Hacking Your Own Timeline

For everyone out there who found this because they thought they were going to hack their facebook timeline, many apologies. Today, what we want to talk about is hacking your own personal timeline..you know, as in your actual life outside of the digital madness that is facebook.

You see, many of us, artists especially, have this imaginary timeline in our heads. Lots of it are socialized stuff that we grew up or had put in place by our parents or relatives. These are things like "getting married by 30," or "retired exactly at 65," or "graduate college by 22." Stuff like that. By indirect (and sometimes direct) messages, we've trained our brain to have these specific landmarks in time where certain things need to be achieved. However, we never stop to ask ourselves if these markers are really valid or even realistic.

While Monkey + Seal always encourages people living their dreams, dreams also need to be tempered by reality. If your dream is to be a world-class photographer, chances are you won't have the opportunity to really develop your skills if you're a freshman in art school. Now this is not to say that schooling is necessary, because it isn't, but the point is that if you are just starting off in pursuing your dream, your dream isn't going to come true on day 1, or even day 600.

When we set goals with timelines, we have to make sure that we temper our sometimes crazy-high expectations of ourselves with what is humanly possible. Going back to the 10,000 hour rule - if you want to be an amazing painter, you seriously need to log in thousands and thousands of hours painting. Assume that you have just started painting and your goal is to be a famous fantasy book cover illustrator, do you really think it's realistic that you can achieve your goal in a single year? It is possible (as we think anything is possible), but is it realistic? Say that you only need maybe 5000 hours to get your first illustration gig - that's still about two and a half years, assuming that you're painting 40 hours a week. Bump that up to an amazing 80 hours of painting a week, for 52 weeks out of the year, and then you're still at over a year. Is painting 80 hours a week - more than 11 hours a day - realistic for you? For more than a year?

We live in an age where we want everything now. With downloadable music and movies and TV, we don't need to wait to drive to the video store or to wait for shipping. We're conditioned to want everything now. We want to be millionaires today, to be successful today, to be famous today. We want our business to be profitable yesterday, to be scheduled for talk shows a week ago, and to be invited to conferences as a special guest a month ago. These things take time, and in order for us to be successfully sustainable, we need to set realistic timelines for ourselves.

So how do we do this?

Step 1: Figure out how much work, on average, you'll need to put in to your goal.

Take the time to write out your goal. How far away from it are you? This first step is extremely, extremely important. How many hours do you need to put in per week? Be honest with yourself. If you want that novel on the bestseller's list, how many hours does it take you to write 500 words? Multiply that by 80 and you'll have the amount of time you'll need to produce a 40,000 word novel. Now, how much time will it take you to edit that much writing? How many revisions do you think you'll need? Research publishing companies. What's the average time between an acceptance of a novel and the books hitting the shelves? Add all this together, and you will figure out how much time you'll need.

Step 2: Double that number.

We told you to be honest, and our bet is that you probably underestimated the time needed. Even if you don't factor in procrastination time, artist's block, and life emergencies or events, you also need to take into account sustainability. You're probably betting on some crazy, over-productive work schedule along with what it takes you to produce a small amount of work. However, as your probably know, larger scale projects usually just take way longer than you could imagine. Writing 10,000 words or painting 5 new portfolio pieces is very, very different from writing 40,000 words or painting 20 new portfolio pieces. If you thought it was four times as hard to do the larger product, you're probably mistake. It's more like 10 times as hard.

Step 3: Divide those hours by the number of hours you think you can manage to work on your goal per week. Keep in mind your day job (if you have one), vacations, weddings, sleep, your friends, family, and dates, your soccer team, etc.

Step 4: Divide that number by 50. Give yourself two weeks of a break. If not for sustainability, then for emergencies.

BAM. That's your realistic timeframe (in years) that it'll take you to achieve your goal assuming you're putting in the work and prioritizing your goal over most other things. We don't want to discourage you from following your dream, but we just want to let you know that your timeline in your head is probably unrealistic, and we don't want you to be disappointed when those deadlines come due and you haven't hit your mark there.

Since Monkey is very deadline oriented, he likes to set his crazy goal, then go back and set another "backup" deadline that is more realistic. He wants to be a Magic:the Gathering illustrator by January of 2013, but realistically? It's more like January of 2015. He's going to bust his little tail to make the first deadline happen, but after doing some research, art directors (specifically those at Wizards of the Coast) say that it usually takes about 2.5 years from when you start trying to go pro to make it to that caliber of an illustrator. Work like you'll do it in half the time, expect longer, and hopefully you'll end up ahead of the curve.

