Last week I woke up and immediately reached for my phone to turn off the alarm. Then I opened YouTube and clicked on a 3 hour Project Zomboid video.
Two hours later I was still in bed. I had already missed my two most productive hours of the day.
And this is not the first time this happened, here’s why:
One of these makes me a better artist, and the other makes me watch gaming videos while I’m still in bed.
Guess which one I actually use.
What I wanted to believe
Most artists think they can consume whatever content they like and still stay focused on art. Watch entertainment when they want to relax and art content when they want to improve. They want to keep both and switch between them.
I believed this too. I thought if I already knew what to do it would be enough.
But in reality, entertainment is addictive. After using my art account for around a week, I came back to my old account and started watching whatever the algorithm suggests.
When it led me down the business content rabbit hole, I spent weeks planning money-making schemes instead of drawing. When it showed spiritual videos, I got into meditation and yoga. When it suggested games, I swapped creating for gaming.
I was dabbling into new obsessions every month.
When I finally stuck to art content, my audience went from 500 to 7.2k followers in 4 months.
But I could’ve started a year earlier, that’s 12 months of audience building I lost because I kept watching Willjum’s Rust adventures.
How it all begins
You wake up and reach for your phone. Your favorite YouTuber just released a new video.
You watch it. Then the next one. Two hours pass, you’re still in bed.
You’ve lost the two most productive hours. Your morning drawing session isn’t happening.
So you decide to fix it. You log out of your personal account and create a new one, for art only.
You follow only artists, you click “Not interested” on memes and other distractions. You train the algorithm.
Now every video leads you back to art, perfect!
Except it’s not.
Making this switch requires you to kill a part of your identity. The part that seeks comfort in watching a 2 hour game playthrough instead of sitting down to draw.
This part fights back. You “accidentally” forget to log out on your laptop. You see those fun videos again, and before you know it, you’ve forgotten the art account exists.
That’s exactly what happened to me.
Here’s what actually worked
On all social media I started clicking “Not interested” on everything that didn’t align with my goals. Memes, gaming videos, political rants etc.
On Twitter I followed only artists, so my timeline became pure art inspiration.
I followed Josh Black almost immediately when I made my account. His anatomy studies were exactly what I wanted to make.
But it took me a WHOLE YEAR of seeing his posts to actually try for myself!
I saw his posts doing well, and I knew that format worked. I just didn’t believe I could do it too.
Then one of my posts hit 33k likes. Before, an illustration I spent 20 hours on barely hit 300.
That gave me the confidence to commit, so I started posting anatomy studies consistently.
Even though I thought I couldn’t maintain the momentum, it just worked. The next studies kept hitting 1,000 to 25,000 likes.
The data was clear. I’ve been optimizing for the wrong thing.
In 2026 I’m finally going to finish what I started. Log out of my personal YouTube account for good. Curate every device – phone, laptop, my PC. Especially the phone before bed.
Three things to remember:
- Your algorithm controls your interests, your interests control your actions.
- Knowing what to do isn’t enough. You have to actually do it when your brain craves dopamine.
- You have to curate EVERY device or you’ll backslide the moment you open your phone before bed.
Here’s what you can try this week:
Pick the platform you use the most and click “Not interested” on everything that doesn’t align with your goal. Unfollow everyone you don’t want to become.
Do this for 7 days and see what happens.
I’m writing this while still using my personal YouTube account. I haven’t fully killed my old self yet.
That’s the hard part.
Changing what you consume is the actual work, not just knowing you should change it.
