The Identity Trap & Art Bankruptcy
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📝 Initial Idea
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YouTube Titles
Initial YouTube Summary
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Newsletter Subject Lines
Website Page Headings
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📋 Recording Outline
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Raw Timestamps
00:00 Intro
04:20 Welcome
05:32 Preface
10:45 Point 1
27:01 Point 2
42:32 Point 3
53:14 The Analytical Takeaway
54:32 The Simple Takeaway
54:41 The Practical Takeaway
55:47 The Philosophical Takeaway
1:00:56 Outro
Final Chapter Timestamps
00:00 Intro
04:20 Welcome
05:32 Declaring Artistic Bankruptcy
10:45 What is Artistic Baggage?
27:01 The Identity Trap
42:32 The 4 Pillars Framework
53:14 The Analytical Takeaway
54:32 The Simple Takeaway
54:41 The Practical Takeaway
55:47 The Philosophical Takeaway
1:00:56 Outro
YouTube Titles (Post-Recording)
- The Identity Trap: Why Artists Stay Stuck (And How to Break Free) | Thumbnail: "TRAPPED"
- Declare Art Bankruptcy: Reset Your Creative Career in 2025 | Thumbnail: "RESET"
- Artists: Stop Carrying This Invisible Baggage | Thumbnail: "LET GO"
- The Art Career Reset You Need | Thumbnail: "FRESH START"
Final YouTube Summary (Post-Recording)
Are you dragging around old projects, outdated goals, and beliefs about success that are actually holding you back? Most artists are trapped by invisible baggage they don't even recognize.
In this episode, we explore "artistic bankruptcy" - the practice of consciously releasing everything that no longer serves your creative journey. From obvious goals you know you should abandon to deep-seated beliefs about what makes a "real artist," we uncover the hidden forces driving your decisions.
We dive deep into the Identity Trap - how your sense of who you are as an artist can either propel you forward or keep you stuck on a treadmill going nowhere. Through real examples (including lessons from my own career) and a practical 4-pillar framework, you'll learn to identify the artistic baggage weighing you down.
The framework covers: obvious ideas you need to let go, non-obvious beliefs requiring psychological archaeology, the mountain of projects and tools you've accumulated, and outdated plans still running your decisions.
Whether you're starting out or mid-career and feeling stuck, this reset exercise will help you enter your next creative season with real clarity about what you actually want.
Newsletter Subject Lines (Post-Recording)
- Why your art career feels stuck
- The invisible baggage killing your art
- Time for an artistic reset?
Website Page Headings (Post-Recording)
- The Identity Trap - Why Artists Stay Stuck and How to Break Free
- Declaring Artistic Bankruptcy: Clear the Baggage Holding You Back
📰 Newsletter Content
Greetings Artisan!
Have you ever felt like you're dragging around a bunch of ideas, projects, and beliefs that are weighing you down... but you can't quite let go of them?
I think every artist has this problem. We accumulate stuff. Career goals we promised ourselves years ago. Projects we started and abandoned. Beliefs about what it means to be a "real artist" that we picked up somewhere along the way.
The problem? This baggage is often invisible to us. It's pulling the strings on what we do and how we feel about our art, and we don't even realize it.
I did an episode of the Visual Scholar Podcast about this if you want to check it out.
[EPISODE: The Identity Trap - Declaring Artistic Bankruptcy]
In it you'll discover:
• Why some of your deepest beliefs about artistic success might actually be holding you back
• The four types of baggage you're probably carrying (and how to identify them)
• A practical journaling exercise to "declare bankruptcy" on ideas that no longer serve you
Here's what I've noticed after years of working with artists: so much of what's stopping people isn't a lack of skill. It's these unseen beliefs about identity and success.
For me, one of these was the idea that I needed to learn to draw realistically before I could draw in my actual style. I read it in books. Everyone seemed to say it. But when I actually looked at the mangaka and artists I admired... that's not what they did at all. They just drew their style. As soon as I let that belief go, everything changed.
Another one that held me back for years? "Those who teach can't." That little saying stopped me from doing something that actually made my art significantly better. Once I saw great working artists who also taught, the whole thing crumbled.
See, the thing is... as artists, we're not dealing with science and math here. What's true for someone else might not be true for you. The path forward is figuring out which beliefs actually serve you, and which ones you just need to let go.
Cheers!
-Tim
PS: If you're planning goals for the coming year, try this first: What if you declared bankruptcy on everything and started fresh? Which ideas would you actually bring forward... and which ones would you feel relieved to finally let go of?
🌐 Website Content
Every artist carries invisible weight. Projects you promised yourself you'd finish. Career goals that made sense five years ago but feel hollow now. Beliefs about what "real artists" do that you picked up somewhere along the way and never questioned. This accumulated baggage doesn't just slow you down - it actively prevents you from seeing what you actually want.
The identity trap is real. You've built an entire framework of who you're supposed to be as an artist, what success is supposed to look like, and which path you're supposed to follow. And somewhere along the way, you stopped asking whether any of it was actually true for you.
The Weight of Artistic Baggage
The real challenge isn't that you have too many ideas - it's that you've been carrying ideas that belong to someone else entirely. Maybe you've absorbed the belief that you need to draw realistically before you can develop a personal style. Perhaps you've internalized the notion that you're not a "real artist" unless you work at a certain type of studio or achieve a specific credential.
What makes this especially hard is that these beliefs often seem reasonable. They came from books, teachers, successful artists, or well-meaning family members. They feel like common sense. But here's the uncomfortable truth: advice that works brilliantly for one artist can be poison for another.
Most artists think they need to learn academic rendering before they can draw stylized work, or that being published is the only legitimate path to success, or that teaching means admitting you couldn't make it as a working artist. These assumptions operate in the background, pulling strings you don't even see.
The Breakthrough: Relative Truth in Creative Careers
Here's what experienced artists know: there is no universal truth about what you need to do to succeed. The path that launches one artist's career would completely derail another's. The beliefs that fuel one person's motivation would crush someone else's spirit.
This isn't about lowering standards or making excuses. It's about recognizing that artistic careers operate differently than plumbing or accounting. You're not dealing purely with physics and material reality - you're working in the realm of ideas, feelings, and vague concepts that somehow need to manifest as something real.
The breakthrough comes when you realize that much of what you believe about success as an artist is actually just inherited social programming. Status games. Value structures you absorbed from whatever community you happened to fall into. And the moment you see it clearly, you can choose which parts actually serve you - and let everything else go.
Key Concepts from This Episode
Declaring Artistic Bankruptcy
A deliberate practice of hitting reset on all accumulated creative baggage. This means examining every project, goal, tool, and belief you're carrying and asking: if this all disappeared tomorrow, what would you actually choose to bring back?
