’d love to learn how to work with wood, or how to knit or crochet my own jumper. I’d love to learn how to fish (beyond the basics).

But with every interest comes a dilution. The constraint of our humanity – that we only have 24 hours in a day, and on average 80 years of life in the developed world – means we need to make choices. The trade off of experiecing breadth versus depth.

With anything, there is infinite depth. Enough for a lifetime of learning.

It’s difficult, no, heartbreaking, to say, “no, not in this life.”

Saying no – the idea of refusal – is often associated with loss, not opportunity. To know that, in this life, I may never know how to play cello, or knit my own jumper, fills me with a sense of ‘missing out’. What if it’s a natural talent? What if I love it more than anything I’ve experienced before? When I hear others play the cello it moves me in such a profound way that it makes me wonder, “is this my calling? My passion?”

Maybe. But also, maybe not.

Because the other question to ask is not what I lose by saying no to the cello, but what I gain from it. Because there are some things that, by now, I know I like to do. I lose myself for hours in drawing – just me, a pencil, and a piece of paper is enough for a lifetime of exploration. If I add colour to that equation (in my case, watercolour), that makes the pit even deeper because colour – the spectrum of it, the science of it, the physiological effects on the human from it – creates a fractal-like infinity of discovery and exploration that could go on forever. And to give myself the time to fully explore those paths, all I need to do is say no to an expectation of a similar depth of understanding in fishing, cello, plants, and knitting and, well, almost everything else.

How to choose when the world is so rich?

If what drives me to learn is curiosity, then saying no to some things means I don’t miss out on learning, I just learn different things. It turns out that, for me, persistence has led to a passion. And I think that’s how this passion thing works. By following a single path – let’s call the one I’ve chosen is visual storytelling – what I’ve realised is that the single path also has infinite branches just down the road – more choice than I can conceivably hold in my head at any given time. And, after a while on that path, I find myself thinking about the music and botany paths less and less and wondering more and more, what lies around the corner of the path I’ve chosen.

I used to be able to swing freely on the monkey bars without feeling sore. I used to spend hours on end climbing trees. I used to play golf well. I used to know how to do quadratic equations, and work out the interior angles of triangles. I used to be able to calculate the volume of a cylinder and program computer games.

I used to do lots of things, and now I don’t. Instead, I do many different things. And so why do people tend to need us to have done something before before they trust us to do it again? And just because I could do it before, doesn’t mean I can do it again (at least not without more practice). Past me had never written a children’s book, or illustrated one. Past me didn’t know how to cook. Past me had never painted with watercolour. Now, I do all those things, and who knows what I’m capable of tomorrow.

Just because we’ve never been an artist or written a book or made a clay pot before, doesn’t mean we can’t do it tomorrow. Our identity is formed by the actions we’ve taken in the past, but, more importantly, the ones we choose to take in the future. There’s no better time to be an artist, or a writer, or a potter, we just need to trust that the past doesn’t control the future, it’s what we decide to do today, and tomorrow, ane day after that do.

What happens when you’re the odd one out – If ‘the man’ said no, you can’t do this thing that you’re born to do? What would happen if you did it anyway? And what about something else, like free-trade? Is it a good thing? If things never changed, how long would we survive? What are the strengths of anxious people or introverts and what if the world knew how to use them?

It turns out I ask a lot of questions. Fiction, whether it’s reading it or writing it, is one of the key ways we explore these ‘what-if scenarios’.

A few years ago, I attended a workshop on storytelling by a PhD candidate whose name I can no longer remember nor find. She was researching why writers write, and, overwhelmingly, it’s always about answering questions.

Being published was (and remains) always secondary to me. What I’m trying to do when a new story or character emerges is I’m trying to answer something for myself. Whether or not it gets published isn’t about whether the story itself is good (although knowing about how stories work helps), it’s whether the publisher believes that there are enough people in the world who are also trying to answer the same question. That, for me, is really the key to determining whether we reproduce an idea 10,000 times or not.

As an artist who deeply cares about their work that goes into the world, letting go is difficult. Embracing chance is difficult. My watercolour practice has taught me so many things so far, and one of its key lessons is to trust in chance.

Trusting in chance

People often remark that ‘watercolour is the most difficult medium’. They tend to say this followed by, “because you can’t go back over mistakes.” And whilst that’s true, it begs a different question – what’s a mistake?

Whenever I’m making something, I set out with a vision. I have an image in my mind (or roughed out on a computer) about where I’m heading. And yes, I try to get it there, as close as possible, but as I’ve written about before, the expectation is almost never met. Mistakes happen. But, like art itself, mistakes are in the eye of the beholder.

If no one else but me knows what I was supposed to do and didn’t, does anyone else notice the ‘mistake’? Maybe to the viewer, there are no mistakes?

