Self-promotion of any kind is always a somewhat tricky and delicate topic to navigate.

That's because there is not only so much baggage that comes with self-promotion, but there are also so many different kinds of baggage that come from different perspectives, disciplines, and schools of thought.

In this way, it's always hard to recommend or even voice one singular opinion because it will never be a perfect fit for everyone. Still, I wanted to share something that has been on my mind for quite a while now as it pertains to getting yourself out there in the world.

If you're an artist, you need to take self-promotion seriously.

Chances are, if you're reading this newsletter, you probably engage in some kind of art already. Now, more than ever, we artists and creatives find ourselves in that awkward position of making things for ourselves but also being cuffed by the chains of also having to promote our work and establish ourselves as artists in the world.

If you take your art at least somewhat seriously, you undoubtedly would have struggled at some stage with the idea of putting yourself out there, getting social, or even "selling out". After all, if no one sees your work, there's absolutely zero chance you can make a living continuing to do it, and in this way, it's most certainly a necessary evil.

But a big problem I see most artists and creatives have is that they need to take their self-promotion seriously. They need to take their marketing seriously. They need to take their sales seriously.

"Why should I? I'm here to make art. Not to sell my soul to the devil for a few hundred likes and a few dozen comments from strangers on the internet or make a few quick bucks here and there", I hear you say.

And depending on your situation, you may be absolutely right. If your situation is such that you create your art on the side, as a hobby, and you care nothing about commercial success, then I would 100% agree with you.

However, if you have any intentions of doing more with your art, if you want to make some money from it, if you want to make a living doing it, if you want to make a name for yourself as an artist, then simply being an artist is only half the battle.

In 2023, now, more than ever, if we're in a situation where we want to do something more with our art, we must turn our art into a business. We don't live in an age where we can simply make good art and expect people to come to us or have patrons sponsor our work. We must put ourselves out there, into the world, into the thick of being surrounded by the competition of hundreds and thousands of other artists trying to make a living doing what they love. And you have to beat them.

So often, I see artists treat social media as an afterthought.

So often, I see artists sell themselves short with how much success they could have on platforms like Instagram.

So often, I see artists not understanding marketing, leaving thousands and thousands of dollars and a sustainable, long-lasting career on the table.

And it breaks my heart.

We live in an age where most art forms have been democratised to the point where every living being on this earth could be an artist. So often, I catch myself viewing someone's profile, commenting on how impressive their work is, and following them for a while, only to see them complain about how they can't take their work to the next level because they can't make a living doing it.

If that's you, please realise that I'm rooting for you. I want your success. And if you've already got the artistic talent, then all you need is to combine that with a few business or marketing books, give it some elbow grease, and you'll set yourself up for life.

That's all it takes. Just imagine spending a week diving deep into business and marketing to set yourself up with the skills to come out of that with the rest of your life sorted.

If you're in the position where you need that little nudge to take your art to the next level, this is it. I'll be here cheering for you, creative.

As a bonus, here are some of my favourite business and marketing books that I've enjoyed:

• This is marketing by Seth Godin

• Permission marketing by Seth Godin

• Contagious: Why things catch on by Jonah Berger

• Hooked by Nir Eyal

• The 22 immutable laws of Branding by Al Ries

• Traffic Secrets by Russell Brunson

• Dotcom Secrets by Russell Brunson

• Company of One by Paul Jarvis

• The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss

• The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

Hopefully, these help take you to the next level, creative.

If you're a creative into photography, maybe I can help you further:

→ 30 Day Photography Fundamentals Accelerator - Is my comprehensive course for photography beginners wanting to upskill quickly.

→ Lightroom Editing Masterclass - Is for photographers who want to learn everything there is to know about Adobe Lightroom, all in one place.

Either way, you're in safe hands. Join thousands of students and learn photography skills in the most efficient way possible.

Creativity is like fitness.

Maybe you've heard the analogy that creativity is similar to a muscle, where we stress and break down the tissue, feed it with the right nutrients, and hopefully build it into a bigger, better, more badass version of it in the future.

But I also like to think of creativity more akin to general fitness.

How "fit" you are is majoritively determined by how often you go for your big bouts of training; think sprints, boxing, dancing, sport, whatever gets your heart pumping fast and keeps it continuing to do so.

But something to consider is that your fitness is also aided by how active you are in your daily activities.