Obvious vs. Hidden Baggage
Some creative burdens are easy to spot - the project you know you should abandon, the goal you're pursuing because others expect it. The dangerous ones are hidden: beliefs so fundamental you don't even recognize them as beliefs. These require genuine archaeological work to uncover.
The Identity Trap
Your sense of who you are as an artist - your values, your definition of success, your understanding of what "real artists" do - often controls everything while remaining completely invisible. The trap closes when you confuse these inherited frameworks for objective truth.
Focus as the Real Path Forward
Every great artist becomes known for a specific thing: a style, a genre, a character, a medium. Success doesn't come from mastering everything - it comes from going deep on what actually matters to you. The million ideas and tools and techniques you're holding onto? You don't need most of them.
What You'll Discover
In this episode, you'll learn:
- Why the advice "those who can't do, teach" is both true and completely false
- How different artistic communities hold contradictory values - and why neither is "right"
- The four pillars for identifying your artistic baggage: obvious ideas, hidden beliefs, accumulated projects, and outdated plans
- Why getting published or working at a prestigious studio may be the worst possible goal for you specifically
- How to distinguish between ideas that serve your actual creative life and those you're carrying out of habit or social pressure
The Bottom Line
The artists who actually thrive aren't the ones who figured out the "correct" path to success. They're the ones who got honest about what they actually wanted and ruthless about discarding everything else.
With this approach, you stop dragging around dead weight from decisions you made years ago. You stop pursuing credentials that look good to people whose opinions don't actually matter to you. You start building a creative identity that's genuinely yours - weird, specific, and optimized for what you actually care about.
This changes how you'll approach planning, goal-setting, and even daily practice. Because once you've declared bankruptcy on the beliefs that weren't serving you, what's left is surprisingly clear. The obvious path often appears the moment you stop carrying the invisible weight.
📊 YouTube Description
Check out my Free Brainstorming Workshop:
Learn to silence your inner critic. Ignite creative ideas. And watch a live demo of these techniques in action.
Are you dragging around old projects, outdated goals, and beliefs about success that are actually holding you back? Most artists are trapped by invisible baggage they don't even recognize.
In this episode, we explore "artistic bankruptcy" - the practice of consciously releasing everything that no longer serves your creative journey. From obvious goals you know you should abandon to deep-seated beliefs about what makes a "real artist," we uncover the hidden forces driving your decisions.
We dive deep into the Identity Trap - how your sense of who you are as an artist can either propel you forward or keep you stuck on a treadmill going nowhere. Through real examples and a practical 4-pillar framework, you'll learn to identify the artistic baggage weighing you down.
TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 Intro
04:20 Welcome
05:32 Declaring Artistic Bankruptcy
10:45 What is Artistic Baggage?
27:01 The Identity Trap
42:32 The 4 Pillars Framework
53:14 The Analytical Takeaway
54:32 The Simple Takeaway
54:41 The Practical Takeaway
55:47 The Philosophical Takeaway
1:00:56 Outro
TOOLS FOR TODAY:
- Journaling / note-taking app or paper
- The 4 Pillars Framework (Obvious Ideas, Non-Obvious Ideas, Projects & Tools, Plans)
BOOKS/RESOURCES MENTIONED:
PEOPLE MENTIONED:
- Picasso (discussed in context of style development)
The Visual Scholar Podcast is designed to help you demystify the world of Art, Productivity, and Creativity. So you can get better faster, and enjoy your Art Journey.
We discuss Drawing, Painting, Illustration and Entertainment Design. Along with Productivity and Career Advice.
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📄 Full Transcript
As artists, we often deal with the unseen, with ideas and thoughts and feelings, things that are hard for people to just say with words, but yet can be expressed through music, through poetry, through visual illustration, through stories. And it's often our job to unearth these things that society doesn't see and maybe is hard for them to understand and to bring it up so that everyone can understand and find that truth. That's a fancy, fun thing to think about. But often in order to do that, we really need to sort through our own artistic baggage and make sure that we're not falling into what I like to call the identity trap, where we have pre-existing ideas, concepts, plans, projects, work, tools, like stuff that is is just a litany of things that you are carrying along, burdening you down. They're actually stopping you from seeing some of these truths and actually being able to create the art you want. These are often big career goals, wanting to work for XYZ, AAA studio, wanting to create all these images and ideas and things that you've had in your mind, wanting to try and explore the full potential of all the different artistic mediums, tools, tricks, techniques, and tutorials that are are out there just having too many projects that you've developed and kind of half developed and abandoned and sort of promised to yourself that like one day you are going to finish this thing we often have these gigantic magnum opus projects maybe a collection of them that are you know collectively if you were to create all the art that you probably thought about up until now it would take multiple lifetimes to complete the same when it comes to all the projects all the illustrations, all the career goals. We're often looking at choosing between multiple careers that are going to take up someone's entire life. And the same with tools. If you learn every artistic tool to its full extent, you would, again, be looking at multiple lifetimes of mastery. The reality is there's often not enough time to just do all of this stuff. This is really obvious. and what we have to do as artists is figure out what's actually right for us in a sea of what could be true and amorphous ideas and things that we're trying to sort through it's really critical for us to figure out what is true for us what are the ideas that really serve us and what are the ideas that we just need to let go when we roll over the new year it's a good chance to hit reset on all of this nonsense and really get a clear picture of what is truly important to you when it comes to your art, your career, your goals, and everything else relating to who you want to be as an artist. And I think if you do this well, if you really look at this and do what I like to call declaring artistic bankruptcy on everything, just hit reset and think about what's really really important to you? What do you actually want to take forward into the next year, into the next season of your artistic goals and aspirations? I think before you really make any big plans and think about what you want to do, this is one of the number one exercises to really make sure that you handle, because if you're just carrying one idea that isn't serving you, that is actually holding you back and you just cling to this thing and just it is maybe unseen, clinging to your back and you are just dragging this thing around like dead weight, obviously it means it's going to be really hard to succeed and be the type of artist that you actually want. So in this episode, I'm going to explore these concepts of declaring artistic bankruptcy, setting goals and aspirations for the coming season, and what it means to escape the identity trap. We're going to look at this in theory and also give you some really practical exercises you can do so that yeah when you're planning the next year you can go in with a clear fresh mind. Welcome to the Visual Scholar podcast my name is Tim McBurnie I have been a professional working artist for over 20 years and on this show we're all about art creativity and productivity so that you can get better faster and enjoy enjoy your artistic journey. Check out my free brainstorming toolkit. If you want to take your art to the next level and really improve your skills, one of the best ways is to create your own personal artistic project. And to do that, you need a great idea, an idea that you're passionate about that is unique and original to you that is going to allow you to see this project through. I've taken the same tools and frameworks that I use every day and created a workshop on world building, ideation and brainstorming. In it, you'll learn things like how to quiet the editing mind, how to enhance your blue sky brainstorming ability and how to use brainstorming anchors for things like story or even your pre-existing ideas and proclivities as an artist. This is a free training. I think you're really going to enjoy it. So if that is something you're interested in, go check it out. The link will be in the description. So recently I made a video on the Drawing Codex channel, which is the channel where I focus on more sort of practical drawing advice, less productivity, career, etc. And I talked about the concept of declaring artistic bankruptcy. And this is one of these challenges that I have done