A new year, another new painting blog to throw in the bookmarks bar. I’m not going to waste a lot of time laying out some grand mission statement about what it is I plan to accomplish here, mostly because I honestly have no idea.
I’ve tried maintaining some sort of “hobby journal” for a few years but I’ve never been able to stay motivated enough to keep up with it. My best attempt came about after a burst of activity over the course of 3 weeks. I found this template, made a few minor changes, planned out a release schedule and made sure to pose every night before I went to bed.
If you scroll down you’ll see…nothing. there’s nothing there. I killed it all.
See, I learned something today. If you are working off pure motivation you are guaranteed to fail. Wait..what? How can being motivated be a bad thing? How can someone truly motivated fail at something? Well, what I’ve found is like the President’s life force, motivation is a finite resource. Yes, when I am in the groove and feeling good about things, the work can just flow. It’s very easy to get through and I feel more inclined to try things that may be intimidating or new. But, like adrenaline, that feeling fades. The quality seems to drop off and things no longer come as easy as they did before. That leads to shortcuts, which leads to just all out quitting.
Miniac’s year-end video brings this up and offers a solution. A solution so simple and obvious that I feel silly for not realizing it before. I offer, that rather than relying on our motivation (and trying to force ourselves to stay motivated), we instead focus on routine. A routine is just something you do, it doesn’t matter if you aren’t feeling like brushing your teeth in the morning. You just stumble over to the sink, slap your arm around the counter until your hand finds the tube and the brush, and you just finish the rest without every really thinking about it.
I believe expanding my routine to encompass the work I do here with painting and website upkeep is the only way to be sure that things are maintained, and more importantly that commissions are completed on time. By having a set block of time every day to complete these tasks, when the motivation is gone, it shouldn’t matter. I update the website every other Tuesday, the end. From 21:30 – 23:30 every night I work on an existing commission.
Setting reasonable expectations and goals is the true key to success. Updating a website of all my progress every day is untenable in the long term. Sure if I’m feeling like it I could write an entire post about spending 4 hours glazing a shoulder pad, but what if I’m not? If I don’t have a routine to fall back on, it just doesn’t get done and I will be the first one to tell you that doing nothing is amazing. I love doing nothing, me and Pooh got that down. The drawback to doing nothing is obviously that nothing gets done. So, if it’s Tuesday afternoon, I update the website. regardless of how I’m feeling. I should have 2 weeks of content to draw from and it’s an easy task to check off, which in itself can do a lot to actually add motivation, so you can take advantage of those times where it feels like you’re powered up.
masque-minis.com 