Define Yourself, Before Someone Else Does that For You

WRITTEN and ILLUSTRATED by PETER MOORE

AT THE END OF A POST LAST WEEK, I ASKED: What gold nuggets are buried in the rubble of your lifetime, waiting to be unearthed through your creative processes? 

In my own creative quest, I learned something important along the way: When you become bold enough to say to yourself: “I am X,” where X equals that producer of stuff you love, because it comes from deep within you. So, fill in that blank yourself: I am an artist, I am an entrepreneur, I am a chef, I am a standup comedian, I am a writer.

If you say it with enough confidence, backed by enough personal striving and experience, people will believe you. But the important bit isn’t what other people believe about you, but rather, what you come to believe about yourself. 

That’s what scratching the itch is about. 

I recently wrote an article for BACKPACKER called The Best .2-Ounce Addition to Your Hiking Kit.

It is of course a pencil, for memorializing your trail adventures on a blank page. In it I proposed the three rules I mentioned earlier. I believe they can guide you to experiences and delights you never thought possible. Just swap in your creative endeavor for the word “draw” whenever you hear it. 

#1. Tell your inner critic to f-off.

Your first drawing [or painting, or short story, or stage play, or Pinterest post] will suck. Who cares? You’re doing this to pay homage to a landscape, not to land on the auction block at Christie’s. Take pencil in hand and start. You learned to walk before you learned to backpack, and this will be a journey, too. 

Nishant Jain, the sketch-meister behind the SneakyArt Post on Substack, has guided hundreds of artists through their first scribbles. “The easiest way to start a drawing is to zoom in on what catches your eye,” he says. “Tap into your curiosities and interests. The better you get at this, the less time you waste in hesitations and second thoughts.” 

Patience and attention to detail are key to start drawing. 

Draw one line, then another one. See? You’re already an artist!

Picasso, who knew something about creativity, put it this way: “Every child is an artist. The problem is to remain an artist once they grow up.” 

Well, we’re grownups now. But we need to be children to embrace the learning and new experiences that can be the highlights of this time in our lives. 

Death is the ultimate form of stasis. Why embrace that before we have to?

#2. Big or small–focus is all.

Once they get over themselves, artists face another decision: How much detail to include? 

Select an object like this pinecone, which I pulled out of the kindling box at a mountain hut I was staying in.

A sweeping landscape works, too. Don’t overcomplicate your rendering. Find the details that make the scene–the triangle pattern to the pinecone, the sinuous line of the far off ridge–and render those in your own particular way. Capture one riveting detail accurately and your drawing is a success. If you fail to capture that detail to your satisfaction? Flip the paper over and try again. 

Here’s how the pop-artist Peter Max looked at it: “Don't worry about mistakes. Making things out of mistakes, that's creativity.”

#3. Remember why you’re doing this.

Drawing isn’t about you. It’s about where you are, and what pleases your eye. If you concentrate on the contours of that ridgeline, or the curve of the marmot’s claws while it eats that Columbine blossom, you’ll see them in new ways, and that will guide your hand. Sure it takes practice—like anything worthwhile.

“Drawing is a way to give time and attention to what you see,” Jain points out. “Unlike a photo, it is not a record of a single moment, but a distillation of the entire time spent at that spot, paying attention to a landscape constantly changing in subtle or dramatic ways.”

So start a sketch. You’ll relive the memory, and increase your skills for the next time nature poses naked and enticing before you. 

And here’s a quote from Steve Jobs, because every essay needs a quote from Steve Jobs: “The real art is knowing what to leave out, not what to put in.”

If you have a sense that there is a new horizon to explore, don’t wait for permission or a road map, go out and explore. You become the thing you’re pursuing by the very act of pursuing it. But you need to do that work as seriously as you’ve done anything, and this time in our lives is perfect for that, with kids and Important Jobs largely out of the way, thank goodness. 

And—not to put too fine a point on it—it also may be our last chance to reinvent ourselves, so it better happen now. 

Examples of people who dove into their passions, and made a success of it:

Julia Childs, obviously. Had a passion to cook, which she indulged in France. The cookbooks and the TV show followed the passion, when she was on the downhill side of 50, like all of us. 

Lucille Ball was forty when it came to light that she was hilarious, and launched I Love Lucy. 

Stan Lee was also in his 40s when he published the Fantastic Four comic book, and launched the most tedious film series ever.

But my favorite story is about James Thurber. OK, fine, he was already an editor at the New Yorker, at age 36. But he wasn’t a writer or a cartoonist until his buddy E.B. White found some of his drawings in a trash can and submitted them to the New Yorker’s cartoon editor. 

The important thing about this story goes back to that Inner Critic I mentioned earlier. James Thurber is arguably the most famous cartoonist of the 20th Century. And his Inner Critic threw his work into the trash bin. If the Inner Critic had won that argument, we would have never seen this work of genius. 

Sometimes only you, as the artist, can hear that seal bark. But when you do, it’s up to you to chronicle it in the way that only you can. 

“We cannot aspire to masterpieces. We may content ourselves with a joy ride in a paint-box. And for this Audacity is the only ticket.”

― Winston S. Churchill, Painting As a Pastime

“The great benefit of drawing is in the time spent doing it,” says Jain. “In our culture of hyper-optimization and productivity games, drawing bucks the trend. You do because it is fun, not because of the results. Its value is in the process.” 

There you have it: Nishant Jain, a professional artist, has given you permission to screw up, artistically. Make one lousy drawing, and then enhance a few details next time. Maybe add watercolors, if that suits you. Soon you’ll have a scenic scrapbook that’s far more precious than mere pixels, because it comes authentically from your hand. 

From you. 

That’s where the beauty lies. 

As one of my college classics professors may or may not have told me, the ancient Greeks had two definitions of time. The first is “chronos,” which refers to the standard ways our days dribble  away. The poet Andrew Marvell defined it as “Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near/ And yonder all before us lie/Deserts of vast eternity.” I didn’t really get that as an undergraduate, but I do now. 

The other kind of time is called “kairos”—where you lose yourself entirely in the process of creation, with attention fixed, and time’s winged chariot up on blocks in the garage, ignored. 

You’ve heard of the idea of creative “flow,” where you are so engaged in a project that you lose track of time? “Flow” is a kairos thing, and any creative endeavor roots you firmly in it. 

Meanwhile our days are limited by chronos, and we can all hear the clock ticking. Now is the time to use kairos to drown out that ticking! Creativity is our last chance to silence the clocks, to rage against the dying of the light. 

Now go out there and scratch your creative itch. Nobody else can scratch it for you. 

"Creativity is seeing what others see and thinking what no one else ever thought." – Albert Einstein

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