I’m sitting in front of an empty tweet draft in Notion.

I have a list of ideas that I gathered from podcasts and videos that week. I pick one about identity and habits and try to make it work for artists. I move words around for 20 minutes, format it so it looks good and fits in the character limit and post it.

It gets 2 likes. Fine. I do it again tomorrow.

I kept doing this for weeks back in 2024. I watched a lot of Dan Koe videos and convinced myself that becoming a thought leader was my path to financial independence. So every day I’d open Notion, scroll through my notes, find an idea that sounded like something a smart person would say, and publish it.

Those tweets weren’t mine. I was translating other people’s ideas into artist language without actually testing if those ideas actually worked for me.

The cost of copying

When you take someone else’s point of view without trying it yourself, it feels like taking a shortcut. You’ve heard a smart idea, you’ve understood it, now you can adopt it as a belief and preach it to other people. But what I was missing is that understanding doesn’t actually mean knowing. Knowing requires you to test it out in your own life.

My text tweets only started doing well when I actually started showing my skills by posting studies. No amount of consistently regurgitating ideas would’ve worked.

I didn’t only waste time by doing that, I also trained myself to look outward for what’s true instead of inward. If you absorb other people’s ideas, you might sound smart when you talk, but there’s no real substance to what you’re saying.

Last time I tested an idea was when I started seriously tracking my drawing time. First I just hung a sheet of paper on my wall and drew a calendar grid on it, where I could write how many hours I spent that day on drawing. I felt like it worked pretty well for keeping me accountable, but I sometimes forgot to write down the hours. So I made a simple script that tracked that for me, in a janky way. It was a really fun concept and that gave me the courage to seriously consider building it into an actual app, which is what I’m doing now.

When you’re testing an idea, it doesn’t have to be big, you’re just looking for a sign that it works in reality and it’s worth your time. I didn’t have to guess if the app was a good idea because I saw it work on my wall first. You can do the same with the beliefs you are following right now.

Testing before believing

Think of one idea that you’re currently running. Then ask yourself if you just decided it was true or did you actually test it?

For example:

  1. If you’re posting a certain type of content because someone said it works great for building an audience, does it actually work for you? Look at the analytics and try to see patterns, and do more of what actually works.
  2. If you’re practicing something because a course recommended it, take a look at the art you’ve made before starting that practice and the art you’re making now. Do you actually see a meaningful improvement? If you’ve been doing it for a while and still don’t see any improvement, you might be practicing the wrong thing or in a wrong way.
  3. Do you think you’re too slow to sell your art? Try to open just one commission spot this week. You might find out that people actually don’t mind the wait. Or that you work faster with a deadline.

I still fall into this trap a lot. I like to believe things that sound good because that’s the easy way. But I know that my motivation struggles happen because I build my day on ideas that I didn’t actually test. I’m trying to build it my own way now.