A most happy accident

In 1902, a French street performer and magician, Melies, began to use one of the earliest film cameras ever made. Of course, these weren’t anything like the cameras we see today, but almost a hyper-mechanical ‘steampunk’ style contraption of running film over a lens. Think grease and oil. At the time, film was brand new, and the few people that had access to film cameras used them in a very static way – to record basic sequential action for a short period of time (about 90 seconds).

But, one day, Melies set up his camera to film traffic passing under a bridge, and the camera jammed just at a point when a bus was passing under it. He unjammed the mechanism a few minutes later, well and truly after the bus had moved on, but just at the moment, a hearse was passing under the bridge.

When Melies played back the footage, he was both delighted and surprised to see the bus magically replaced by the hearse in front of his very eyes. Melies had accidentally invented the jump-cut, the first real ‘special effect’ of film where anything could become anything or, in true magician style, simply vanish. It unlocked an entirely new way to think about film.

History is littered with stories like Melies’ – the happy accident. Quite often, it is the happy accident that helps us make huge leaps both in new technology but also in the way we think. They are near impossible to contrive because, well, then they wouldn’t be an accident, would they? But, I wonder, which conditions might provide a space where happy accidents are more likely to occur? In any objective view, Melies’ camera jam would be counted as a ‘mistake’ – a thing to fix; the resulting footage something throw away. But maybe it’s worth sharing the things we think are mistakes in case, well, to others, it’s an innovation.

If you look up the word ‘priority’ in the dictionary you’ll notice something peculiar; there is no plural form. By definition, priority is singular – a thing that is regarded as more important than the others. So, when we try and make “priorities”, we attempt to tell ourselves what’s important but what we’re really doing is deciding that nothing is.

Instead of saying yes, how about saying this before that?

It’s easy for any artist to reel off a list of things that feel important. Do I work on this piece or that one? Do I invest time in social media marketing? Email marketing? Which medium do I work in, I love them all? I’ve been guilty of writing all these tasks down, then categorising them based on the type of activity, then ordering them in those categories. A bit like this:

Of course, what happens in this model is I’ve still got 3 or so things that appear to be equally important. I haven’t really prioritised in the truest sense.

At least until parallel universes open up, time and life are linear. One thing must come before another. It’s not possible to work on e-marketing and exploring a new medium at exactly the same time. I might think I’m ‘multi-tasking’ (also a fallacy by the way) by switching my attention quickly between the two activities but the risk is that both tasks take twice as long for the switching cost involved and, chances are, the quality of each won’t be as good.

Focussing on one thing at a time

But, if we acknowledge that there can be only one priority at a time, things begin to look very different. Firstly, we need to think much more about why something is more important than another. We have to actually make the choice – this before that.

Here’s an alternative way to structure and organise work.

• The Done column gives me a sense of achievement
• The In progress column only has one thing in it at a time. If I work on Concepts for a new book and then switch tasks, I move that item back in to Up next and swap it with what I now believe is the most important thing to work on.
• The Up Next column contains a single, prioritised list. It forces me to choose what’s important across categories. Yes, the order can change, re-prioritising happens all the time. But, in a single-column format, there’s nowhere for me to hedge my bets.

How to decide what’s important?

There are many reasons why something should be more important than another – that’s going to be different for every artist at any one time; tasks can be urgent, have high impact, make us feel good, make us money, etc. But, by forcing our ‘priorities’ into a single list, regardless of how we want to ‘categorise’ those things conceptually, what we’re left with is accountability to ourselves and, more importantly, focus.

Yes, there is fear in getting the ranking wrong, of working on something that may not be indeed as important as something else, but it’s better than fooling ourselves into thinking we’re doing a lot of important work all the time. A single list makes sure that we can continually ask the question, anyway, so it’s likely that we may just be one or two items off at any given time, but by working this way, we’re increasing the chances that we’re working on the most valuable things first – and that’s really the priority.

5 year, 10 year, 25 year plans – I don’t see the point of them, and I see how important they are.

The problem with long-term thinking is that plans change. The environment in which any human operates isn’t a static one. And so to say, “In 25 years, I’m going to travel the world, and do all the things I never got to do while I was working” seems dangerous to me. Yet, it’s the overarching narrative of my parents’ generation – work hard now, enjoy yourself later. Of course, later may never come and, even if it does, it may coincide with a 3-year travel ban because of a global pandemic. As the old saying goes, ‘You just never know.’

Conversely, the problem with short-term thinking is that it’s very difficult to build something bigger or something beyond what we’ve got right now. If all I do is think about tomorrow, I wouldn’t save money because, well, tomorrow may not come so I better spend it now. If all that mattered was getting to next week, my diet would contain many more chips and far less broccoli.

