Potato is yum

So I’ve made it pretty clear that I’m probably delusional about my work and probably have more confidence than I should about my work. But I think a distinction between confidence and good is necessary. It is very possible to be confident in something fully knowing it isn’t good. In fact, when we were young we probably made shitty drawings but were proud of them. We were proud of all the crappy stuff we did because we didn’t know about anything better than it. The widespread use of the internet and such has made it much easier for people to cherry pick the best of different forms of art without seeing any of the work done that led up to the great art.

I think one of the biggest reasons for the cherry picking of art is two problems. I’ll try to break them down here and show how to stop caring about them by reframing the problem into something you can act upon and actually do right now.

The first problem is the massive quantity of high quality art that is out there on the internet. At almost every moment in time you could go onto basically any social media platform and find some incredible art for basically any niche you want. This volume of art makes it difficult for newer creators to break into the scene because it feels like an impenetrable wall without realizing many of these successful artists have been working at it for decades before getting to where they are. Also success in art has become more of a contest of marketing rather than ability which is something people often overlook or focus too much on. You need both. I saw the amount of competition that I had and instead of thinking about how great these books were I started thinking about how I could make it better. I came up with a book I wanted to see in the world and saw nobody else had made the combination of ideas I wanted. The only way to read the story I wanted to read would be to make it myself. So that’s what I’m doing. I reframed my goal for creating to be from making a successful book to making something I want to see that doesn’t exist. By taking control over the goal it’s easier to actually complete it because it doesn’t depend on others.

The second problem is the surface level understanding of a large amount of art. There’s a lot to be gained from a lot of books beyond just the surface level plot elements and the story. It seems as if much of the world has begun to consume art for entertainment rather than for thinking. I find this kind of sad. This can be seen happening in real time when you take a glance at the gaming industry where the best stories released in the past decades are almost all done by smaller studios. The biggest studios ended up making COD7. It’s ridiculous. And even stories that don’t have a story have a kind of design philosophy that is meant to make players feel something however it feels as if the development of gaming has become incredibly stagnant. This comes down to actually understanding the art you consume and use as fuel to make your own stuff. After all, how are you supposed to make anything if you don’t understand what you’re consuming. Understanding why you like certain works helps a ton with actually making something.

Overall, the issue of confidence is more of a framing issue where many have lost sight of a an actual goal and are chasing social validation over creating valuable art. Unfortunately, I can’t really comment much on this as I’ve been producing art at a loss for over a decade. I’ve kind of accepted I’ll never make a living off my hobbies. And I’m kind of okay with that.

So I planned a different post for this week but it took much longer for me to write up so we’re putting that off for a week. Instead everyone’s gonna need to be okay with this for now. Oh, here’s the post plan:

• My Minesweeper Addiction
• Andor Is Good
• Media Review
• MY BOOK IS BEING RELEASED!!! (This coming Sunday. Chapters will also be available on this website!)