quite a bit of. of. And now I kind of make sure that I do every year when it comes to really setting goals and kind of figuring out, okay, like what am I going to do? That kind of new year's timeframe is a good time to always kind of do that because it's in the air, but you can use this anytime that you are really stuck. And the idea is really simple. What we're doing is just saying like, if you kind of let go of all the ideas, all the projects, like everything, what would you actually bring forward. Like, are there any of these ideas that you kind of know are not serving you and that if you just kind of let go of them, maybe you would feel a lot better. It's often surprising how many of these ideas that we are kind of bringing with us. And these can be, as I sort of touched on in that video, really kind of obvious ideas that you just kind of can't let go of. Like these are career goals where you just cannot kind of say, look, you know what? This isn't something I actually want to do anymore. And I don't think it's going to happen. And I'd actually feel better if I didn't do it, but like, I just kind of can't let go of it because in some way achieving a particular career thing, like define success to people, you know, often I, this will kind of be the case where you can kind of point out that like in today's environment, like getting published as as an author, for instance, like going, and especially when it comes to like just getting published by anyone, you know, like maybe getting published, but like a big publishing house, working with really great editors, like that might be great. Right. And offloading some of that mental load to other people working with a good editor, like, you know, there's a lot to be said for that. But in many cases, people are like, I don't care. I just need to be published. Why? Because being a published author or a published artist or whatever, like is the definition of of success. And it's kind of these days, the reality is like, that's not really true. There's so many other pathways to success, but they often don't come with that real sense of like, you have achieved success here. So it's often really challenging for people to like, let go of these things. Like if you've been holding onto that as a goal of yours for 20 years or like even five years or even a couple of years, it can be really challenging to just kind of step back and and say, well, like, does this actually make any difference? Like, is it actually making my life any better? And, you know, I think for a lot of people, you could kind of argue that like probably getting published is no longer the first stepping stone to like a success as either a comic book author or a prose author or whatever. Like there's so many other ways to just make art and get it out into the world. So many other good business models for kind of succeeding there. And you'll often retain your IP, make more money, have more fun, have more creative freedom, like all this of stuff but so often people are just like dedicated right like like with a dog with a bone like they just need to get this thing to happen so again like there's this everyone's different like and this is the reality there's no truth here and we're going to discuss this concept of like uh which may be a little bit sort of challenging for people but the understanding that like there's often relative truth when it comes to creative goals we're not dealing with with science and math here. We're dealing with like, what is actually going to serve you? And as artists, we need to get really good at understanding what is actually going to serve us. How do we actually build a career by making up these fantastical illustrations or pictures or stories or artistic expressions? Again, like it's often really important for us to be in a good place with it and feeling good about it and feeling positive. So anyway, there's a lot of of stuff we could kind of say about this. And that's exactly what I'm going to unpack in this video. So if you've been thinking about setting some goals coming up to the new year, coming up to that January time, or if you're listening to this later on, again, this works at any time. If you're a little bit blocked and maybe you're kind of feeling like, oh, I should let go of this. Or as we talk about some of these things, you need to go do a little bit of digging. You need to get a little bit psychedelic and crazy with it because there's also some real hidden ideas that you can be carrying around and they are invisible to you it's not clear to a lot of people that like very simple beliefs they have about what they need to do in order to succeed as an artist like in terms of like what craft to use what process to use whether it needs to be traditional or digital like there's so many of these things where people are just like unaware that this thing is actually actually it's actually driving everything, right? It's actually pulling the strings on what you're doing and what you're thinking and how you feel about what you're doing. So, yeah, anyway, we're going to dive into this and a little bit more detail. And if that sounds fun, then I guess strap in. OK, so firstly, let's dive into this concept of art baggage. And I touched a little bit on this in the drawing codex video. But and again, for clarity, like the concept of like the the creative bankruptcy challenge is something that I have kind of formalized and made a part of like all of our yearly planning in the communities that I run, where we are trying to really dig deep and go in and like next, when you really think about what you want to do in the new year, like what are your ultimate aspirations? Like what is your seven-year goal? What is your three-year goal? Like how do you really plan it out? It's often like really hard to do that, to really think about, okay, what do I want to be doing in seven years in terms of my art? So these are the things that I found have really helped me. And these are the things that I often do within the communities that I run. And it's just really tricky to do that if you haven't often really thought deeply about what you really want to do in the first place and to sort out some of this baggage. So the artistic bankruptcy challenge is something that I found really useful. And it's something that we kind of do all the time. So I've sort of had these things that I have contemplated throughout my career that have really helped me. And I found that often when people go through this challenge, they, uh, yeah, they often come out the other end going like, oh yeah, you know, that was really good. I had all these things I kind of didn't think about. So this is often related to a number of different ways that you're experiencing your artistic goals alter aspirations. And this is going to be totally different if you are much younger and thinking about like which career path you want to take. This can be very different if you have already been working as a professional for multiple years and you're thinking about like, what does success mean for me now? Right. It's less a matter of like becoming a professional artist and it's more a matter of like, do you want to keep climbing the ladder that you're on? Do you want to switch ladders? Is this actually making you happy? Like now that you can do this, what do you want to do? do? Do you want to do more personal work, less personal work? What's really important to you? And we've often carried a lot of this baggage in because often in order to get to where you are, you are often carrying a lot of different ideas about what success means. And that can really change when you do get that success. And when you do get those jobs and you kind of realize what's actually involved and what it feels like to do it. So this can apply at every level of of what you're doing. So, you know, I'm going to give you some different examples, but just understand, you know, the concept for you is to find out what is the baggage for you and where is it, what is it and how do you deal with it? And how's it affecting you? Cause it can be very different if you are like, I know a lot of students who are like 17, 18, that the kind of baggage they're dealing with is often like parents telling them they can't be artists, people telling them what style they should use people taught like you know just giving them different ideas about like what like whether you can succeed in this as a career or like which career path is going to be the most successful and they're often just dealing with these like very fundamental ideas about like what their future is going to look like and how they would sort of achieve that and it's often possible to kind of burn three or four years of your life kind of just really on a a treadmill, not really going anywhere because you're just kind of listening to the wrong people, right? And they just don't actually know how to get better at art and how our careers function and like how hard they are and where you got to put in the effort, et cetera, et cetera, what's important. So anyway, it's going to be totally different, but let's look at, you know, the fundamental concept of artistic baggage and kind of how this can affect us. So for me, I'll give you a couple of examples because this is probably the best way to really sort of make it clear but one of the ones i often use is that i just kind of always imagine that as artists in order to really succeed you need to be able to draw realistically you