Walking to your destination instead of driving, using a standing desk at work, getting up to talk to your colleague across the floor instead of messaging them on Slack, how we feel about all of the movements we make throughout the day says a lot about how fit we are.

Creativity is a lot like that.

Sure, bouts of deep creative work are necessary for us to get anywhere, but practising and using our creativity in the cracks of everyday life, in the space between, is where we can really gain momentum in our creative pursuits.

Everything can have some level of creativity applied to it; when you're trying to solve a problem with your kitchen sink, when you want to make everyday activities more optimised, when you're trying to design boring name tags for a big function you're organising.

Breaking out of the idea that creativity needs to be and have some kind of visual art to it allows us to expand our creative approach.

People think art and design is all about the visual. But something I learned a long time ago is that design is simply about solving problems. That's all it is. Whether you're solving problems in a graphical sense where you have to create a banner ad for a company, or in a photographic sense where you're trying to create a specific image that says something for a campaign, or in a user experience sense where you're trying to create a pleasurable journey for someone. All of these problems require creative designs, creative solutions to common problems, and this process is just the same for mundane activities like fixing your leaky tap, tackling the hornet's nest of cables under your desk, or optimising the best travel carry for your next adventure.

Rather than go about our day with a straightforward approach of just "getting things done", instead, how might we inject creativity into the smaller things we make and solve in between the bigger things in our lives?

Something to think about.

See you next week, creative.

If you're a creative into photography, maybe I can help you further:

→ 30 Day Photography Fundamentals Accelerator - Is my comprehensive course for photography beginners wanting to upskill quickly.

→ Lightroom Editing Masterclass - Is for photographers who want to learn everything there is to know about Adobe Lightroom, all in one place.

Either way, you're in safe hands. Join thousands of students and learn photography skills in the most efficient way possible.

To-do lists are great, but often, they can feel like busy work.

Why are you doing those tasks?

What are those tasks moving you towards?

Is the method by which you're doing them efficient enough?

Without solid direction, we can sometimes trick ourselves into feeling productive by ticking off tasks that might not move us forward towards our goals.

Getting things done is less valuable than getting the right things done at the right time.

To that end, a tool I've been using for many, many years now is this idea of the lead domino.

It's a question: what is the most essential thing in your life right now that will move you forward in the most progressive way?

There's always something. Something that has an upsized value over the others. Something that, should it be done, will make all the things that follow it easier.

For me, it's making sales in my business. More than taking photos, creating content, and writing these articles. More than doing YouTube videos, planning content trips, or meeting new people. For me, if I make more sales in my business, I generate more revenue, and that allows me the space, the time, and the financial freedom to do more of the other things that I need to do to make a living doing what I'm doing. Without making sales, I don't get to have the life I lead right now. Plain and simple. To that end, this is where I should be spending the majority of my time in my week.

For you, the most essential thing might be to establish your brand, learn marketing skills, upskill yourself in your craft, or figure out how to make products from your art. Or you might be further up the chain, and perhaps your most important thing is cultivating your community, doing more sales with the products that you have, or getting really, really good at obtaining and nurturing leads for your freelance business.

It's this clarity of understanding what's truly important to the success of your creative life/business/career that really focuses and hones in on your decision-making process.

Clarity of the most important thing. The lead domino. The thing that will cause all the stuff under it to fall into place a lot easier. It's from this place that you should then make your to-do list. Doing it from a place of clarity and direction is far better than ticking boxes and thinking you're productive. Deep down inside, we all know we could be doing better than we are on a day-to-day basis.

This is how we step towards that. We find our lead domino.

See you next week, creative.

If you're a creative into photography, maybe I can help you further:

→ 30 Day Photography Fundamentals Accelerator - Is my comprehensive course for photography beginners wanting to upskill quickly.

→ Lightroom Editing Masterclass - Is for photographers who want to learn everything there is to know about Adobe Lightroom, all in one place.

Either way, you're in safe hands. Join thousands of students and learn photography skills in the most efficient way possible.

Well, it finally happened.

A few days ago, the prestigious Sony World Photography Awards was held, and Boris Eldgasen, a German photo media artist, won the award in the single category of "Creative".

Normally, this would be pretty normal news. However, he won that category with his image that was AI-generated.

Boris Eldagsen’s winning work in the category of “Creative” for the Sony World Photography Awards

As you can imagine, that generated lots of controversies and shortly after winning the award, he released a statement about refusing the acceptance of the award on his blog, as well as performing a Kanye West-style interruption to talk briefly about his AI work being swept under the rug by the judges at the actual awards ceremony itself.

