How I became an artist
medium.com
How I became an artist
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Re: How I became an artist
#2Love this. Well done.
Re: How I became an artist
#3Awesome post! Very useful to have the inside scoop. There was a recent posting on "Ask HN" about pressure to quickly succeed. The exact quote was "I'm 22 and I feel if I don't hit it big within the next 2 years I probably won't". [1, 2] Success is a slow road, as this post so nicely illustrates, you need to constantly be putting in the hours! It's easy to browse HN/startup eco-system and only see the career highlight reels and think: "jeez, I will never be successful", or "Man, how did they get to this point person, must just be a natural", or "I can never be like that". But, this behind the scenes view shows you what success looks like on a day-to-day basis (hard work + passion + education + tons of practice + over many many years). What is funny, is that we often only see the end result, and just assume it was an overnight success.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9837493
[2] sorry to use this as an example, but looks like new account / throwaway
Re: How I became an artist
#4REALLY good piece.
The bit that stood out to me in particular was his embrace of deliberate practice. It's been identified in studies as the most powerful tool for learning skills like this - good to see it born out in at least one practical example too.
Re: How I became an artist
#5One of the things I'm pretty jealous of is that in my career path (as admittedly vague it is... I'm 25 and my education & experience is in marketing, but being a CMO certainly isn't my life's ambition) is that I couldn't really start young and produce a tangible good that's worth anything to jump start a career since Marketing is really all about numbers. Anything without results is just speculation. (Nice job cross posting across the internet, btw)
I'm not a programmer, so I can't build an app... I'm certainly not an artist and can't paint or sing... Although I like carpentry and ok at it, I don't want to be a carpenter... So for me, being successful and earning a decent wage is either from climbing the corporate ladder or building my own company. Both are possible, but talent is really not much of a factor.
Anyways, the point I'm getting at is that it's impressive and inspiring to see talented people (like yourself) with artistic skill-sets and ambitions put the hard work in to get their inherent skillsets noticed and make a career for themselves.
Talent doesn't get you everywhere - and neither will hard work - but together they can do great things.
Re: How I became an artist
#6Awesome work.
Would love to see the path that follows.
Cheers
Re: How I became an artist
#7One of the things I'm pretty jealous of is that in my career path (as admittedly vague it is... I'm 25 and my education & experience is in marketing, but being a CMO certainly isn't my life's ambition) is that I couldn't really start young and produce a tangible good that's worth anything to jump start a career since Marketing is really all about numbers. Anything without results is just speculation. (Nice job cross…
I'm not so sure about that.
As a product manager I wish I had spent more time on either learning to program or preferably designing interfaces for product ideas that I had. I did some of this stuff but not as much as I now realise I could have.
As a CMO the best evidence of your skills is in marketing a product of any kind. It could be a blog or product that you've created yourself, or pro bono work for someone else.
None of this is to downplay the chops of this artist - it really is amazing.
Re: How I became an artist
#8I'm also on quest to become an artist, I created a site for keeping up consistent drawing streak (although I'm struggling at the moment).
The site is for anyone to use and we have quite a few artists using it already: https://streak.club/s/8/daily-art-2015
Here's a post I wrote talking a little more about the site: http://leafo.net/posts/introducing_streakclub.html
Re: How I became an artist
#9This is great and you're of great inspiration to young artists or simply anybody that wants to pursue their dreams.
I think that living a humble life doing simple things that don't necessarily lead to professional success, is still a very noble lifestyle. The pressure society has brought upon us to follow our dreams, simply because it's nice to follow your dreams, is a bit of a pipe dream.
What I'm trying to say is that success isn't objective, it cannot be measured with the amounts of projects you've built, or with the amounts of professional artworks you've produced. Success is being happy about the simple things in life, whether these are output of your work (art, code, music, etc.) or experiences you've had in life.
Re: How I became an artist
#10One of the things I'm pretty jealous of is that in my career path (as admittedly vague it is... I'm 25 and my education & experience is in marketing, but being a CMO certainly isn't my life's ambition) is that I couldn't really start young and produce a tangible good that's worth anything to jump start a career since Marketing is really all about numbers. Anything without results is just speculation. (Nice job cross…
I'm not so sure about that. As a product manager I wish I had spent more time on either learning to program or preferably designing interfaces for product ideas that I had. I did some of this stuff but not as much as I now realise I could have. As a CMO the best evidence of your skills is in marketing a product of any kind. It could be a blog or product that you've created yourself, or pro bono work for someone else.…
I guess I could clarify that what I'm talking about is the time it takes for skills to become apparent and credible. I'm not saying Noah's first works were Old Master level[1] or that they even are now, but clearly you can look at them and say "Kids got talent and has made tangible improvements."
Sure, I can start a blog talking about social media marketing, but basically it's starting from absolute zero - whereas Noah even early at his earliest started from a place a bit higher. For me to start a blog and say unique things about marketing that haven't been said before and then get that noticed... I consider myself to be smart, but I don't know if I'm on that level.
And sure, like you and I both said, I can build a product (I'm trying as we speak like everyone else is on HN) to develop my marketing skills, but then lets face it... if it's actually worth doing, my job isn't going to be primarily about marketing; it will be about leading a team, building a great product, and yes a bit of marketing.