need to be able to render and create stuff with dimensionality and this is because often when you go looking for foundational advice about how to draw better this is what's there it is a lot of advice on how to render, how to make things more defined. And often people who kind of have a lot of success with their art often have a higher level of polish. It's more refined. They have a lot of flexibility. And just if you read any art book, it's going to talk about this. And so for whatever reason, I often just kind of thought that like I needed to render realistically, or at least I needed to know how to do that in order to do everything else because this is one of these key beliefs that's often there is like you need to kind of know the rules before you break them and a lot of what people would kind of say is like oh this person could paint realistically but then they kind of chose not to like Picasso is a perfect example where everyone kind of says hey Picasso had really great art and I'm like I don't know about that uh you know before he kind got into doing cubism and exploring these different styles. And again, I'm like, well, maybe it was okay. I don't know whether it was actually standout. That's probably why he started cubism. That's probably why he did that sort of great marketing campaign to get you to create a completely different category of art and that catapulted him to success. But there's often these ideas that like, this is another one is, if you want to draw like manga, you should draw realistically first and like this is such a pernicious belief because it kind of makes sense it's kind of true but it's also not really true because if you look at the vast majority of manga car they don't draw realistically they just draw manga and if you want to really draw manga you have to go so hard at drawing manga that like firstly just doing that will teach you so much about drawing but yeah like this this myth that kind of you need to learn in this like academic three-dimensional kind of rendered way and you need to study these kind of dimensional structures and do live drawing and all this because you want to draw in a really cartoony way uh i just kind of believe that and like that's just not true though it's not actually the i think the experience of most people who do draw in a more stylistic way um yet a lot of people will tell you hey you need to study your foundation you need to study your fundamentals because when you look at an artist and they're just kind of struggling to draw anything you're kind of like oh i don't know what to say right like this is really bad um you just need to study your fundamentals and learn perspective like that's all true but i think often the message we get as artists is like i need need to go and learn to draw like Michelangelo, Da Vinci. I need to learn how to render properly. I need to draw people realistically. And again, you know, people do often do a little bit of that, but then they just go and create their art, right? And really, this is one of these big things that for me just kind of changed. Like I had all these beliefs here that I had kind of read in books about what I needed to do to be a real artist and to really kind of build my foundation. and as soon as I kind of let that go it just helped me immensely because it did two things one is it really let me actually focus on the foundation that I think mattered which was this kind of core foundation of just raw perspective and just understanding anatomy but not necessarily doing anatomical studies just kind of really looking at like where all the muscles were were, but then drawing my art, you know, like me drawing my cartoony stuff and just kind of saying, ah, like, where does the arm go? Like, where does that bicep go? And I would go look at the anatomy and kind of understand that. But, you know, there wasn't this idea that I needed to like master realistic rendering before I could finally, you know, draw in the kind of cartoony comic book-y style, you know, probably what I actually wanted to do. So, you know, these are like these beliefs that for me early on took me a long time to kind of get over and realize like okay well i'm not because i actually stopped doing that like i i stopped pursuing drawing in a realistic style and trying to paint realistically and i had much more success and my career actually progressed a lot more but i still had in my mind like but at some point i should really learn to draw properly possibly because then I'll be a real artist and it's these are the ones that will really get you right because you're just carrying this stuff around so again let me know whether that kind of makes sense like whether you've kind of had any of these things where you know I like my lived experience actually disproves a lot of that kind of core advice that I'm kind of following and yet I still feel as if I should draw realistically I that I'm not a real artist that I in some way like I'll never be complete or whole or happy or have respect or whatever it is like these things can often just be be massive and and often this is just a matter of the people you hang around and the things that they say and I think actually like for me going and hanging around like French artists and listening to a lot of like actual mangaka like talk about what they they do. I was just like, that's obviously not true. That's obviously not what people do. That's obviously just the kind of stuff that like people who don't actually make comics and make stylized art say. Anyway, I mean, that's my experience. Let me know, like your truth there may be slightly different, but that's one of those things where as soon as I kind of let go of that and really understood how these things go together, it just made me a lot happier. So that's like a good example um another one is you know in terms of i think a lot of people struggle with this the idea of being pro and that you uh and again this is really interesting because different artistic milieus will view these things very differently and i've kind of discussed this as well in previous episodes that some artists will really view the concept of like making a lot of money or being pro as like that's actually not that cool what you really want to do is just figure out a way to make exactly the art you want um and and a lot of other artists will have this different identity which is that like you are not a real artist unless you're pro unless you're a professional artist and not just that but unless you're working on unless you've worked on like a really good triple a xyz video game like vfx project and and kind of people won't give you any respect unless you're like pro unless you're really doing this well unless you've really worked on a big project in a big studio. And people will kind of really defer to each other and say, oh, so-and-so worked on this. And there was this idea of doing that, working at bigger studios, getting paid more money, being able to finally actually buy a sports car, not being a broke artist who's kind of just struggling to get by. And that like, you know, maybe that is what you actually need to do in order to sort of find success. And there's just so many different versions of this right but again like as i've said that there's so many times where i've kind of meet real kind of author-based comic book artists and people who are making work they actually care about where like they're actually spending their whole day making stuff that they actually enjoy and they kind of don't care about any of that stuff and on the flip side i know a lot of people who do have cool sports cars and do have great jobs and are absolutely crushing it and killing it and and getting better and better and rising the ranks of like vfx and hollywood movies and triple a games and stuff and uh yeah often they kind of talk about lamenting the fact that they haven't developed a personal project and that that's kind of what they actually want to do because often the work they're doing is like not actually that fulfilling you know like they're good at it it's everyone's saying hey this is amazing but like they're often not that happy with the work they're doing so this is where it's like so important to understand these ideas of like identity and and baggage that you can be carrying along and it's i've seen so often that people will go just dragging this stuff for like 10 years uh building a career like succeeding but like really it not being optimized for what's truly going to make them happy so we'll talk about a couple of different frameworks to use when it comes to listing some of these beliefs but But to kind of recap the basic idea so you can kind of see how it connects to this, you can often have these really obvious beliefs that you kind of know you should get rid of, but like you kind of can't let go. This is where it's like, you know, I know that I don't want to work at a AAA game studio, but, you know, my parents want me to. So I kind of go, I kind of have to keep doing this. That's like an obvious thing. Like you kind of know it's not what you want to do, but someone else kind of, or for some reason, you still feel it's a good thing and you're just playing with it. You're toying with it. But really, if you let that thing go, if you really said, you know what, that's actually not going to happen and I'm going to do this other thing, that would empower you a lot, or at least that's what I found. Then there's the second