When you decide to go on a long trip, you don’t take everything that you own with you, do you? After you choose your destination, you determine exactly what you are going to take with you. If you’re traveling to Hawaii, for example, you bring along your swimsuit, not your fur coat. You don’t even think about what you’re leaving behind, unless, of course, it’s the dog. You are focused on what’s going with you. Well, it’s the same thing when you’re planning for your future in art.
In a recent podcast, Dan Sullivan discussed the idea of “letting go” in order to grow as an entrepreneur. We realized that his advice was appropriate for artists as well.
Choose your future
Just as the first step in planning your trip is to determine the destination, deciding what kind of a future you want is the first step. This future needs to be a bigger, better one than you may have ever imagined. We mentioned, last time, that the ideal goal can never be reached because it is a moving target. Remember, the “plateau effect” pushes you ever forward toward a higher goal.
For example, you may want to sell your art. Instead of wanting to sell your art on Etsy or Ebay for a few hundred dollars, how about expanding your future and selling your art in a gallery for five figures? That’s an ambitious goal, right? As Bill said, “If I want to reach the stars, I should aim for the stars. If I aim between, I will never get there.” The pursuit of the goal is as important as the goal itself.
If I want to reach the stars, I should aim for the stars. — Bill Alexander [Click To Tweet].
Another example would be teaching. How about instead of lugging a trunk load of art supplies to your local hobby store, you set a goal of starting your own art studio and gallery and let students come to you? Even if you only want to spend some relaxing afternoons painting, you can be thinking of how this process can help you grow more as an individual and as an artist. So, the first step in this process is selecting a bigger and better future!
What are you bringing along?
As you move into your new future, you can look back and decide what you want to bring along with you. Your past contains a lot of experiences…some good and some not so good. Your past is filled with accomplishments, failures, successes, mistakes, complexity, frustration, defeats — an unending array of positive and negative events. If you bring all of that with you, it’s going to slow down your progress toward your new future.
What gets to come along and what gets left behind? What part of your past will speed you toward your new future and what part will hold you back? You already have, within you, the resources and tools that can help you achieve success. Why not use them? In our next article, we’ll discuss exactly what you need to bring along on your adventure to a new future.
Great article. Every day in the morning before I “fire in” to my illustration work, my wife and I talk about “what is my goal?” This declaration helps get me onto the track for the day’s work, and delimits the chances of me frittering away hours drawing little, non-essential marks and lines on my images. Bill’s “fire it in, no mercy” attitude has been so helpful to me, but sometimes it is hard for me to check my bags, as it were. Yesterday was an example. I spent hours on trying to replicate Bills painting “indian summer” on the sunday preceding, and failed. I ended up wiping the canvas and feeling depressed with my productivity (I should say negative productivity, as I had actually moved backwards by sunday night from where I was in the morning). The “gap” was looming above me, and I found this baggage hard to leave behind on Monday morning when I was starting work illustrating. I draw for a livng, and drawing is pretty different than painting, but the failure mentality of sunday was actually affecting my high-level drawing skill on monday. Of course it was my mind, and I eventually overcame it, but “checking my bags” continues to be a struggle. I will add reading this article as part of my morning routine of “getting into the spirit”, before getting to work. Thanks for the great posting.
I saw an article on creating a practice board. It calls for 18×24 painted with enamel gloss but the enamel is for metal, can I use it on the wood. After painting do I wipe off the board how is it a practice board.the same person suggest making your own paint cleaner with water,oil and dishwashing soap.