This Tuesday I woke up at 5 am, I set myself the brave task of going to gym at 6 am for the first time. At 8 am I returned back home, completely exhausted, but extremely proud of myself. This was a start of a very productive day.
Four hours later I was still on the couch, sliding down the spiral of another YouTube rabbithole. I didn’t even want to watch those videos. Every now and then Google Calendar was sending me notifications about the drawing session that I scheduled. But every time I moved it 1 hour down the line.
When YouTube’s suggestions finally stopped being that interesting, I snapped out of it. I opened Notion and started planning the next newsletter. The only question on my mind was “Why can’t I just sit down and draw?” The answer was sitting in my post history from two weeks ago.
The fear of small numbers
This month I posted a drawing called “Exoskeleton”. It was one of my favorite sketches I did in a while. Making it was super fun, I was glued to my tablet for 3 hours straight. It made me reconnect to that unfiltered joy I felt when I was drawing stickmen battles as a kid.
It got 186 likes.
By my standards 6 months ago, that’s great. But now, I’m used to my posts getting at least 1k likes. My most successful posts are always studies or tutorials. They are helpful, bookmarkable, repostable and likeable. They are the biggest return on my time investment that I can get. They are the fuel that grows my following, and gives me confidence in my business. But they’re also the trap.
When my post stopped at 186 likes, it felt like a threat. My brain just connected the dots: “The art that you actually love making will not give you freedom. Only educational posts will.” This made me abandon the idea of drawing Venjiro sleeping on a prone leg curl machine. I was going to call it “Sleeper build”…
How setting intentions solves it
When a study goes viral and brings in 400+ followers, my brain registers it as proof that my business is actually going to work. But when a piece I really enjoyed making gets very little attention I feel like my “real art” is a liability.
The problem was that I measured personal sketches by metrics meant for social media posts. Now, when starting a new piece I ask myself “Who am I making it for?”.
And here are my 3 possible target audiences:
- Social media followers – These are the people that follow me for my studies and tutorials. The stuff I make for them has to have the potential to improve their skills. The goal is for them to bookmark it.
- Potential clients – That’s where I’m meant to show off my skills, to make pieces that I’ll put proudly on my website. Ones I can spend 30 hours on. My intention is for them to go like “Woah that looks great, I should commission him.”
- Me – For him it doesn’t matter if it’s not perfectly rendered and it doesn’t matter if it went viral or not. The only thing that matters is how fun it was to make.
What does it mean for you
Here’s the 3 things I recommend to do when starting a project:
- Answer this question exactly: “Who am I making it for?”. Is it your followers, your clients or is it just for you?
- Define what success looks like before you start drawing.
- Don’t get distracted by metrics that don’t matter for the goal you set. In other words, if you’re making a personal sketch and it doesn’t perform well on social media, it’s fine.
If I asked myself this one question before making “Exoskeleton”, then I would’ve avoided spiraling down the “oh no am I even supposed to be an artist if I can’t draw what I enjoy and be successful” spiral.