set of ideas, which is exactly the kind of thing that I was just discussing. When you actually dig in and do some archaeology on your beliefs and the the structure of like what you think is good. And a lot of this is simply based upon the people you're hanging around with and the things that they value. Then you kind of find these little gems where you, for me, I just look at this and go, wow, like I never knew that this was actually the thing that was driving most of my action. And I would be feeling really good about making particular career moves or again, getting more and more concept artwork at better studios and doing this stuff. And yeah, you know, it's all based on a particular set of things that you value. Anyway, this is a little bit abstract, but I think if you can really find those deep-seated ideas that you're unaware of, that are deeply based on what you think success is, that could be really, really valuable. This can also be really practical. Like, you know, I know a lot of people just view like digital art as like, oh, it's not real art. It's like, okay, that's an an interesting idea to have. And, you know, they've always wanted to do this other stuff and they're just kind of dragging along these kind of beliefs that I'm not a real artist because I'm not, I'm working digitally or I'm doing this or I'm not doing that. Again, there's so many of these things. Again, the next thing that I think is worth looking at is the concept of projects and ideas, like tasks that you've kind of collected as things that you've promised to yourself. Like how many images have you come up with in your mind or characters that you've thought of, stories you've created, projects you've kind of ruminated on that you've half finished, started, sketched about, thought of, and maybe are abandoned or at least are not under active development, right? Because often we only have time for like maximum one thing to kind of really focus on. And lastly, we'll be looking at sort of plans. So some of these things that you can have as artistic baggage can be really obvious. Some can be really unobvious and some Some are just really practical, right? It's just like you kind of always had in your mind that you would never be a real artist until you were painting with oil on Belgian linen and, you know, while you have classical music playing or something and, you know, anything else is just, you know, not really quite good enough. It's so tricky to know exactly what is there. But this is basically the idea behind artistic baggage. And your goal here is to figure out what is there? What are you actually carrying around that you might not be aware of? So next, secondly, let's take a look at the concept of the identity trap. And this is something that I've also discussed quite a bit because I find it is a very powerful idea that if you really understand, it can allow you to really figure out what you want to do with your artistic career. And I find that often the real struggle that a lot of artists are having across the range. If you're starting out and you are just out of school or you are in school and you're trying to figure out what career path do I want? What skills do I build? It's often a lack of real clarity about what your identity is and who you're actually going to be and what you're building that's stopping people from focusing. And if you don't focus, often nothing happens because if you're trying to do a whole bunch of things, especially in this particular climate of career, I think that's often not going to work that well. We often need to focus and focus really well. This can also be something that, as I said, like if you are halfway through an art career and you're really figuring out what to do next, the way that you view your identity as like a production artist or as a beginner can really hold back your ability to go to that next level and kind of understand what you want to do and it's often tricky to know again like is this something you want to do is this something that other people kind of want you to do a lot of artists sort of get into art wanting to make art and then you get a job making art and then you kind of realize the only way to climb the ladder is to do less art become a lead become an art director uh ultimately the higher that up you higher up these ladders you get the more money you get paid the more respect you get and the more creative decisions you have, and maybe even the more freedom you have to make a few little pieces of art and for those to really matter and have impact on the project. But a lot of what you actually do is not making art. And I think that, again, is a major part of people's identity of looking at what success means to rise in the ranks of a particular job or organization versus get better at making actual art. So much of what defines what you're going to focus on is about your identity and kind of how you view yourself. So again, let me give you a couple of other examples here that might help you to kind of understand this, looking at sort of how I've used these ideas. So one of the original, again, misconceptions or things that was really kind of holding me back that I needed to kind of change in terms of identity was the idea of the art teacher and the teacher artist. And this is something where I've probably always always just been interested in why things work and process and how different artists make things and because i had such a struggle learning to do art myself and i kind of had to almost be self-taught it is kind of really interesting to me to figure out like what the future of education is and it's something i kind of just care about right like i can't explain why but but it is just part of one of the things i often sort of think about as a lot of people do but when it came to to kind of contemplating like, should I teach art or should I not? The big thing that was holding me back was just this old adage, right? And my kind of brain works. I don't know whether this is the same for anyone else, but I really, I really kind of run on little aphorisms and little sayings. So, you know, like those who teach can't, right. It's like a great little thing to say, right. And it is, it is often true. And the basic idea there is like, if you are sitting teaching teaching someone to do something, that's probably because you're not good enough to actually get employed to do that thing. You're kind of like a second rate teacher. And, you know, this is something you do see, especially with artists. And I saw this a lot with artists and the kind of teachers that I had is that frequently they weren't working artists and they weren't actually doing it. And their kind of art didn't have the level of craft that you probably needed in order to get professional work, or at least to get paid the amount that they were getting paid in their teaching career as artists and you know again like this is a really complicated this is probably a whole podcast episode onto itself uh which would be really interesting again if you want to hear that one let me know because i think this is like a fascinating concept but anyway like i just had that as an idea that i was kind of carrying around is like i should not teach because that will mean that i've sort of given up on becoming a real artist and i'm just kind kind of teaching. And especially if you are kind of like struggling to make money as an artist, I think it is really challenging to know whether you should like try and teach other people. Cause it's like, well, if I can't make a living as an artist, like I shouldn't be teaching other people how to make a living as an artist. Right. Like that's pretty obvious. But what sort of changed for me. And so anyway, like that sort of stopped me from understanding how much work it is to do teaching, which is a huge amount of work to do. Like just the admin, if you're working in one of these university environments, if you're actually a full-time teacher, like it's a huge amount of work just behind the scenes doing stuff. And a lot of those people are genuinely passionate, but yet we still have this basic little saying, right? Like those who teach can't. And this is just baggage I was hanging around for a long time. And I guess the reality is like, Like, I think you find it's a little bit more complicated than that. And I kind of found out that it was more complicated than that. But still, this is one of these ideas that I think is really important to contemplate with your identity. And so, as an example of how I kind of struggle with that, what I kind of found is when we got into running, like, sort of big workshops with the concept design workshop, which I was kind of, you know, just around when that kind of started. And it sort of started in Adelaide, Australia, as one of the first times where we actually got people from other sort of countries to come and kind of teach people in Australia. And that is like a really cool idea. And what I kind of found is if you go and look at the attitude that a lot of people have to learning in California, where people are actually all professional artists and everyone's trying to get better, is actually there was like a pretty strong tradition of like artists teaching artists and this is something that also goes back to you know the great masters and the beginnings of kind of a lot of like ateliers and artists always having sort of students and people kind of hanging around and just this this idea I think persists