Set your goals today, whether it's looking for a new job, a specific achievement, or your end-all dream. Just make sure that they're realistic and true to you.

Let Your Freak Flag Fly - Be Yourself

Many people might give you unsolicited "advice" as to how to approach your work. Maybe your paintings are too dark and morbid, or that abstract painting looks like a bunch of paint splatters, or that you should take photos that are more commercial.

Getting criticism isn't a bad thing - it's getting unhelpful criticism (especially unsolicited criticism) that's a bad thing. Having someone help critique your work is awesome - we constantly critique each other's work probably daily, but we always ask for it, and we always ask what the other person is trying to achieve.

Asking what the other person is trying to achieve is always important before giving feedback. This allows you to tailor your feedback to the specific problem the other person is trying to achieve. If you are trying to paint a stylized character with goofy proportions, it doesn't help if the feedback is "Your proportions are off." Duh, that's what you were trying to do in the first place, right? However, if you're working on a photo-realistic painting of a friend and someone suggests that perhaps the left eye is a bit higher than where it should be, then you're getting helpful feedback.

But let's get back to bad feedback. Hopefully you don't have to deal with this, but if someone (especially someone whose opinion really matters to you, ie. mom, dad, partner, etc.) gives you feedback completely unsolicited and completely opposite of what you want to do and who you are, DO NOT LISTEN.

While they might mean well, do not listen to them. If you paint bears, and you love to paint bears, and bears are your favorite thing to paint, don't paint landscapes, even if you think you'll have a better chance to sell the painting. Even if you think you have a better chance at getting into a gallery. Especially if that someone told you not to paint bears, you had better frickin' keep painting bears.

If you don't enjoy what you paint, even if you're good at it, even if you become successful, you won't be happy. Monkey and Seal fought their Academy of Art classical realism training for years, and only just now are we really embracing what we love to do. Seal was told that her paintings are too saturated and look too much like animation background illustrations to be fine art. Bah! Monkey was told to paint more realistic, and to leave out the text or incorporate it more into the painting. Bah!

You have to love what you do, and to do that you have to do what you love. Whether you like painting demons or angels, landscapes or portraits, animal sex scenes or intricate church interiors, you have to paint what you like. If you're a dance who loves modern dancer, don't do ballet (unless you love ballet as well). If you're a MC, rap about what you want to rap about, not what you think will get you street cred. If you're a weirdo, be a weirdo. Everyone is weird to someone else. Just as you might be branded a weirdo for making your own paintbrushes out of your own hair, for you, that's normal and most importantly that's who YOU are. If you collect Coach bags, while you might think that everyone thinks you're normal, I bet you there are a good billion people or so who think you're nuts for spending so much on a single bag.

There is always going to be someone who thinks you're doing it wrong, but in reality, if you're happy, you're probably doing it right. So do what you love to do, and do it proudly, and everything else you want will fall in place after that.

Managing Expectations

Monkey + Seal hold ourselves up to high expectations. While this is usually a good thing to strive and work and bust your behind to make it to the top, it's always a good thing to make a clear distinction in what expectations you hold to yourself. That distinction is doing your absolute best, and doing your best given the circumstances.

The difference is that your absolute best is probably a near-impossible level of work to keep up with any sort of consistency. If you were doing your best 100% of the time, you wouldn't have time to eat, sleep, or do anything that is remotely relaxing. Your stress levels would be so high you wouldn't be digesting your food (assuming you ate anything). It's an unrealistic expectation.

This is not to say that you shouldn't try, or that you shouldn't push yourself. Especially with working with clients and deadlines, sometimes you do have to push past what you think you can do and do that 30-hour day, or finish those five paintings in twelve hours. However, when you work yourself that hard, you're going to burn out. The crash isn't fun, and the whole experience generally isn't that fun either.

What you should aim for is that you do your very best given the circumstances. If you forgot the box of your highest selling comic and only brought the old stuff that no one buys, you can't expect to do the sales that you would have. But, you can do your very best given the circumstances and figure out how to sell what you do have. Or you can lose an hour of sales to leave and go get the comics. Or you could buy some paper and a pen and start selling one-of-a-kind comics that you draw there and then.

Basically, while we strongly promote setting lofty goals and expectations, make sure you realize that sometimes life doesn't always work out the way you want it to, but you shouldn't let those bumps derail you. Do not let missing a mark end your career. Use the missed goal as a learning experience, and as long as you did the best you could given the circumstances, you can walk away knowing that you did all that you could.