For more context, his statement reads:

I first read about this on PetaPixel, and I highly encourage you to go and read that article for the rest of the drama.

For my take on this, while I personally don't agree with entering a photography competition with an AI-generated image under the guise of it being an actual photograph, there is also something interesting and perhaps even slightly noble about doing it from the perspective of trying to start a conversation about whether the industry is ready for this kind of change or not, because honestly, and quite predictably, it's not.

But in the judge's and SWPA's defence, how could they be? This technology is progressing way faster than most individual people can even comprehend, let alone for a big company or organisation to respond to and have processes for, so I don't blame them for keeping silent on the entire matter even up till this point because, quite frankly, what is there to say that is going to appease everyone in this situation? The organisation is stuck between a rock and a hard place, and I'm sure the judges and even anyone who has caught wind of the news is still coming to terms with how disruptive AI is going to be to our industry at large and what's going to happen next.

I think the most interesting thing about all of this is the spark that it provides when thinking about what an image or a photograph is.

Eldgasen, the aforementioned winner, mentioned that his submission was an "image". Not a photograph. A semantic that is not to be missed because, in the general zeitgeist, visual pieces of art; pictures, images, and photographs, often can be called and often are referred to as the same thing.

But a photograph is usually an image, but an image might not be a photograph. A photograph, in the purest sense, is an image made using a camera. That's the difference. An image can be made from anything; a drawing, an illustration, a still from a video, or something generated by AI, but they are not photographs, and I think we, as humans consuming media like this every single day, tend to forget that.

This distinction is very important because for all of those photographers out there freaking out about how their jobs are going to be displaced, this is exactly how it's going to happen.

People have many uses for images. Think of anything stock photography has a use for. Photography for ads, illustrative purposes, as an aid to educate. These types of images have a utility to them, and it's usually to some kind of commercial end. If you're in this kind of photography business in the future, you're probably going to lose your job to AI. If you're doing photoshoots to sell a product, shooting models to make advertisements, or need to create a visual piece with a human element to seem relatable, even today, right now, with the newest version of Midjourney, you can do all of that.

One only needs to look at a brand like Levi's, which recently replaced its models with AI, to see where this is going.

However, if you're in the profession of using your photography for the purposes of inspiring people to travel to a destination because humans trust other humans more than they trust computers, or you use your photography as a means to capture experiences, make memories, and immortalise moments, or any other way that translates the human experience into the art of photography, then your job is safe. Probably.

That's why this is important. When you think about photography and AI in the future, consider the intent of the image. Does it have commercial utility or something in that vein? Or is it about human expression or experience? Because the former is going to be replaced by AI for sure, and the latter, we can hold on to for a little longer.

Thank you to Boris Eldgasen for starting this conversation in this way, and I'll leave you with that thought for now. More thoughts on AI and the future of our industry to come.

See you next week, creative.

If you're a creative into photography, maybe I can help you further:

→ 30 Day Photography Fundamentals Accelerator - Is my comprehensive course for photography beginners wanting to upskill quickly.

→ Lightroom Editing Masterclass - Is for photographers who want to learn everything there is to know about Adobe Lightroom, all in one place.

Either way, you're in safe hands. Join thousands of students and learn photography skills in the most efficient way possible.

Think about a recurring multi-stage or complex task you have to do as a creative.

Perhaps the craft itself; adventuring to take photos, filming a YouTube video, sitting down to write, readying yourself for a long session at the Wacom. Perhaps it's not about the craft at all; maybe you're building a new website to promote yourself, learning how to do marketing, or networking with new people.

The things we do as creatives (and as humans, just in general), are complex. And even the most seemingly straightforward of tasks can have a lot of moving parts.

Take my favourite act and craft to do, for example: Taking photos.

Now the actual physical action of pressing a shutter button is, in itself, a simple task, but the process of going to take photos isn't always as short as it seems to be.

Yes, sometimes, it's as simple as just grabbing your camera and going for a walk outside and seeing what you get, but for me, more often than not, I'm going to shoot for work, or with a purpose, or for a deliberate practice; all of which require some kind of planning and conscious effort to execute.

I have to think about what I want to achieve out of the shoot, where I can go to make that shoot happen. I have to research the time to go, the weather conditions I want to shoot in or what's coming up. I have to figure out how I'm going to get there and the logistics. Maybe I have to get other creatives involved, or maybe this one single shoot involves multiple content pieces on multiple platforms.