for a long time that like often the people who really teach artists are other artists we've always done this and what I kind of found is actually some of the best artists that I could see were actually quite good at teaching and they taught a little bit. So it wasn't a matter of being a full-time teacher, but they kind of were really good at teaching. And I kind of noticed, yeah, two things. One, it's like these people were really good at art. They had really good art careers. They were making a lot of money, but they were still teaching. And this I think was just because the reality is teaching helps you understand what you're doing much better and so as soon as i kind of saw that it gave me a really good role model for how you could actually teach and get better at the same time and how these things weren't like oil and water and this again changed my entire view of a lot of things but it often takes you seeing the reality on the ground of what's actually happening to kind of understand because the reality is that it's more complicated than that but in that little aphorism that little saying like those who teach can't um is categorically wrong uh because again i think one of the things that helps you to get so much better at something and actually do it is your ability to explain this and in a lot of physical based learning modalities like sort of martial arts sports etc like this is pretty true you know like in order to really get better at something you kind of need to be able to explain it to other people and that's where like some extra growth happens right so you know if you've ever been going through this this is one of these things where like you can intuitively understand maybe some of the rules of like rendering and understand like what you know uh your sort of main light is your kind of core shadow your reflected light and you kind of have a rough idea of it you can kind of do it but then when you have to explain it to people, you kind of realize where those gaps are. And then when people kind of understand it, but aren't really applying it properly and you kind of see, oh, like I didn't really understand that or like, actually, you know, the way I handle it is I just kind of cheat and I don't do what I'm saying. There's so many nuances here when it comes to actually understanding and examining what you're doing that. Yeah. So a big part of what I had to do when it comes to like identity and And understanding how I was going to do that is to transition my identity from someone who was just aspiring to be a working artist and actually understand that probably one of the things that certainly allowed me to improve my career a lot faster and catch up to a lot of people was the fact that I was teaching because I went really deep on foundation and I got to the point where I had to kind of be able to explain it to people. people so even though going back to some of these other things i never really work in a realistic style um i kind of knew how a lot of that stuff worked and i can actually paint that way uh it's just a matter of me kind of choosing not to and because i learned how to do some of those foundational kind of exercises and you have to explain it to people and you kind of realize what you don't really know what you're talking about and then you have to go read more books and understand it much more fully and you have to be able to repeat it uh yeah like the the amount of knowledge you can get there is just not really available any other way so what i actually found is like not only was i able to become an artist who was working and i was a professional and i was teaching but that actually made my art significantly better and i was able to improve prove a lot faster than if I just kind of been working on my own. So that was one of these real ahas, right? Where I really understood that I was in an identity trap and it was actually stopping me from succeeding. And all it kind of took was just looking at the reality and understanding that this little phrase, right? Like those who teach can't was like, yes, true, right? That's a true statement because a lot of people that like, that's a very true description of a lot lot of teaching and certainly a huge amount of art teaching. But on the other hand, that's completely false because I know there are so many amazing artists who can, but yet they still choose to teach. And that is one of the things that kind of helps them to get better and better at that. And then everyone kind of benefits. So it's often a matter of really going deep and understanding these because until I kind of made that kind of switch in my mind, yeah, I was completely self-sabotaging. Now, it's probably worth diving a little bit deeper into why I think the concept of identity is so important. And we will be touching on some of the more practical things here, which is like often having just a million projects and a million ideas and how that can can often be really sort of challenging because actually you really only want sort of one idea or one project and that's often all you need we'll kind of touch on that in a bit but the reason identity is so important is this is often where the bodies are buried this is often where because we're hanging around with a particular milieu of people because we just have these unseen ideas and value structures about like what is good and what is good like is money good it is creative freedom good? Is being pro good? Is pro being bad? Is being published good? Is published bad? Is being independent good? Is independent bad? Is it like a lower or higher rung? It's really important to understand that often so much of what we do is based on value structures and status games that we're playing and that really there's no truth there. This is all just late stage hominid mammalian nonsense about like who is going to respect you and this is so important to understand because again one of the things i've sort of touched on in past episodes is that you know because i often hang around different artists who are part of different artistic cultures you kind of really see the differences here where like you know some people just think that complete the same thing is either not worth contemplating or really really important right like creative freedom or being original can either be like an afterthought or it can be the number one thing that you aspire to do copying someone's style can either be as a concept artist just part of what you do and some what's something you train to do to like copy someone else's style or as a comic book artist um a cardinal sin to copy someone's art style it's something that you may be ridiculed for and people talk about you behind your back and give you no respect for copying someone else's style profile or it may be again part of your artistic journey where a lot of artists kind of start copying someone and you know graduate to figuring out their own thing like again like it's complicated the way that we kind of view these things depending on where you are but like so often I kind of see people who will deeply respect one thing in one art community and that same thing will be you know completely disrespected in another art community so if you're kind of just unwilling willing and unknowingly carrying along some like fundamental belief that is you know a major pillar of who you think you are as an artist uh that can just be just pulling the strings this is like the the the jungian shadow um just kind of subtly controlling everything you do and often i think this is at the root of this is the concept of identity of like who you are so this is like the the deeper stuff that may take you a while to kind of dig around but if you let go of these identities that kind of aren't serving you and really understand like what is the identity that you either want to take on and build for yourself like for me again i saw like it very clear it was very clear to me that i i knew a lot of people who were really good at teaching and doing art and working professionally uh all at the same time and and that was like an identity that was was very easy for me to then take on and kind of understand and i knew i wasn't kind of all out on there you know out on a limb by myself but but sometimes you have to really go out on a limb by yourself and understand that you may be having an identity one this is not a social group and that can be even more challenging but either way contemplating what identity you have and what is the baggage you you have existing and whether you need to let go of it um i think again you can get a huge amount of leverage here. A huge amount of stuff can instantly reframe if you just think about what identity you have as an artist. Okay, let's look at what we actually do here. Now, this will mean we are going to do a very short version of our practical takeaway when we do our takeaways, but this is the practical takeaway. We can do this as a journaling exercise and you basically just list down and figure out what artistic baggage you're carrying around. out. This can be as free form as you want, but I've got four things that I think can be real pillars for this brainstorming. And we'll go over them briefly. And then I'll sort of see if I can unpack them a little bit. We've already unpacked some of them in quite a bit of detail. The first is the obvious idea. What are these obvious ideas that you kind of know, obviously you shouldn't be doing, but for some reason, maybe