![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Time Is Talent
Apr. 12th, 2021 09:06 amIf spending time writing and drawing makes me happy, does spending more time writing and drawing make me more happy?
It turns out the answer is YES!!
It also turns out that, if I have more time to spend on creative projects, I won't necessarily produce more. Instead, I'll edit and experiment more while devoting more time on skill development. What this means is that I'm not producing more work, but I'm hopefully producing better work.
If I had to guess, I might say that this is why a lot of younger creative people - visual artists especially - have such polished and sophisticated styles. Instead of having to spend all day on tedious adult nonsense, they have the time and emotional energy to sit down and write or draw for hours at a time. (There's also the fact that younger brains pick up and retain information easily, as well as the fact that younger brains tend to bounce back from trauma like negative social feedback quickly, but I'm going to conveniently ignore both of those facts.) People have done studies about this, and various theories been posited and then debunked, but I really do think a large portion of "talent" is just the amount of time you spend doing something.
(Although I'm not going to lie, the quality of my visual art in particular improved immensely when I finally bit the bullet and bought myself a semi-professional tablet. I use it every day, I love it very much, and I do not regret a single one of the hundreds of dollars I spent on it.)
No longer having to deal with full-on anxiety helps as well. Aside from general quality-of-life issues, it's nice to be able to sit down with a project without feeling pressure to make it perfect or risk backlash. Like, it's okay to take on projects that I'm not already 100% sure I can handle, and it's okay to fail a little and cut a few corners as I figure out what I'm doing in small increments.
In a fortunate turn of events, this mentality of "it's okay to be shit" has carried over to other aspects of my life. I'm more willing to start (and continue!) conversations on social media and Discord without expecting them to go anywhere, and I'm also more willing to try different types of video games. If nothing else, I finally started playing Hollow Knight, and damn if being able to spend time in the world of that game isn't the best reward for improving my mental health and outlook on life.
It turns out the answer is YES!!
It also turns out that, if I have more time to spend on creative projects, I won't necessarily produce more. Instead, I'll edit and experiment more while devoting more time on skill development. What this means is that I'm not producing more work, but I'm hopefully producing better work.
If I had to guess, I might say that this is why a lot of younger creative people - visual artists especially - have such polished and sophisticated styles. Instead of having to spend all day on tedious adult nonsense, they have the time and emotional energy to sit down and write or draw for hours at a time. (There's also the fact that younger brains pick up and retain information easily, as well as the fact that younger brains tend to bounce back from trauma like negative social feedback quickly, but I'm going to conveniently ignore both of those facts.) People have done studies about this, and various theories been posited and then debunked, but I really do think a large portion of "talent" is just the amount of time you spend doing something.
(Although I'm not going to lie, the quality of my visual art in particular improved immensely when I finally bit the bullet and bought myself a semi-professional tablet. I use it every day, I love it very much, and I do not regret a single one of the hundreds of dollars I spent on it.)
No longer having to deal with full-on anxiety helps as well. Aside from general quality-of-life issues, it's nice to be able to sit down with a project without feeling pressure to make it perfect or risk backlash. Like, it's okay to take on projects that I'm not already 100% sure I can handle, and it's okay to fail a little and cut a few corners as I figure out what I'm doing in small increments.
In a fortunate turn of events, this mentality of "it's okay to be shit" has carried over to other aspects of my life. I'm more willing to start (and continue!) conversations on social media and Discord without expecting them to go anywhere, and I'm also more willing to try different types of video games. If nothing else, I finally started playing Hollow Knight, and damn if being able to spend time in the world of that game isn't the best reward for improving my mental health and outlook on life.
