Whenever anyone begins an art journey, the overwhelming advice from an expert in a medium is to “buy the best art supplies you can afford”. I’ve never found that very helpful. A pencil, paper, and eraser can cost anything from a few dollars to $50. Should a beginner spend $50 to try drawing? The answer is almost always no.

Creativity thrives under constrained conditions, constraints like time, space, skills or, yes, money. For anybody wanting to try art, there is no right or wrong when it comes to money. I know artists who produce amazingly moving work from materials they found at the dump ($0). I know other artists who have spent thousands of dollars to make a single sculpture that fits in the palm of my hand. And yes, while there are slight variations in the costs associated with starting in a particular medium over another (e.g. sculpting in pure bronze will set you back a bit more than drawing an apple with a pencil), the amount of money you spend is far less important than how you feel while you’re making it, and when you’ve finished.

Art, after all, isn’t really about the product, or the materials, it’s about the space you create for yourself to be brave enough to try to work out what you think about the world, and how you think about it. Taking the first step in that journey, with any medium, is the best place to start. Only when you begin will you learn, for yourself, what’s next, and how much you want to spend to get there.

In tennis or golf, the crowd is disciplined to be quiet while the athletes are performing. Between shots or rallies, the umpire (or the little guys that hold the quiet signs at the golf) are in control. They help to give the athletes focus.

But artists working alone in their studios (or in my case, the ‘spare room’ in my house) don’t have an umpire. There’s no person holding up a sign to tell others to quieten down, or go away, or stop inviting us out to social occasions that we’d rather not attend but feel obliged to anyway. Artists need to find their own focus. Control their own environment. Remove distractions so that they can hit that winning shot. We need to make our own quiet because no one else is going to do it for us.

Ideas are a dime-a-dozen. Before I started making picture books, I sat on the couch in front of the TV, and while I was watching a show, I’d have ideas. Heaps of ideas, actually. It felt pretty good. At the time, having those ideas was enough. I remember thinking, “Sure, I could draw it if I wanted to, but why bother, I’ve already had the idea.”

Then, I read Art and Fear and realised that it wasn’t that I couldn’t be bothered drawing the idea, it was that I was scared of trying to make the idea (and failing at it) that was preventing me from taking that first step.

And you know what? That first step was hard. Turns out that having the idea is the easy bit. Confronting the fear, poor drawing skills from years of no practice, difficult brushwork, and crumby colouring skills was the tough bit. It still is, six years later.

At first, I started slowly. I had an idea, and then I’d try executing it. But it was never as good as what I could see in my head so I’d give up. Then, I’d wait a week or two, or until I forgot about how crap my last attempt was, and I’d try again.

The second attempt was better, but it was still out of my reach. What I saw in my head wasn’t hitting the page as I wanted it to. After all, I hadn’t drawn anything since high-school. I gave myself a break. I tried again.

After a few weeks, I had a mass of drawings. And while each individual drawing looked just as dodgy as I remembered, a trend emerged. Over the weeks, things had improved. Not everything, just small things. But it was enough. There was enough in those few weeks of drawings to make me want to keep seeing an upward trend. Six years later, the drawings are much better, but so are my skills. The problem, of course, is that my expectations have moved forward also. And that’s the thing with art; your expectations will always be slightly ahead of your ability. If it weren’t that way, we’d stop trying.

The problem with the internet browser is that it’s exactly that, a browser. We can spend hours browsing, losing days of our life whilst not finishing anything.

What if the browser was called a do-er? Would it change how we use it? What else would we do differently if we gave things another name? What happens to your work if you begin calling yourself an artist, instead of a hobbyist. Or an inventor instead of a dreamer. Language shapes the way we interact with the world, so now I’m going to close my browser, and re-open it as a do-er, just to see what happens.

There seems to be two ways to represent reality. The first is a photo-real representation of reality. I spend my time drawing a bird, exactly as my eyes see it. I focus on tone, and shape, and colour. If I spend long enough, I’m likely to be able to draw a bird so well that, at first glance, a viewer may perceive it to be a photo.

The second way is to represent how reality makes us feel, or what lies beneath the visual layer. To look beyond the feathers and the beak of a subject to its soul. Is it cute? Cuddly? Streamlined or sleek? Is it kind and gentle or is it a bully? Representing this unreality is harder to teach, and harder to learn, but it’s where the magic happens. At least for me.

As adults who have learned about the world, we carry a version of it that’s influenced by our loves and fears, our likes and hates. These things make us who we are. They influence the decisions we make, the risks we take, and the stories we tell ourselves about the life we’ve led. They also influence the art we make, and how we make it.

It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child. – Pablo Picasso

Perhaps the pursuit of art is about unlearning what we know and what we’re afraid of. To put aside what people think we should or shouldn’t do and take the selfish time to discover who we were before we learned how to exist as adults in the world that may not be made for us.

Different things motivate different people. Take setting goals. Some people love goals. 300 words a day. A chapter per week. An hour a day. 2 books a year. Something by some time.

For other people, goals are terrifying. They’re not something to aim for but an opportunity for failure. They become a source of anxiety. The idea of getting to the end of a day and not getting 300 words down can be enough to prevent a single word from being written at all. Failing to achieve a goal can induce a sense of worthlessness or lack of ability. It could make things far worse.

For each individual, goals can work for some things, and not others. Goals like 300 words per day for writing don’t work for me. But deadlines do. Deadlines give me enough autonomy to decide how I get to the goal, but give me a focus and makes me accountable for getting there.

A lot of advice from professional writers I see is about setting goals. If not the ‘300 words per day’ style of advice, it’s things like SMART goals, or some other variation of a way to break down work. But what we fail to recognise when we’re giving advice is that all we’re telling people is what worked for us. We never say, “300 words per day worked for me.” Instead, we start those sentences with, “You should do 300 words per day.”