because you just kind of promised yourself before, or like, Because some other like really pithy reason, you're kind of just hanging on to this thing and this just needs to go. Secondly, what are some non-obvious ideas? So this is where, again, these are going to be more linked to identity, to your deeper value structures. These can be harder to figure out. You need to do some archaeology. You need to go deep if you can, and maybe you're not going to get there the first time around. But nevertheless, we're going to like start to pick away at this and start to think a little bit more deeply about where we get some of these value structures and are they actually serving us? And is this actually linked to a really obvious plan? For a lot of people, there's a really obvious avenue for success. It's like, oh, just go do this. Why don't you do this? Oh, I can't do that because of this reason. It's like, okay, why do you think that? Is that actually true or is it linked to some other value structure? And it could just be a matter of you you're just saying, look, you know, just if you just cease believing that that little thing that is stopping you from taking the obvious path to success doesn't exist or isn't true, then maybe everything's fine. Like who cares whether it's true or not? Just go do the thing. Or it could be a matter of you going deeper, right? To really understand like, look, let's figure out what those things are. So I kind of touched on those quite a bit. The identity, the social value, status, etc. This is often the work you're going to have to do to really figure out these hidden forces that may be really, really important. And again, the value there can be great. The third pillar that I think is good to kind of just list out is all the projects and all the ideas that you kind of have rattling around in your head. Now, this can just be a weight of stuff that is weighing you down. It could be, again, every story, every idea, every piece of art you've kind of of contemplated or thought about every character you've kind of come up with every medium you've wanted to explore you know often this is a matter of like for me you know every i really have bought a million art materials million sketchbooks million pencils uh i could probably spend the rest of my life just messing around with markers watercolor different paints 3d vr 3d printing printing, could get an airbrush. You could paint the things you 3D print. That would be awesome. There's so many ways that could maybe tie into a career, be fun to make toys. A lot of people want to do that. I could maybe buy a big printer. I could maybe sell prints. I could make video games. There's so many of these things. And what would I need to do in order to play video games? I need to learn this skill, that skill, get better at 3D, maybe not better at 3D, maybe get better at 2d animation what tools would i need to use what books would i need to do like you can just go on and on and on and this is often just like baggage where like you're kind of thinking about it and uh if you just kind of write it down and then think about okay which of these do we need to let go now the last one is just plans and this is where often people are working under some structure that maybe you've kind of thought of a year ago in which case let's uh let's update that let's think about like does this does this plan still apply like is this thing still good is this thing still solid uh but often people are operating with 10 year old plans like oh i'm gonna do this and that and like that's not working and it hasn't been working for five years but we're just kind of still going along with that plan uh okay let's what if you just hit reset you made all those go away what is the obvious plan that may just kind of appear out of nowhere what's a new plan you could build. So the reason that I think it's so important to list out a lot of these projects and ideas and plans and things is that fundamentally we're going to have a lot more success by focusing and this means that often you can't learn every program and every technique and every medium and every type of way of making art. We're often going to have a huge amount of ideas and the more we get better at creating things, which is our goal. So if we think about, okay, we're going to have success, we're going to probably get good at making art. Well, the better you get at making art, probably the better your ideas working in that particular medium or genre are going to be. Like the more you understand about the horror genre, the better you're going to be able to make it work. The more you understand about how watercolor functions, the better you're going to be at it. The more you understand about everything, the better we get at it. The example I often use is that free people frequently are working in a two-dimensional illustration or a comic book medium and but we're all imagining living breathing moving worlds and if you're in cinema you do need to make sure that you put fans everywhere so that the set is moving so that you have movement within the frame you know you want that big akira kurosawa movement within the frame where everything is kind of kaleidoscoping you've got foreground middle ground background you've got plenty of movement right doesn't just look like a static shot like this one right this is a terrible cinematography there's no movement uh barely any sort of depth right like you know if you're in that medium you're gonna invest in fans right you're gonna figure out how they work you're gonna compose scenes so that they have depth in them uh if you're a two-dimensional illustrator you can't do that you have to think about leading lines and motion within a static frame. If you're going to think about comic books, it's often the magic happens between the panels where you feel a lot of movement and kinetic energy that doesn't actually exist. So your job is often to not illustrate the actual action, is to illustrate two different states and let people imagine how you got from A to B, from panel A to panel B. And whatever medium you have, you're going to express motion and movement differently. The better you get at that, the more your ideas fit your particular medium and the better your ideas get. And so typically the ideas you're going to have next are going to be more suited to the skills you have. They're going to be better. So probably again, you know, the ideas that we have and our expressions of them are going to be better as we move on. So we often don't need to carry along a lot of these ideas that we've had and also a lot of these different tools techniques ideas concepts that maybe one day you'll use because the other thing is again the more you get better at doing one particular thing the more you get better at just using a couple of tools and most great artists whether they be again film directors like musicians storytellers visual arts like whatever it is like people are often known for one genre, one style or something that's very unique to them. And that's often what people want. And that's often what success means. And when you look and you appreciate those artists, that's what you appreciate about them. And they're often really good at doing a particular set of things. And insofar as maybe they work on different projects, like they're still probably going to work on a couple of genres in their entire career. Often people who write novels or comic books are going to work with a couple of characters. If things go well and you create something that's good, or you work with a character that's really good, you're probably going to only draw that character. That's probably going to be your character that you're known for. So we often don't need a million things. You may need to ideate and throw a bunch of stuff against the wall until you find what sticks. But once something sticks, that's probably what we're going to be working on. So it's important to reframe success as a focused achievement and a focus on a particular set of skills, tools, mediums, characters, and stories, as opposed to this idea that like when we finally succeed, we'll be able to do the million trillion things. It's like, that's probably not what's going to happen. Yeah. I think in the beginning, that's often one of these ideas that we're kind of holding onto. So the reason it's really good to get clear on what what you do want to make and which ones you're just going to leave behind is because often we're going to find a lot more success by focusing on a particular pathway, particular career opportunity, particular project, particular story. And while it can be good to put down a lot of these ideas and kind of codify them and list them out, primarily what we're doing that for is so we can forget them, pick the right one, and then work on that. And again, this is a topic for a completely different episode, but often picking the right one is not a matter of which is the best one. It's a matter of which is the best one for you right now. Because again, you can have a whole bunch of ideas. They can all be good. They could all succeed. The right one is the right one for you right now that best fits your skillset. And also the one that you are going to be able to manifest the best based on your real skillset, your proclivities, et cetera. Again, that's a a totally different podcast episode but uh that's why it's so important i think to kind of do this listing out so anyway that's what we do here