Here’s a quick tip to stop you from taking the leap and sharing your art: Start comparing yourself to others.
Seriously, it's truly a vicious cycle. A smooth race to the bottom. An easy way to hide from what we have to offer.
This is how it typically plays out:
- We start making and sharing our art.
- We fail to get any traction in being noticed or building an audience.
- We get inpatient so we start some “research” on what other creators in our space are doing.
- We begin to benchmark our performance to that of others.
- Eventually this comparison game slowly creeps into our work.
- As we attempt to “keep up” with others we lose the personal touch that made our work unique in the first place.
- Eventually our work is so familiar and unremarkable that all momentum is lost, and at worse, we give it all up.
The deal is that depending on how we define better, there will always be someone better than us. Better looking. Better connected. Better educated. Better resources. Better thinker. The list goes on.
What matters is not so much where we end up relative to those around us but where we end up relative to where we are now.
Ponder this:
- Where are you at right now?
- Where do you want to go? What do you want to achieve?
- What small steps can you take today and each day moving forward to get you closer to that goal?
- How would this process feel if you accepted that the best you can do is simply this moment and then repeating the process over and over and over.