All before I even get to press the shutter button.

Of course, over the years, I've gotten better and better at this, but still, every time I want to go out to do a planned shoot, there's a cost, the cost of switching contexts.

When we're changing contexts and moving from process to process, task to task, there's a slowdown in our levels of efficiency depending on the task. Some tasks require us to do a lot of prep work to even get a result, while others can get going straight away. Context switching can cause our focus to wane or make us forget things in the juggling act of managing all the things.

For example, when I'm going to a new location I've never been to before, researching everything there is to know about a particular place takes significant ramp-up time to start to develop enough domain knowledge about it so that I can think like a local and find things that are off the beaten track. Sometimes this can take me hours, and sometimes, it can take me days, depending on how in-depth I go and how important it is.

When I'm planning the itinerary, I've faced this ramp-up problem enough times now that I have a template I made for myself that breaks the days down into chunks that are logical to me. This lets me get started much faster and, subsequently, finished faster too. We're talking minutes, not hours.

Even when I'm on the shoot, because I'm such a hybrid shooter now doing both photo and video, there are/have been/and will continue to be, missed moments because I'm fluffing about changing between modes because I want one media type over the other. Also, this mental jiujitsu I have to do every time I want to capture a scene inevitably leads to more mental fatigue or, even worse, poorer quality output on both media types.

All this is to say that the act of context-switching is costly. Costly in time, costly in effort, and costly in quality.

The worst part about it is that it's usually so subtle that you don't even notice it. A small slowdown here, a bit of mental jarring there, but over the course of a day or a week, it will start catching up to you.

I've been a lot more sensitive to this lately, so to solve this, I've started thinking about how I can apply the art of batching to my creative work.

I love batching. Doing common tasks together at a common time.

It means that you set up once and get a lot of the same thing done quickly. No ramp-up or wind-down time, no switching workspaces, no setting up the studio and breaking it down 1000 days in a row.

Best of all, it means that you can focus on one thing at a time, ensuring that the quality remains high.

Some ways I've started to do this are:

• Writing all my YouTube scripts on the same day

• Filming all my YouTube videos on the same day

• Spending one entire day editing YouTube videos

• Or, spending one entire day editing photos

• Writing as many creative&process newsletters as I can in an afternoon in a week

• Going out to only shoot images

• Going out to only shoot video

• Doing all my upcoming trip planning in one day

• Doing all my comment replying in the same hour for every platform

• Replying to all my friends in the same hour a few times a day

• Doing emails only twice a day, inbox zero once in the morning, and inbox zero once a few hours before bed.

Building in these batch actions means that I'm zoned in and focused on the task at hand, and that usually means I can do more of it and in higher quality as well. Win-win.

Try it for yourself!

Test out a few regular actions you always do, and see if breaking them down and doing those parts in batches works for you and your creative process better than doing everything from start to finish every time.

Let's get efficient, creative. 🫡

See you next week.

If you're a creative into photography, maybe I can help you further:

→ 30 Day Photography Fundamentals Accelerator - Is my comprehensive course for photography beginners wanting to upskill quickly.

→ Lightroom Editing Masterclass - Is for photographers who want to learn everything there is to know about Adobe Lightroom, all in one place.

Either way, you're in safe hands. Join thousands of students and learn photography skills in the most efficient way possible.

Every so often, I get into this weird state I often have trouble labelling.

It feels like being depressed, but only in the clinical sense of losing interest in everything, rather than losing interest in life or being sad. It's this feeling of not having the motivation of wanting to do much of anything. It's a feeling where productivity and putting my time to good use is quite literally the last thing I want to think about. It's a time when impulse, lying on the couch, and irresponsible eating are the heroes of the day.

But I'm not sad. I'm not upset. I'm not unhappy.

But I'm not happy, joyful, or thriving either.

It's a weird place in the middle.

It's in this space that life, for me, seems to go on a bit of a pause. And the interesting thing is that it happens in waves, and it always comes back. Throughout my decades of being a creative person, it always comes back in some way, shape, or form.

It doesn't feel "full-blown". I'm just tired. And when I'm tired, I don't want to work. I don't want to generate new ideas. I don't want to see anybody. I don't want to get out there and make the most out of my life. And when you're your own boss, it's very easy to give in to this impulse and let life slide away.

If I had to sum this feeling up in one word, I think, perhaps, I might call it burnout. But honestly, while I'm getting better the older I get, I've never really been very good at connecting with my emotions and labelling them, so I don't really know.

