I have a friend who is an amazing baker. She makes sourdough bread for her family, religiously, every couple of days. She puts all her love and care into it. Because she’s practising so often, it’s soft, fluffy, and most of all, delicious. It’s good enough to sell.

But she doesn’t need to sell it. Her ‘market’ is a 3-year old boy and a 35-year-old man. She makes them happy, every day, with the bread that she bakes. But, the nagging feeling persists. This could be bigger. She could make more people happy with her baking, so why not?

If she had more customers, she’d have to make many more loaves. She could get even better at baking than she is now. But to scale, she’ll need to work more efficiently. Weekly trips to the market to chat with the supplier and pick up the small amount of flour she normally needs won’t do. She’ll need to order ingredients in bulk. And people won’t come to her house to pick up bread. For that, she’ll need a store. And the number of customers are likely to fluctuate each day, so she’ll need to learn how much to make, what the average is. She’ll need the average amount of ingredients, she’ll need to sell it at an average price (because people won’t buy sourdough for $20 a loaf), and she’ll need an average location – one that makes it easy for as many customers as possible to swing by and pick up a loaf.

Being able to make amazing sourdough and being able to sell it, are two different things. As we scale, we need to find efficiencies. That’s how McDonald’s did it. So maybe my friend doesn’t need to sell it at all. Maybe her 2 customers are enough. Maybe the ability to make such beautiful bread is only possible because she’s not selling it. When does a craft lose its craft-ness? Just because people would buy it, doesn’t mean you need to sell it.

Most people I know think they’re going to be robbed. They put locks on their doors, carry valuables close to them, they’re always on high alert. But you can’t store an idea behind a locked door. An idea behind a locked door isn’t that useful. If the idea isn’t shared, then perhaps it never existed in the first place.

I once asked a famous architect whether they were scared of being copied. Once they designed that new fancy chair or kettle, what would stop someone taking those designs and just copying them, flooding the market with cheap reproductions and diluting his work?

He responded in two parts:

Firstly, he said the people who are interested in his ideas, aren’t interested in the reproductions of them. The people that buy his objects, aren’t interested in the chair or the kettle, they’re interested in the story behind it. They want an original. If they’re the sort of person who buys a reproduction, they were never his customer in the first place.

Secondly, he said that by the time the copies would have been manufactured, he’s already moved on to something new. By the time the cheap knock-offs hit the market, it’s an old idea, and so they’re worth far less then something new from him. He said, “I dare them to just try and catch me.”

This architect knew that it wasn’t the object that was the valuable bit, it was his honed ability to think differently from everyone else. To spend time and energy interpreting the world, and re-inventing it. Over and over again. That’s what his buyers bought. The chair or the kettle was secondary, very secondary.

Often, when new writers approach me to illustrate their work they’ll ask me to sign a non-disclosure agreement before they share their manuscript. And I get it, they want to protect their idea. If a ‘professional’ saw this idea and thought it was great, they could just steal it and pass it off as their own, right? But what new writers don’t realise is that’s a great problem to have. If you’ve got an idea that people want to steal and make their own, your on to something. But, if you can’t have another, and then another, and then another, like the architect I talked about, then you’re not a writer. You’re just a person who had an idea. You’re exposed.

Until writers realise that the words on the page aren’t the important bit, it’s difficult to make progress. If you’re scared that this is the only idea you’ll ever have, you tend to protect it with your life so you don’t share it, which means it’s hard to get feedback. If you can’t get feedback, you can’t improve it, so the idea dies.

But, if in sharing your idea, someone copies your first one, then you know it was good. Someone liked it. And if you’ve got ten others waiting in the wings, then you’re on to something. It’s going to be very hard for anyone to catch you too, when you’re writing like this, because you’ve already left them behind.

I’m a big believer in the power of clothes. What we wear sends signals to the people around us. Clothes can communicate who we are, how much money we make, what mood we’re in, and what job we do.

When some people go to work, they wear a uniform. Chefs, pilots, and plumbers all wear uniforms. When we see people dressed in those uniforms, we know how to behave around them. What a ‘normal’ interaction should be. But, artists have historically said no to uniforms (after the whole beret thing died down). After all, the clothes we wear can also be used to express ourselves, and that should *not* have rules, right?

But everyone wears a uniform, whether they like it or not. I can’t go to a school workshop dressed in an expensive suit. It’d be too weird. The kids wouldn’t know how to behave, nor would the teachers, no matter how engaging I was. People would likely stiffen up. Maybe be a bit more formal. Creative people are supposed to be sneakers and jeans type of people, aren’t they? Relaxed. Or they’re supposed to wear shirts and dresses with colourful patterns, bright colours, or cute animals on them. Even if 50% of the work of being an artist is spent doing paperwork and managing finances, we’re still expected to ‘look creative’.

Well, it turns out that what we wear not only changes the way people around us behave, but it changes us, too. It’s been proven that if we wear a white scientist’s lab coat, we’re able to concentrate for longer periods of time. That’s weird, isn’t it?

I hear creative people struggle with balancing the creative work with the work of running a business. Procrastination. Boredom. Block. I hear plenty of remedies for these things – go for a run, take a walk, have a shower, just forget about it for a while. But what if all we needed to do was put on a different jacket or shirt? What if I wore a business shirt while I did my accounts? What if I wore a painter’s apron when I was looking to explore new colour palettes? Maybe that’s worth a try, instead. Maybe we need to just dress for the occasion.

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.