Uses

If you feel like something is wrong, believe me, you can find something that is actually wrong. It isn't even difficult!

Now, if it's getting too much and you can't help it, you can channel this. Never mind what's wrong with where you're looking. There's always something wrong. What's interesting is if you can find something wrong that needs more attention. Something underrecognized, maybe an unsolved problem, or one solved elsewhere but not here. Or maybe you can notice some pattern in a problem here that helps over there.

If you are feeling very much inclined to look in the shadow of every stone, that certainly has its uses.

Breadcrumbs

One of the most satisfying things about learning to make stuff: you watch feelings of despair and inadequacy dissolve into a better realization. Every reason you aren't good enough, every evidence of your weakness or incompetence, loses its threat when you notice that you are looking at what to do next. Far from saying you cannot, the flaws in your work are leads and ideas. Not happy with this bit here, but you know it's doing something, and you feel it just came out that way and ought to stay? If you have the freedom to experiment, then do so. Between feeling no good and trying stuff out, where's the contest?

It's more disheartening at first when you have less skill and less faith that you can turn critique into improvement. But mere effort and experience are your mentors. One day you will know, with certainty, that you have turned a critique into an improvement. From that day forward, if you wish, if you remember, you can always tell yourself that you know what to do with flaws: work on them, trust in them. They are your leads.

?

If you're like many people who want to be creative, you've spent a lot of time worrying whether you are, or whether you are enough.

Keep at it. In the end you will see, I promise, that the question is not whether you are. Nor is there a quantity to weigh.

Listen, there is joy in exploring and arriving.

Listen, there is work, there is pain in it, also.

If the challenge of "Am I creative?" or "Am I a real artist?" - or whatever your big concern is - motivates you well, then carry on.

But the worry could be joy instead, you know. It could be work instead, you know. It could be pain instead, you know. And in all those you would feel better than you would about the doubt.

Why? Because that's creating.

Saying Never

People say - often very successful people, especially - never give up. And I've always thought that was particularly delusional advice, or at least incomplete. Everyone gives up on things, and everyone has to, and no one benefits from refusing to give up on even a single thing. On the contrary, the only way you can pursue a big goal well is by giving up much else.

So I adapted that to "Never give up - if it's really important." And how do you know? There isn't a clear criterion. You have to figure that out for yourself. And if someone else is involved, you have to respect their freedom.

Also, you can understand "never give up" less as general life advice than as how to succeed at a particular dream. While it's possible to give up or put aside dreams temporarily, they may not survive that. For me, I've found they can. I give up on things I then continue. It's almost as if these ideas follow me around. But we have to accept that putting something aside may be the end. So, you definitely don't want it to get away from you? Don't put it aside. Don't let it get lost where you might forget it. People lose sight of their dreams for the last time every day, around the world.

You can waste a lot of time losing steam questioning this, that, and the other thing. If and when you get discouraged - yet from experience you already know that, at the end of the day, or the week, or the month, you will be back at this, not having given up, whatever you say to yourself now - you might as well save the energy and the emotional pain, a little, and refuse to waste time on questions about giving up. Ultimately, the wrong kind of "giving up" is a waste of time, and you'll start to notice if you watch out for that.

It's one thing to be unrealistic. It's another to get demotivated and start believing this isn't possible yet come back around, having lost time and opportunities. You can be realistic and dogged as well. You have to be selective. You can't be that way about everything, no matter what they tell you. But you can pick one or two things to be this way about. Maybe a few more. Not many.

Parallels

It's easy to forget that every experience you've had, someone's having that experience now. We put life in a chain, but it's a fabric. What you started off seeing and ended up seeing—another person has gone through the reverse, and feels just as sure of the new view.

I don't believe that now is all that exists. I don't see the past and future as illusions any more than the present is an illusion.

But what I'm getting at is that your past is someone's present. Your future is many's past.

I get the idea. The past only matters because the present was once it. But still...

Your memories are hooks on aspects of the present you do not see, but know are real.

To say now is the only time is to forget all the links.