All I can recognise is that when I'm in these states, I'm not my best self. I'm not very high functioning, I'm not very charismatic, and I don't really care about anything.

And I used to hate this feeling.

"It's such a waste of time", I thought to myself. "I could totally be doing something else right now".

I used to try to brute force my way through these states and do anything in my ability to muster up the willpower for just a few hours of solid work.

But over the years, I've learned that rather than fight these waves of extreme lethargy; actually, life is a lot better if you give in to them.

See, creativity is like a muscle.

In the gym, we stress our bodies. We fatigue ourselves. We create micro-tears in our muscles, which force a biological adaptation, usually a signal for growth. When you put good quality food and the right nutrients into your body, you feed that adaptation, and the muscle grows; in strength, in size, in ability.

We need this cycle of stressing, feeding, and repairing not only in the gym and in our bodies, but also in our creative abilities as well. We need a challenge in the things that we make; it's literally the only way we can grow our creative abilities and constantly iterate on ourselves and progress.

And for a Type-A personality like me who is constantly striving for success and continually pushing themselves, this can actually end up unintentionally destroying me.

What I've realised over the years is that much like when you enter a workout program for an extended period of time, your body needs a break. You don't do back-to-back 12-week programs because you'll burn your body out, and it won't grow at the same rate as it did previously.

You need a few weeks in-between to reset. To recharge. To let your body adapt to your newly found strength, skill, and size.

Creativity is a lot like that.

Especially if you're pushing yourself for an extended period of time, it's easy to get caught up in the momentum and keep going, but that's also where the trap lies.

And after 5 back-to-back snow trips, journeying to the end of the world with my Antarctica trip, a couple of dozen smaller domestic trips around Japan and Tokyo, trying to start a new business in Japan, doing 2 commercial jobs, 4 sponsored jobs, 12 YouTube videos, starting a new newsletter (this one!), posting a short form video to 2 platforms every single day for the last 30 days, editing hundreds of photos from all of those trips, and honestly, so much more in just the first 3 months of this year, I'm pooped.

With the Cherry Blossom season here in Japan and every other creator who is here right now, I feel absolutely exhausted, and my creativity is fizzling out whenever I call upon it.

This is the cycle of hard work and rest, of intensity and breaks, the undulation of waves.

I know that this is all just another wave, and after some rest, I'll be back to my old self again rather than resenting my sloth-like behaviour of playing video games and eating too many Japanese snacks.

I wanted to make this post this week to serve as a reminder that it's important to come up for air every now and then. If you're anything like me, I can go on working forever, especially because I love what I do, but it's dangerous. When the quality of your work and the quality of your life and the quality of your relationships start dipping, it's time to come up for a breath, enjoy the air, feel the satisfaction of what you just did, and then get ready to go back for another round.

If you need it, I hope you can restore that creative energy too, creative.

See you next week.

If you're a creative into photography, maybe I can help you further:

→ 30 Day Photography Fundamentals Accelerator - Is my comprehensive course for photography beginners wanting to upskill quickly.

→ Lightroom Editing Masterclass - Is for photographers who want to learn everything there is to know about Adobe Lightroom, all in one place.

Either way, you're in safe hands. Join thousands of students and learn photography skills in the most efficient way possible.

In writing, there's one thing above all else that stops us dead in our tracks.

The dreaded blank page.

Or even worse, that little line cursor thing constantly blinking, taunting you to type on it, regardless of whether you feel inspired to type or not.

The blank page is the same as a blank canvas. It's the problem of not knowing what to create, or having too many options, or not being confident enough in your idea. But at the root of it all, it's the problem of having too few constraints.

That might sound weird; the idea that not being constrained is a bad thing, but when it comes to creativity, sometimes, oftentimes, for me, most of the time, it's a terrible thing. Counter-intuitive, I know.

While every artist prays for freedom and its many incarnations, having too much causes us problems.

Nope, that sucked.

Gah, that was a terrible idea.

Man, I can't think of what to say.

Will they like this? Or this? Or this?

What am I trying to say here? I don't even know.

How do I shape this into something someone will enjoy?

What the hell do I even write about?

Having an infinite amount of options creates space between you having an idea and you executing on it.

In that space lies doubt. Indecision. Fear. Laziness. Procrastination.

And the more space you have, the more likely you are to self-sabotage the starting line of creating your next thing.

Decision-paralysis.

