Get more done by saying less

I have a friend who happens to work for the same company as John Carmack. He told me there are these moments where people won’t know what to do or how they will accomplish something, then John will pop his head out of his office or send an email saying something profound or inspiring to everyone. We both agreed that we wished we could be like that. I do wish I could be like that. I’d like every post and update to be filled with deep insight. I don’t think we are quite there yet. 

This last year has been interesting. My year started on December 17th 2018. That’s the day I decided to sit down and start dedicating myself to improving as an artist. This didn’t just entail working on my weaknesses as an artist, but also my weaknesses as a man. I’ve spent time working on my mental fortitude, my physical body, my knowledge base, and my skillsets. I’ve improved.

Throughout the year there were times it felt like I was fighting metaphorical Ogres and Strongmen, conquering, climbing, two steps forward, one step back. It felt difficult, it felt surreal, it felt like a real journey. Now, at the end of the year, when I reflect back I feel like the last 365 days have been a warm up. I’m genuinely interested to see what growth I can accomplish now that I have a much firmer foundation than before. I won’t post my goals or make promises here. I found I get more done by saying less.

Happy New Year,

-Joseph

**The photos of the Male in the shirt and tank were not taken by me. I found them on the internet and superimposed my illustrations on top to show the print company how I want my designs printed.

Enough to be dangerous

Knowing enough to be dangerous is the wall I hit circa 2012. If we were to take a step back from my life now and compare it to my life back then we would see some similarities. We would see an artist very much doing a lot of artwork. We would even see that artist employed and doing personal projects. There is one distinction though and it’s important. In 2012 I got very comfortable.


From 2013 – 2018 I wouldn’t really do anything of note artistically. My blog confirms this.

Knowing enough to be dangerous was a windshield that splattered me like a bug. It allowed me to think it was okay to “hustle a little less,” or “take a little break.” It allowed me to believe I was a victim when things didn’t go my way in life. It allowed me to do everything, but sit down and put some work in. 

Eventually I realized that I only knew enough to be dangerous.

Waking up to realize how little you actually know and how much you have avoided learning because you think you’re “all good” is something that took me a long time to come to terms with. That realization was so jarring that I started second guessing things I did know which only made things worse.

I didn’t know anything. I couldn’t do anything. ……

Things kept happening. I kept not knowing anything. I kept not doing anything.

This pattern repeated for a number of years.

There are people who may say that they always saw me doing something. I think people see what they want to see in some cases. In other cases I could be very good about showing enough of something to pretend.

I have these dreams of things I want to do in my life and I have always been pretty good about being a dreamer. For a moment I left all my dreams on the table except for one. Even in the worst of times it just tickled me. Some dreams you just can't escape. 

So I went to work.

Work yielded some forward momentum, so I worked a little more, which led me a bit further. This is still continuing.

I have done more personal artwork this year than I have done in the last 5 years combined. I've come back to the place I was as an artist when things began to get hard.  If we look at my life and compare, I am doing a lot of personal artwork and I am employed. I’m not however comfortable.

My routine of doing weekly art assignments, reading through a stack of books, getting up before the sun, and hitting the gym is starting to grind on me a bit. My routine is also producing results so why does it hurt? Because there is this part of me that wants to fight against self-betterment due to its inconvenience.

It’s actually interesting. When you finally start getting a handle on self-discipline and a routine that is producing results, you start to see that the internal fight against self-betterment is almost like staring into the eyes of a version of yourself,  knowing the first one to blink loses. It’s easy to blink and spend a weekend playing video games instead of reading. It’s easy to blink and binge watch a show on Netflix you didn’t even care about 6 months ago instead of learning something about your craft. It’s easy to blink when blinking can feel so fucking good.

When I look back on all the work I have actually done this year I have chartable, measureable progress, from a routine. I have metrics I can apply. I have data and this data makes me curious about where I could be 60 days from now, 90 days from now……a year from now.




After 5 years I learned something I should have known. 

When it starts to hurt is when you know it’s starting to work.

-Joseph 

Words

I have mixed feelings about Social Media. I have mixed feelings about self-promotion. I have mixed feelings about being a public figure, being in the public eye, being Internet famous, being famous and generally anything that can impact a person’s ability to be genuine. 

I took the time last night to actually read through most of this blog. I’ve never taken the time to actually sit down to re-read anything I have written here…… ever. Mostly out of embarrassment for putting myself out there.  Why? For the most part almost everything written here is nonsense, which is fine because I didn’t really know anything a decade ago. I also really wanted people to view me through an illegitimate lens. I think I wanted to invent a “better” or “different” version of myself because of my own personal issues regarding how I felt about myself.  Reading through this blog I “saw” the voice of a person who was trying to be liked by trying to seem clever.  I never really use the word “shall” in casual conversation. I also tend to use contractions.

It’s okay! I’m grateful. In-between all the nonsense were a few gold nuggets for me to mine.

For better or worse this is the closest thing to a history record of my life as an artist. It’s true this space has never been kept on a regular basis. I don’t even know if people can easily find it, but it’s still the only timeline I can look through and get a sense of where I’ve come from. In a weird way this shitty little blog is kind of an important thing to me. I think my future self would be grateful to if I continued to update this space.

I’d like to try to speak (here) the way I would if I were having a conversation. I’d also like try and express myself and my ideas. I don’t know how the words for that are going to align, but I hope they make sense to whoever might be reading this. More importantly I hope they make sense to me. In 10 years when I take another walk down memory lane I’d like to hear the voice of a man on a journey, not the whine of a boy trying to be well received.

There used to be this mentality on a place that was called conceptart.org that you shouldn’t update your sketchbook if the only thing you were going to update was a bunch of words.

This is all the art I have been working on the last 30 days. I really want to get better. I want to be one of the very best.

It’s not over until I win,

-Joseph

Been Trainin....

Just been grinding it out the last 60 days. This is almost everything. I curated out the really ugly stuff ;)