All in on Art

Share a lesson you wish you had learned earlier in life.

Go all in on what you love.

Of course it is possibly impossible to go all in on your art when you leave school. But it’s actually the best chance you are ever going to get to go all in on what you love. I don’t mean just do it like a job, I mean go all in, get obsessed, because after all you are doing what you love, so spending crazy amounts of time on it should be a pleasure, and if it’s not, maybe you are pursuing the wrong thing.

In my younger years I found it was too easy to get distracted by things and opinions of others. Somehow I was convinced after leaving school that I needed a nice car and save for a house. And that there is no way you can make any money ‘good money’ being an artist. If I was going to follow that trajectory I’d end up poor and miserable.

So I got a job that I hated and a nice car that would take me a ridiculous amount of years to pay off. This would lock me into a system, a trap. It got me on the treadmill of life, working on other People’s dreams. That was the done thing, get a job, take out loans and buy things you can’t afford. Then suddenly you have no time to create the work you’d love to be doing instead.

I’d tell my younger self to live frugally, to allow myself the time and money to pursue my passions. To get obsessed by my passions, in this case art and filmmaking. Then by doing the things, honing my art, I’d create my own job creating my own creative dreams and not slogging it out working on someone else’s dream.