This occurs in all forms of art and creative endeavours and in as many ways as the options you have before you start something. It's perhaps one of the biggest "resistances" (as Steven Pressfield in his book "The War of Art" calls it) you have as a creative person.

This is something that took me a long time to figure out for myself. I'm the kind of guy who loves lots of choices and options and prefers to survey the environment before making a decision. I'm a real min-maxer of both life and RPG games, always looking for the most optimal decision, so this insight wasn't something I was born with; I had to learn it.

The key to creative productivity oddly lies in something completely opposite to having the freedom of choice. It lies in creative constraints.

Creative constraints are you giving yourself some guide rails for your next creation. Providing yourself with a prompt, a tip, a strategy, a tactic, a something you can use to work from. Because when the world is at your fingertips, there are too many options and deciding what to do next takes too long. But if you've got a clue, a goal, a direction, then getting started is easy.

"Draw me a painting" is hard.

What kind of painting? In what style? With what colour palette? On what surface? Of what? Including who?

"Draw me a painting of a green and brown pine tree with this set of coloured pencils in this book" is easy.

The saviour is in the detail.

Creative constraints are something you can use in any medium of art. However, I've found them to be extremely useful when they're aligned with the goals of what you're trying to do with your art and/or your creative business.

When you have goals you want to reach, you have direction. When you have a direction, you can give yourself prompts and guide rails to make sure that the things you are creating are moving you closer to those goals.

Want to become a master photographer? Get out there and spend every single week mastering a new Visual Pattern.

Want to become a fantastic writer? Figure out what you want your work to be known for and write in pieces towards your main goal.

Want to become a world-class videographer? Research the best ones in the world, break down the individual skills they use to become the best and spend your next creating session working on those skills.

The idea here is to figure out where you want to take your art, break it down into teeny little pieces, and use those pieces as your creative constraints for the next time you go and create your next piece of work. Not only will you find that you get started almost immediately, but you'll find that after doing many of these in a row, something forms. Something larger than the sum of their parts. Something magical, a body of work.

As artists, many of us think that by just "doing the work", the results will come. Sure, broadly, that's kind of the goal. But deliberate, consistent, timely practice beats fractured, infrequent, repetitive practice any day of the week.

Freedom, in this case, ironically, is the enemy. And the narrowing down of your options provides you with focus, and focus is what gets you to your goals.

So go make friends with creative constraints. They'll be your next best friend.

See you next week, creative.

If you're a creative into photography, maybe I can help you further:

→ 30 Day Photography Fundamentals Accelerator - Is my comprehensive course for photography beginners wanting to upskill quickly.

→ Lightroom Editing Masterclass - Is for photographers who want to learn everything there is to know about Adobe Lightroom, all in one place.

Either way, you're in safe hands. Join thousands of students and learn photography skills in the most efficient way possible.

If you create things as a business or for a living, you must use social media in today's age.

Now, before we get too deep into this, yes, there are a great many artists who make a fine living without social media. Still, I also know that these people are in a position through other means where they don't have to use it, through luck, circumstance or otherwise. But all the same, by not using it, they're handicapping themselves when it comes to business.

I'm not interested in debating this important fact's edge cases—I'm speaking to the full-time artist masses here.

What I am interested in, however, is arming you with the tools at your disposal. Social media is one of those great multipliers in our current age. It's the thing that, if successful, propels the potential of our opportunities exponentially.

There are so many benefits to growing an audience on Social media. The connection you have with people who love your work, the sense of community you can build together, the opportunities that come your way from people who notice your work and love it. Among the countless amounts of jobs, campaigns, trips, travels, foods, and people I've met through Social media in some way, I can strongly attest that deciding to grow an audience using the platform of my choice (initially Instagram) was the single most fruitful and impactful decision in my photography career. It changed the way I live my life. I met my girlfriend through Social media; I met many of who I call my closest friends through Social media; I've had the pleasure of working with almost every single Fortune 500 brand I've ever wanted to work with through Social media, I get to do what I do for a living largely through Social media.

It's because I know how beneficial it can be that it absolutely breaks my heart when I hear artists and creatives dismiss it.

But I understand the resistance. It can feel like you're selling out. It can feel like you're pressured into doing something you don't want to do. It can be something you don't want to make time for. It can be terrifying to be in the public eye in any way, especially if you're using your own name and likeness.

Even not that long ago, just a couple of years, I remember the wall of emotion before me as I was scared out of my mind about starting YouTube.

