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
