A brief personal monologue cautioning creators against repeatedly joining free art challenges and courses as a substitute for actually producing work. The speaker recounts spending years seeking competitions and ideas instead of creating, and emphasises that real progress came from making work and finding mentors who treated them as a business worthy of investment.
Before you go off and do another free art challenge or free course, I want to ask you a really big question. Fair warning, this might trigger some people. For many years, I was trying to make a living as a musician, specifically as a producer. And I probably spent, if I'm being real with myself, more time looking for new competitions, looking for new ideas than I did actually making something. And so, in turn, nothing grew. When things grew was when I actually created something. When I sat down, got away from the competition, and just did the work. And when it really started to shift when I found mentors that were above me, that helped me to see myself as a business, as someone who deserved to be invested in financially. So the question is, is this free thing that you're about to do actually helping you? In other words, is this a way that helps you feel like you're being productive without actually taking the action? I hope that you hear this with all sincerity and love and not someone pointing a finger, because question really changed the way I thought about myself. So I hope it does the same thing for you.