What if people call me out?

What if they think I'm a fraud?

What if people don't like my work?

What if I get a lot of hate online?

What if I have to do things I don't want to do?

I'm not good enough.

I'm not attractive enough for YouTube.

I don't have the right personality.

And it can go on forever. Truly.

You can come up with 10,000 reasons not to start something like this, but the truth is that everyone goes through the same thing.

From my first YouTube video

We all have the same fears and the same walls to go through, and you can bet that your favourite artists and creators went through the same fears and pushed through them (or, even more likely, still facing them head-on every day).

But the rewards at the end of the day; the connections you get to make, the people you get to help, the ones you get to inspire, the money that comes at the end of it, the brands that you get to work with, the places your campaigns take you on—all of it. It's all worth it in the end, trust me.

If you're a full-time artist or creative and don't have a Social media presence, I implore you to start one on any of the big channels today. I implore you to start focusing on it and find out how to make it work for you and your art. And I implore you to use it to help your creative business so that you can have a long-lasting creative career.

Wishing for your success. See you next week, creative.

If you're a creative into photography, maybe I can help you further:

→ 30 Day Photography Fundamentals Accelerator - Is my comprehensive course for photography beginners wanting to upskill quickly.

→ Lightroom Editing Masterclass - Is for photographers who want to learn everything there is to know about Adobe Lightroom, all in one place.

Either way, you're in safe hands. Join thousands of students and learn photography skills in the most efficient way possible.

As a self-declared "technologist" or someone who is always standing at the forefront of many different kinds of technology, I'll admit that I've been late to the game when it comes to talking about AI publicly.

That's not because I don't think AI is interesting; on the contrary, I've been keeping my pulse on and deepening my understanding of AI for the better part of a decade already, and I've seen it mature so much over the years. I'm thrilled to see it finally hit the mainstream, and I'm interested to see what happens next.

Midjourney prompt: “A dystopian world, robots on one side, humans on the other, clashing and waging war on each other”

Rather, it's because I have an understanding of how AI and ML work that I've chosen to be patient with seeing how the general zeitgeist has reacted to the breakneck pace of what's occurring in culture, especially considering all the near and far-reaching touchpoints AI is sure to have throughout our entire lives.

Many, many years ago, it was painfully apparent to see that AI was going to shape our future world. And to see this all unfolding today is utterly fascinating and worth thinking deeply about.

There are a lot of topics to cover here, but as it pertains to art and creativity, there has been a lot of discussion around copyright and consent, compensation, career displacement, the ethicality of AI-generated art, how AI-generated art will shape culture, and so on.

Meaty topics, to be sure. Topics I'm excited to dive into in future issues if you're also excited to dive in with me.

Midjourney prompt: “A Japanese female model wearing a kimono and using a paper umbrella, Mount Fuji in the background, Autumn leaves surrounding the frame, at sunset”

But above all, perhaps the most pressing issue I'm seeing the zeitgeist talk about in art, is the thread of career displacement and how AI threatens the careers of many artists.

The reality is that you can type in a sentence and press a button, and an AI will generate that exact thing you asked for. Man, that's no joke. For the artists out there who are scared that AI is going to replace your work, honestly, you may have valid concerns here. This stuff is scarily good.

There are many ways to see all of this. There are many perspectives to take, sides to sit on, many a devil and many an angel's advocate to play.

My take on career displacement is this: art is a luxury. It always has been.

The art you make is a sign that the time you live in is one where we, as humans, are prosperous enough to have the capacity and resources to do so. The fact that you're making art of any kind, rather than doing manual labour, or even knowledge work for that matter, is a sign that your work isn't critical to advancing the human race. And as such, you can be replaced.

On the flip side, it's the same transient, fragile, and disposable nature of art that makes the enjoyment of it valuable in and of itself. As humans, we enjoy consuming art in our free time. To some, the more art they're able to consume, purchase, and involve themselves in is a reflection of the very lifestyle they have, one where they have the luxury and the freedom to do so.

Midjourney prompt: “A drone shot of a lake with an island in the middle, in Winter, Snowing, the island has a Torii gate”

If you're worried about your art being replaced by AI, I'd ask you to answer a question: what is your art for?

Because if it's self-expression made for yourself, then by the very nature of it being for you, it has no value to anyone else.

However, if it's self-expression for the purpose of being shared with another: to spark emotion, to tell a story, to deliver a message, or to fix a problem, then it has value.

