Tag: resistance

This was not the beginning of the challenge that I expected! Absolutely not! And it is another piece of evidence why your daily form does not matter in the long run.

I slept the whole first day and had five hours to compress the whole day into, then the following night I did not sleep at all and had more hours and freedoms than nature would let me have if I had slept. So I worked through two extremes following one after another and it barely made a difference for my comic or other projects. Everything hit it‘s daily goal. What is my secret?

I have a simple schedule.

I do not have my best self on my best days in mind when I plan my work. Most of my days tend to be average in mood, productivity and external factors that could keep me from drawing. I still plan with my worst days in mind, so that even me at my worst can complete the most important goal of the day. That is working on and releasing at least one panel of my webcomic every day. So if all goes wrong, I am still moving forward. If I have more time, energy and other ressources to spend the day in question I will of course invest in other projects of mine, but never more than 2 or in dire times like right now 3 at the same time. I am already looking forward to putting most of my energy into SPREY instead, maybe just to see how that is. We‘ll get there.

Also, some tasks never get less tedious, boring or annoying. An example – for whatever reason I can‘t stand working on zines, but I never regret it when I finish one and I always do my best to create them with love and care. It can just be very tedious to compile and edit the art and create additional text pages such as the imprint and so on. But it‘s part of creating a zine, too, so I can‘t have only the sugary sweet fruit parts like making the actual art for it and dismiss all other parts of the plant that made it possible to get to the fruit. What makes daily sessions on something you dislike bearable is never doing too much of it in my opinion. Better come again for hundred days and do a little bit every day than using your willpower and then throwing the thing after 14 days because you are fed up or bored beyond any limit without any visible result.

I would do you a disservice if I didn‘t mention one other unsung ingredient to beating resistance and creating your thing: experience. I talk of experience as the sum of things that you did, didn‘t and that happened to you on your journey through life. As an artist I probably have made so many mistakes already throughout the years that some of the simpler to fix mistakes just don‘t occur that often anymore

So: one bad day won‘t throw you off a cliff, one great day won‘t make you grow wings so that you never have to do tedious tasks again. A positive tendency over time is a great result. Think long term and build yourself up, one step at a time. A journey is a sequence of steps. How many steps are you willing to go? And steps back or off the road are also just little steps. It is surprising what effects our small daily decisions can have.

Good luck creating and see you next time!