The Workshop Episode 1 🛠️ | Additional Notes
Hey, if you’re opening this out of context, then the video which references it can be found here.
In this newsletter you’ll find the additional notes, resources, and prompt questions for the two audience messages that I built some response to in the video. So without delay…
The first audience member’s struggle ( 📝 paraphrase and quotation):
I struggle with debilitating insecurity. I had a successful corporate career but I was incredibly unhappy, and I quit that job to pursue a creative path as a digital illustrator. My insecurity was heightened by my family's lack of support. Creativity was a children’s hobby according to my family. By quitting my job to pursue a creative path, I was essentially regressing in maturity. I'm already insecure, and having the people I love question my decision made things worse…
This insecurity is rotting away at my progress. The inspiration won't come because the only thought in my head is "did I make a mistake?" I know I didn't it because remaining in my corporate career was definitely the wrong choice, but if I try to pursue the creative path and it doesn't work out, then what? Maybe I'm not meant to succeed at this.
For the response to this struggle see the video here.
Some prompts to journal on 📝 and explore your thinking around these issues further:
1: What kind of tasks would you want to be completing every week to get the momentum moving forward?
2: Can you separate these tasks into different buckets and categories? For example software training, deeper creative work, applications for jobs, and spaces where you can gather free work to build your portfolio etc.
3: What time of the day is going to be best to push forward with these different categories of work? When do you do your best deep creative work, or when is your energy more conducive to training, sending emails, or looking for opportunities for work? (Use this to build you calendar).
4: Are there any additional things you can do to ring fence your focus in these sessions, and increase your chance of having success at these tasks? (Such as going to a library to do them, or working in a space where you know you won’t be disturbed).
5: Are there any practices which might be used in a corporate scenario, such as weekly reviews, or structured planning and tracking documents, which might help the process of self-motivation, and be useful to feed into this new push forward.
Further resources to support this struggle (I will update these as links come in from the YT comments)
Virgil on escaping linear career thinking:
Tips on habit forming:
The second audience member’s struggle (📝 paraphrase and quotation):
I’ve been struggling with the balance between what I want to explore and what the algorithm “favours”. I often feel like I have less creative freedom now that there is pressure to keep up the views and stay within the niche I became known for.
Not complaining - just stating the obvious tension between optimizing the external presentation of my art (the business side) and what is actually needed to grow as an artist (time, effort, experimentation and risk). I also have carpal tunnel from editing videos and I would much rather have it due to painting but that’s a whole other topic.
For the response to this struggle see the video here.
Some prompts that might help to journal on and explore this problem further:
How much time do you spend doing the artistic work you used to do, before you started trying to use these skills to make money?
What are your long term goals for this? And is feeding the algorithm to try and scale your business in a maximum way, actually going to feed where you want to be in 10 years? Or is there a smaller scale and just as valuable route you might take?
Are there things that you engage in around the business side of your creative goals, that could be dropped, and switched for something that more truly reflects your original creative passion?
*And I wanted to add a note to this one. Really easy, when those lines between business or social media success, and our art, become faded, the inputs that we spend time on can often masquerade as useful in our creative journey, when actually they are detracting from any real sense of quality or value. For me, this could be as simple as a podcast I might listen to every week, which covers business development maybe, being switched out for an audiobook from a writer that I’ve always wanted to listen to.
Are there some simple ways you could help to create a boundary between your professional use of creative skills, and the time you spend on the original creative practices you want to engage in?
*This can be simple stuff, like having a certain chair that you only use for painting, and not video editing, or a specific time that you put aside for that original creative practice, and don’t push the work in to. I think the key with this is, even though we might be trying to make money from our passion, to clearly recognise that as soon as that creative drive is mixed up with economics, it’s necessary to keep an eye on it, and see that it’s now different from that original creative drive, and if you do want to continue the projects that are closest to your original passion, you need to make the necessary time, outside of your economic imperatives, to try and do so.
Further resources to support this struggle (I will update these as links come in from the YT comments)
Song Exploder host discusses balancing creative career with his own artistic practice.
Peace to all reading, and have a good week.
This is great stuff, truly commendable that you're putting out this amount of quality material. I love the new format, and how it opens up the platforms for the community. Great work!