Dear ADs, I am a working artist who has not ‘broken through’. I am in my mid 30’s and not yet ‘a big deal’. It’s difficult at this point to start new projects because I despair of ever reaching the career goal posts I have set for myself. I intellectually understand that I am not old, but it is hard to see artist after artist in their early 20s being lifted aloft and not judge myself as wanting in comparison. Sincerely- ‘Wasn’t cool when I was young, either’.
This is both a really personal, and also a really universal issue. Let me answer you in a bit of stream of consciousness here, bear with me.
1—”Breaking thru” and “Big Deal” are completely arbitrary concepts, depending entirely on your POV. I am friends with artists who were (and still are) heroes to me. They’re so famous, and so goddamn good, that you’d think they could rest on their laurels and finally relax and just go about being great and enjoying it. But it’s not true, because that feeling of never being where you want to be, not having made it yet, never goes away. It doesn’t matter how far you climb, that feeling climbs with you. So get used to it. In a way, you need it. The artists that don’t have that drive never rise above mediocre. It’s that dissatisfaction that keeps you striving. Unfortunately it can also make you miserable. Each of us needs to find a way to balance and walk the tightrope between being dissatisfied enough to keep growing, while letting ourselves be pleased with what we’ve accomplished at the same time.
And remember, no matter where you are on the ladder – you’re only looking up the ladder to your heroes. Remember there’s also people below you on the ladder looking to YOU and wishing they could be where you are.
2—Don’t fall into the trap of comparing the 100% of your life that you know with the 10% or 25% or even 50% of someone else’s life that you can see. Social media and the internet in general is the worst for this, but it happens in real life too…you’ll see someone’s successes and not see their hardships. We do this naturally as human beings. We don’t put our chronic diseases, our divorces, our depressions, our failures, out there for the world to see nearly as much as we celebrate our wins. You see the artist suddenly getting all the book cover commissions, but you don’t see that they’re stuck in the house 5 out of 7 days with Crohn’s Disease. You see someone get into Spectrum or American Illustration, but you don’t see that they’re going through a period of depression and intense dissatisfaction with their work to the point that they haven’t made anything new in six months. You see the concept artist working on a bunch of big movies, but you don’t see them struggling with overwork injuries. The key here is to just assume, just know, that you’re not seeing the whole story. Don’t compare your lows to another person’s highs.
3—Goals are both critical to your success, but at the same time, can defeat you before you begin. Instead of setting really big goals that immediately overwhelm you with how far you have to climb to get there, try setting priorities instead. This exercise might help.
4—The solution is to stop caring about what everyone else is doing, how young or old everyone else is, and especially worrying that you’re too old, too late, not where you want to be yet, haven’t hit an arbitrary goalpost. Just put your head down and make great work. Show it to the right people. Repeat. You’ll get there. Everyone who has gotten there ahead of you got there this way.
