It’s the 1st of January 2024. I’m already sitting at my desk, staring out of the window at the sunny day outside. The kitchen is a mess of undone dishes. But I am not planning to do them right now. I have been thinking about this day for weeks.
I turn back to my monitor and open up x.com and for the first time press the Sign Up button. In the username field I enter “Venkaris”. When I finally log in, I see that my name is now @user18472125? That moment my heart sank a little. I’ve been picking this name out for 2 weeks, and it’s already taken?!
Thankfully all it took was changing my username to @venkaris manually and that was it. I am Venkaris from now on.
What my comfort zone looked like
I posted in 3 Discord servers, Newgrounds and on Furaffinity. I also got clients who commissioned me, those clients were friends or acquaintances I’ve met on those servers.
It was like living in a small village. I wanted to show my art to a friend, I tried to google the name I was going by back then and all that came up was salad. A lot of salad, but none of my art.
During the next 2 years I bookmarked videos about marketing and branding, made lists of content ideas, and sketched designs for my new fursona. Every now and then I would find a game like Skyrim that I got super obsessed with and played it for 8 hours straight. Then a couple days later I would realize how much time I’m wasting and delete the game. I got angry at myself for that, but a few months later the cycle repeated.
The cost of waiting
One day a classmate asked to see my art. I pulled out my phone and scrolled through my gallery, but I only had 3 public finished pieces to show. “I want to become a professional artist and make a lot of money!” I told him. He looked at the pictures. Nodded slowly. “Huh, is that furry art? Well, keep at it I guess.” Most of the commissions I did were private, so I couldn’t show them.
The last straw was a 500 euro commission I did, it took me 2 months to complete because it consisted of 2 full illustrations and a couple stickers. Not only that but there were endless revisions and I had to draw the same character over and over again.
What made me change
I asked ChatGPT which platforms I should be on as a professional furry artist, it gave me a list of 20. I decided to start by creating a YouTube video. “It’s gonna be so fun!” I thought. 6 months later the video was finally done, I posted it and a month later it has only gotten around 100 views. I haven’t checked my YouTube analytics ever since.
I decided to start posting mindset tweets to become a thought leader. I tried that for 2 periods of 3 months. Around 80% of those posts flopped, getting less than 10 likes each. Between those periods I took a long break to go through an anatomy course, I was frustrated by my drawing skills. During my second try of posting mindset content, I posted one of my anatomy sketches.
I was sitting on the bus, coming home after hanging out with a friend. That’s when I checked my phone. I saw 2k likes under my sketch and my jaw dropped. I’ve spent the rest of the ride answering every comment I got under that post. When I came back home I struggled to fall asleep, I was just too excited. It hit 33k likes in 2 days.
What it means for you
Three things:
- Manufacture a reason to start. I picked January 1st because it was easy to track on a calendar.
- Create a new identity. My old account had 3-4 years of friends watching. Venkaris could post and fail without it being personal.
- Stop forcing what doesn’t work. When mindset tweets didn’t go anywhere, I stopped. I switched to posting my anatomy studies instead, because I saw that they actually worked.
It’s time to stop putting it away indefinitely. Pick an arbitrary deadline this week. Do the first step.
