My 2 week college break is about to end. I was really excited when it started, promised myself to post a sketch or a study every day for those 14 days.

I posted 6 times. Spent around 1.5 hours of drawing per day. On average, that’s less than I drew back when I had classes.

But the thing is, it wasn’t my fault at all.

Find your external circumstance

The first step to avoiding responsibility is to find something outside yourself to blame. This is easier than you think, there’s always something.

When I lived with my parents, it was the perfect excuse. How could anyone focus when they live in a corridor and their parents keep entering at random times?

Then I moved out and lived alone for a while. School now became the problem. It took up all my time and energy, I kept thinking about how much I’d draw if I didn’t have school.

During vacations, when I was living alone and didn’t have classes, my friends kept asking me to hang out. The government always needed me to handle some documents. Clearly, everyone was trying to sabotage my art career.

The beauty of this approach is that you never run out of excuses. When one problem disappears, you immediately find the next one.

Make it sound legit

Your excuses need to be reasonable. This is how you convince yourself they’re true.

School is a great excuse because it obviously takes time. And you clearly need to spend a lot of time with your friends for it to be a real friendship, right? And the government bureaucracy is definitely a real thing. It’s also very important.

These excuses work because they’re based on truth. Yes you do have to show up at 9 and go home at 5. Yes you do have to stand in line for multiple hours to renew your visa.

The trick is to focus only on the external circumstance and ignore where you actually spend your time. Better don’t look too closely at those 4 hours a day of watching art tutorials instead of actually drawing.

Stay 40% committed

Never commit fully to anything. Keep it around 40% at most.

Draw when you feel like it and skip days when you don’t. Work for 8 hours one day, then take the week off. Keep the hope to build that drawing habit eventually, just not today.

This approach keeps you safe. If you give it 100% and your art still looks terrible, then you have no excuses left. You have to admit that you just aren’t good enough yet.

But if you stay at 40%, you can always tell yourself that it’s only bad because you didn’t really try. If you actually focused, you’d be amazing.

When it feels wrong

Sometimes you’ll feel guilty about watching YouTube instead of working. You will hear the faint voice of your heart telling you that you’re wasting your life.

This is dangerous because it might lead to change. Fight this by continuing to watch YouTube anyways. Or even better, watch art tutorials or courses. Now you’re doing research and learning instead of “wasting time”. You don’t even need to do the assignments to feel good about yourself.

The other option is to build the most complex time tracking system possible. Spend a week designing the perfect spreadsheet. Track every minute of your day. Make it so exhausting that you have no energy left for actual drawing. If you spend your morning on logging data, you’ve already earned an afternoon of recovery.

A small problem

There are two types of pain in creative life. The short-term pain of sitting down and drawing hands until you get better at them. And the long-term pain of realizing that you haven’t improved as an artist for the past 3 years.

Every excuse above is designed to avoid the first pain. But they all guarantee the second.

You already know what to do. The hard part is choosing the pain you’d rather live with.