Good enough to what? What is ‘good enough’ in your mind, and what are you comparing yourself to in order to construct this question? Part of this problem is comparing yourself and your ability to other people’s work, which is another topic entirely, and one I will cover in a future post.
If you immerse yourself in a lot of brilliant work from artists, on instagram, on dribbble etc., they can be an incredibly inspiring presence, but you’re setting the standard for your work that follows, as you aim to emulate that brilliance, the production value, the quality, the skill and technique, either consciously or subconsciously.
This can lead to a saturation of content that drowns out your creative spark and drive to create work on the back of what was originally meant to be inspiring. Where you reach a point where you doubt your own ability so much that you don’t want to continue, or even start in the first place.
Use this brilliant work as a motivator, something that drives you and something to strive for, for future you. Expose yourself to enough content to become motivated, but not enough so that it drowns your spark.
Too many people see the finished product on social media and from artists portfolios, but never comprehend the difficulty it took the artist to get there, the sacrifices, the long hours and deliberate practice they put in to better themselves at their skill and become and expert. People want the final result, without the hard work.
Seeing the brilliance on display can lead to people copying artists work. Never copy. Copying is the lowest form of flattery. Something an artist worked hard on to create and for someone to take that work and pass it off as their own is not something that is respectable by professionals. It’s easy to see when an artist has just copied work from elsewhere.
Immerse yourself in great work, be inspired, get ideas, and absorb as much as you can from different sources before coming back at a later time without the source material and practice your skill. This way you develop your own personal style, and look and feel.
Hard work will always beat talent, and for the most part, you don’t become talented at something by doing nothing. If you believe someone to be a natural talent, in actual fact, they have worked hard at their skill and dedicated a lot of time to it to purposely learn it and become better.
You can’t have talent without hard work.
Don’t compare your skill to someone else’s, you can never know the circumstances that surround them and the situation they are or were in to become great at what they do. Focus on your own skills, your own passion and shift your attention to deliberately practicing at becoming better at that skill. Expose yourself to enough content to become inspired, but not enough that it kills your passion.
Be a creator, not a consumer. The vast majority of the work is a consumer, if you’re creating content, you’re already unique.
Never be afraid of hard work. By putting in the hard work and investing time in a skill, you will discover if you truly loved it or if it was the idea of it that you loved. You have to love the act of doing it.
By taking the time out to discover if something is your true passion, you may discover other avenues that you never knew you liked, but would have never known if you hadn’t put in the hard work and took the risk from the start.
Hard work always leads to greatness in one form or another.
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