in terms of this assignment um four pillars that i think can really help you there's no reason you couldn't think of four more or only do a couple of these but yeah what are the obvious ideas that you just need to forget about what are the ones that are going to require some psychological archaeology for you to kind of uncover um again again, there's some good work to be had there. What are all the projects and ideas and tools and techniques? Like what's just everything that's kind of hanging around that you've been promising yourself you're going to do or you think is cool? And lastly, again, what plans have you got that you can probably just declare bankruptcy on? Before we bounce out of here, let's do a couple of quick takeaways. I'm just going to run through these because I think this is always good to do to frame up the things we've been discussing, but you probably have got a pretty clear idea of what and how this is going to help you and what you should sort of do here. But if you look at this from an analytical point of view, really, this is just understanding that it is often this complex set of like pre-existing ideas and value structures that are often like running our current actions. And as soon as you kind of understand that and really sort of figure out how it's affecting you, it can often drastically change how effective your planning can be. and this this is just one of these like weird things about being human is that often we run on habit and a lot of the psychology a lot of the science kind of backs this up that often we're dealing with social structures with status and that often we're making decisions and choices that are not necessarily serving us we're just kind of trying to fit into and rise in social rankings and that often we're just running on habit, right? And we often don't know why these things are even happening. And most people are exactly like this. As artists, again, I think it's our job to rise above this a little bit. If we look at this from a really simple takeaway point of view, I think here we can just say, let go of what does not serve you. If we look at a practical takeaway, what do you actually go and do? We have discussed this, but it's important to understand here that this is a matter of finding truth for you. It's a matter of really figuring out which of these things are true for you and which are going to help you out. Because we're doing art here. We're not doing science. We're not doing maths. This really is a matter of understanding how best you are going to utilize your creative energy to make art and build a career out of making that art and do it on your own terms and do it in a way that's actually going to be creatively fulfilling and that is actually going to work, right? So I think this is a matter of just, again, recapping those basic concepts. We're looking for obvious ideas that you need to declare bankruptcy on. You're looking to do some archaeology for some non-obvious ones. You're looking at projects and ideas and tools and techniques, and you're looking for plans. plans figure out what is true here for you and what's actually going to serve you lastly if we look at this from a philosophical or a spiritual point of view this is where i think it is really interesting to me how important the concept of relative truth here is and i know this can like annoy a lot of people and twist your mind a little bit but i think as artists especially like there's There's many different types of artistic roles where it is, I think, a little bit more important to be grounded and be in touch with reality. But for a lot of jobs and careers that are non-artistic, it is so important to be fact-based, to be looking at actually what's happening 100% of the time. You need to know if you're a plumber, what is actually the problem? What do I actually need to do? You need to make sure you do all the steps. It's non-ambiguous, right? There's certainly art to it and problem solving but like fundamentally you're dealing with the real world with physics and material science and that's often the same for like a lot of careers like it's really important to be grounded for artists again we're often dealing with this way this vague like idea space with concepts and how you feel about the work is like directly relating to how good the work is and you know we're fundamentally dealing with like creating and evoking feelings and emotions through a medium it's a little bit more mystical here and a little bit more spiritual i think and this is where it is so important to understand that like depending on who you want to be as an artist the relative truth of what you need to believe is a little bit different and i know that sounds a little bit weird but i think this is very true or at least it's true for me as someone who is like trying to look at different people's careers and like how they they kind of function and how often we're looking and taking different people's advice and kind of taking it to heart. So much of what is going to be true for you is going to be based on who you are as an artist and how you want to express yourself and what you actually want to spend your time doing. And if you kind of get this a little bit off, what I find is it makes a big difference. And it's very easy for people to get very caught up with their careers and really kind of crash out and burn out because you're just kind of pursuing the wrong pathway and you've kind of believed someone someone else's value set and like it's just not the kind of job where a lot of people can just grind away and you know just grind down to the bone and kind of just do it and be like oh well it doesn't really matter you know it's just my job like we're often putting a lot of ourselves into these projects and we're caring about it deeply and we're caring about things that don't exist, these fantasies, these stories, these ideas, these concepts. And it's so important for us to kind of take them seriously, even though they don't exist, even though they're not real. We're often thinking about characters and ideas that don't exist. We're making 3D characters for video games. None of this stuff is real. It's only real insofar as we believe in it and we put everything that we have into it and that that somehow comes across when someone's just playing this thing. And so if you're not kind of putting yourself all in, into the art that you're making, then it kind of doesn't really work, right? It's kind of like a nothing. And so a lot of what we're trying to do is figure out like how to build the craft, how to build the skill, how to figure out how those particular careers function, how to actually do it and how to put ourselves into the work. So what is true for someone else is maybe not going to be true for you in terms of what you you need to focus on and what you need to value and how you need to view success and what's actually going to function. And I think the path of an artist is a little bit different here to a lot of careers. This is often why a lot of people don't understand it and they give us terrible career advice in the beginning, like have a plan B. Again, should you have a plan B or not? Maybe no plan B is better than a plan B. Plan B is more reliable. Maybe we don't want to be reliable. maybe we need to feel a sense of desperation as artists like who knows right again for some people having a plan b is like really important for some people finding the ultimate creative asset like um aspirational job is like really important um for some people just finding any creative career is is more important as long as they're making enough money like for some people money doesn't matter like this is amount is about you and what you value and getting closer to that and figuring growing up what's true for you and i think for a lot of artists you see like a lot of artists are really weird you know you look at like someone like stephen king a lot of these writers are like weird people um they're very unique and they're opinionated and you know that's often why their kind of work i think succeeds so anyway um we can kind of go on and on about that kind of concept but yeah really understand that for an artistic career and an artistic existence you are kind of making up this amorphous identity for yourself that is probably going to be a one-of-one and it is really important for you to figure out what is true for you anyway that's all we've got time for in this particular episode let me know whether you thought this was fun whether this was in depth enough not in depth enough whether you'd like to go kind of deeper i think i kind of listed out a couple of podcast episodes here that are entire sort of concepts and episodes of themselves so if you want to see any of those things i kind of talked about expanded upon let me know but other than that uh again i have been running this as a challenge in some of the communities that i run i've been doing this for much longer and i found this to be super useful so hopefully this is is useful to you whether you're doing it now when this comes out at the turn of the year or any time after that again it's never too late to hit reset and declare artistic bankruptcy on every single thing that maybe is not serving you so anyway that's the whole point of this let me know what you thought in the comments down below hopefully you can commit to this idea to doing it and getting the most out of it other than that catch you around on the next one