In both cases, we’re making bets. The long-term thinker is making a bet that things will be fairly predictable over 25 years in order to enable their 25-year plan. The short-term thinker, on the other hand, is making a bet that tomorrow may be vastly different from today and so it’s better to strike while the iron’s hot and do what you want to do now. But, maybe there’s a middle ground.

Incremental planning

Maybe there’s a better way to make bets? If we have more certainty in shorter timeframes and less certainty across longer horizons where does that leave us?

The longer the timeframe, the less specific or abstract the goal. Many of my parents’ generation planned on ‘visiting country x‘ when they retired. Or ‘driving around Australia.’ But, who knows whether driving will even exist in 25 years given the way automation is going. And who knows what political turmoil any given country will be in 25 years.

Outcome over output

For long term plans, thinking about outcome over output seems to be the right way to go. The trick here is to ask yourself, “Why that country?” or “Why driving?” If we understand the motivation behind our intentions, we may be able to use the concept of equifinality to satisfy our needs without being so specific. Maybe the goal of both of those things is really to see places that are simply different to the ones we inhabit everyday. There are many ways to achieve that, and you may not need to wait 25 years.

Once we know the less specific goal and the reasons why we have it in the first place, we can make smaller goals, based on closer timeframes, that still progress towards the larger picture. The idea of seeing different places can start right now. For example, during the constraints imposed on us by a pandemic, we’ve travelled to Victorian towns like Maldon, Benalla, and Gippsland – these are all places we’ve never been before. It scratches the novelty itch, and we build empathy for people who are not like us. We’re already achieving a version of the 25 year plan but it’s happening right now.

With an outcome mindset, and a little incremental planning, we become far more adaptable and resilient. We can still fulfill our needs allbeit in a perhaps a slightly less than ideal or different way than we may have intended or imagined.

What’s this got to do with art? Well, artist’s goals are usually, “I want to make a living from my art” or “I don’t want to compromise on my vision.” But, when we give ourselves time and introspect on the reason why we want to make a living from our art, it’s usually because the way we’re currently making a living is stressful, or tiring, or boring, and what we really want is for those feelings to go away or, at least, be reduced somehow.

I find the idea of blending my way to make money with my ability to produce art completely frightening for a number of reasons. Because of this, and using the concepts above, I’ve been able to balance a job that I’m lucky enough to find interesting, with ‘some picture book work on the side.’ I’m not particularly stressed or bored living this way, so maybe I’ve already got what I need without needing to commit to being a full-time artist. Maybe the tweaks we need to make to live a less stressed more fulfilling life aren’t really as big as throwing it all in and leaving a different life behind?

I’ve lived my whole life in service of deadlines. It’s both a positive and a negative aspect of working in a creative field.

It’s positive in that it gives me something to aim for – a date or time in the future by which someone needs something from me. I’ve made a lot of stuff because of my fear of upsetting someone else by not delivering by a deadline.

The negative side of deadlines is that they create anxiety. What if I don’t make it? What happens on the other side of it? Who will I upset and how upset will they be? The one question I don’t often ask myself enough is, “Who dies?”

It’s not about bloodshed, it’s about a commitment

No one dies on the other side of a deadline these days, at least not the ones we have in creative industries. That wasn’t always true, especially for people in prisons in 1864, but it’s useful to put today’s word in perspective; we’re simply talking about making a commitment.

When I compare the phrases “Making a commitment” and “Hitting a deadline”, the latter feels far more violent. And sure, maybe the violence is intended to invoke anxiety and energy towards the milestone but, to be honest, I don’t think it’s the anxiety of losing one’s life (or whacking it with force) that’s the thing that motivates me to deliver. No, my motivation to get the work done comes from two sources.

Firstly, I want to share it with others because I value the feedback. It’s only through feedback that I learn about what I’ve done well and not so well. When I have that feedback, I can use it in the next thing I make. Over time, it should follow that what I make gets better.

The second motivation (but no less important than the first) is that others depend on me. To produce anything amazing in this world takes more than one person, and we each have a role to play. Sure, maybe my name is the one that ends up on the cover, but the team (and family) that surround the book are also just as responsible for making it. As an author/illustrator, I feel like I’m just doing my part in the team. Just as a goalkeeper’s job of stopping the ball entering their own goal is just as important as the striker’s job of putting the ball in the other net.

In sport, the commitment to one another isn’t a deadline. It’s not a blood pact or some other medieval phrase intended to induce anxiety and fear. Teams huddle. They celebrate. They support and cheer each other on. Maybe the creative industry could learn a lesson or two from others and create an environment of positive energy rather than one fuelled by fear. Maybe it’s time to bury the deadline and start talking about commitments.