Unless you know the person you’re advising intimately (and let’s face it, that’s rarely ever the case for online writing advice) such that you understand what motivates them or energises them, sharing ‘advice’ as instruction is most likely a bad idea. Perhaps all we should be doing is sharing our own experiences. What works or doesn’t work for our own selves. If enough of us do it, there’ll be a diversity of stories about ways to work in the world, and that’s better for everyone.

Setting goals, and working towards them, means that we’re always in one of two unhappy states. We’re either striving to achieve the goal, in which case we’re unhappy because we haven’t got there yet. Or, we’re busy setting new goals and trying to achieve those after reaching our previous goals.

The ‘normal work career’ or even schooling revolves around this goal-driven mindset: acquiring skills so we can move up to higher grades. Higher grades mean higher pay. Higher pay means better stuff, or more power or more control, or more responsibility.

The problem with these sorts of goals is there’s a ceiling. What happens when you reach the dizzying heights of CEO, or President, or the world’s first Trillionaire. There’s always another goal to invent to give us something strive for. It seems that money, power, and control don’t necessarily bring contentment.

Perhaps it’s better to play an infinite game—a game where there is no goal. At least we’re not chasing our tails in an infinite loop of unhappiness.

When I was a kid, I was bored. A lot. “Bored?!” My parents would say in horror. “How can you be bored?!” They’d reel off a list of all the options available to me, “Read a book, play with your brother, mow the lawn, take the dog for a walk, empty the dishwasher, draw something…” and so on. When we’re bored, the instinct is to assume that the one who is bored simply can’t think of the things to do.

No one teaches us what to do with boredom. We think it has to do with the list of things that we just can’t think of, but it’s more than that. Having the list isn’t the problem, it’s understanding how to pick off the list. The purpose of each possibility is the difficult thing.

If only someone would pay us to enjoy ourselves

Giving ourselves purpose is difficult, not only because we’ve not been taught to do it, but it requires us to truly believe that we’ve made the right choice for how we’re spending our precious ‘free-time’.

Whether it’s school, or work, the purpose is clear. If I don’t do schoolwork, I’ll get in trouble or fail. If I don’t work, I won’t get money to live. Easy. But, when we’re using our time for leisure, and payment is off the table, the choice for how to spend it can be overwhelming.

Should I read? Go for a walk? Plant or nurture a garden? Bake bread? Watch a movie? The choices are endless, but so too are the ways in which we’ll benefit. I love a good story, so reading or watching a movie has value. Exercise is important, so walking is good, too. Gardening helps my mind relax, and baking bread will give me food for days, not to mention make the house smell delicious.

Each and every leisure activity on ‘the list’ has different domains of value. None of them are the easy choice – money – that trumps them all.

The search for intrinsic value

Finding intrinsic value in any activity is hard. In fact, it’s so difficult that the easy way out is to try and fill our minds and time with any sort of distraction we can. Right now, the bite-sized pieces of social media interaction happen to be perfect for it. It means we can distract ourselves from ourselves.

Schools have trained us well. As a society, we value economics far more than any sort of immeasurable value we get when we do anything for ourselves. The sort of activities I mean are the ones that can be measured, objectively, by science. For example, exercise is easier to prioritise because we can measure it’s effect on our organs. Writing a novel or practicing meditation, less so. The activities that breed peace or contentment for some of us within our deepest selves are seen as a more ineffective use of time compared with creating measurable value in some way.

Intrinsic value is hard because we’re complex beings. We enjoy many different activities for many different reasons. Yes, that makes it hard to choose from ‘the list’, but it’s also something to be celebrated; that we can find so much richness and joy in so many different ways.

It begins with understanding ourselves

Before we can begin to prioritise the things in ‘the list’, we need to get to know ourselves – the things that truly bring us joy, peace, excitement, and sorrow. Once we know this, we can begin to use what’s on ‘the list’ in a way that gives us the most value for ourselves. There is no playbook. We can’t fall back on science or economics. No one can offer an ‘if-then-else’ decision tree for another’s intrinsic value because every single person is different.

For me, I know that when I’m feeling frazzled, like I have too much on, or ‘too many threads to keep-a-hold-of’ as I like to say, then meditation is the thing I pick out of the list. When it’s sunny and warm, the garden is the place I love to be. When I’m feeling joyous and energetic, taking to a canvas with paint gives me the most ‘bang-for-buck.’ What’s the bang? It’s difficult to define. I’m not measuring my heart rate, or calories, or bank balance when I’m doing this thing for myself. I could try, there’s probably an app for that, but sometimes living in the uncertainty is also part of the purpose.

No one will pay me to prune my garden, or meditate, or sling paint at a canvas, but being paid isn’t the point. It’s just a really nice way to spend the finite amount of time I have here on Earth, and I kind of don’t care if no one else can understand it. I’m definitely not bored.

Saying Yes is easy. Saying yes keeps people happy and keeps me busy. Saying yes to going to dinner, having a drink, going to a friends’ place, working on a book. Saying yes brings me a lot of joy.

But for two letters, No is a powerful word. In contrast to saying Yes, saying No is hard. Saying No disappoints people. “I can’t help with that right now.” “No, I can’t attend your event.” “No, I’m not interested in illustrating that book.” No is the hardest word for me to say because I generally derive most of my pleasure from pleasing people. But, in the long run, saying no has never led to a catastrophic mistake.

No unlocks things. No makes it about me, not them. No creates space to think, to breathe, and to observe. Saying ‘No’ helps me say yes to things that matter, when they matter most.