In the latter case, the question then is, can AI do the same thing faster and put you out of a career? Well, maybe. But I don't know what medium of art you're in, so I can't give you a definitive answer to that right now.

What I can tell you is that AI is coming for every medium, and eventually, what I foresee happening is that art is going to go one of two routes.

The first is that AI will be used to solve a problem that art has had a solution for. Need a pretty piece to fill up your wall? AI can do that. Need a random image of something specific to illustrate your point? AI can do that. Need a quick jump-off point for an idea in your mind that you want to make for yourself? AI can do that too. In this instance, you're probably going to be replaced.

But where I see artists live on forever is in the idea of connection.

Humans connect with other humans. And sure, humans can connect with inanimate pieces of art regardless of how they're generated, but the value that can never be replaced is the connection that humans have to other humans, emotionally, physically, and abstractly.

Midjourney prompt: “A photorealistic portrait of an Asian woman, in her twenties, hair slightly parted and falling off to the right side of her face, a slight smile, looking straight at you, in dslr style, with crazy detail”

If you have an artist create a piece of work, and you've got the story from them about what it means to them, the amount of time, effort, and love they've put in to create that piece, the backstory. And then you get an AI to make the same thing; when you look at the AI piece, you think, "oh, it's just AI". It's shallow. It's cold. It's fast. But when you think of the human-made piece, you connect with the story; you connect with the human and their experience. Humans are wired for connection.

These connections to humans and their work can happen everywhere in all sorts of ways. And it's this very connection that we're all going to start to value more and more as we move forward in cooperation with AI in the future.

Of course, I could be completely wrong, and AI wipes out all art as we know it, but I don't think that will be the case. If anything, in the future, I believe AI will provide us with ways to be more efficient and make many things in our lives easier. That will give us even more time for things of luxury, like art, to be made, and that will then present more opportunities for us to think about how we can also continue to evolve the value of our art.

Man, it's crazy to think this is just scratching the surface. Much more to think about here.

See you next week, creative.

If you're a creative into photography, maybe I can help you further:

→ 30 Day Photography Fundamentals Accelerator - Is my comprehensive course for photography beginners wanting to upskill quickly.

→ Lightroom Editing Masterclass - Is for photographers who want to learn everything there is to know about Adobe Lightroom, all in one place.

Either way, you're in safe hands. Join thousands of students and learn photography skills in the most efficient way possible.

Who are you as a creator? As a brother? As a sister? As a friend? As a co-worker?

We can be so many different things to so many different people at so many different times.

There's the version of you at work, perhaps bold, proper, well-spoken and even better dressed.

There's the version of you with your closest friends, perhaps peaceful, fun-loving, and carefree.

There's the version of you with your pets, perhaps gentle, or perhaps a bit overbearing. Maybe you start talking in baby speak.

"That's not like you", a close friend might say to you after you've done something uncharacteristic.

But on the contrary, it very much is you. It's just that you behaved a certain way outside of what your close friend has seen you do, outside of the "you" they know. The "you" that you present yourself as when you're with them.

It's a shame that when we think of people, or even ourselves for that matter, we sometimes average out all of what makes us truly unique in exchange for something easy to package up and describe to someone else. "He's a creative person", "She's an overthinker", "He's a worrier"—all these labels.

But when is he a creative person? All the time? Every waking hour? Or just sometimes? Under pressure? When he's relaxed? When he feels like it?

When is she an overthinker? When she's in the shower? On an important project? When she's thinking about how best to solve a particular problem?

When is he a worrier? When his job is on the line? When it matters the most? Or when it's all about the small details?

As humans, we're complex, multi-sided beings. Physically, emotionally, and metaphorically. We have so many sides to us that even the people closest to us, our significant others, our closest friends, or our families, never truly see all 100% of us.

And yet, we judge everybody we come across through the singular perspective of what's in front of us, completely disregarding the complexity of the other human who is also doing the same thing.

Our work is very much the same, too—Human-made, human-judged, usually from a single perspective.

When we look at a piece of work, we think about how it makes us feel. We think about how it relates to our lives. We create stories in our imagination to help us relate to it. Rarely do we ever muster up the empathy to think about what the artist was trying to say with the work, let alone consider the artist's mental state, emotion, background, and what they must be like as a person when they're in flow creating their art.

This is what I'm thinking about right now as I'm currently doing an experiment on my content.

In the past, on many of my channels, I've talked about the idea of authenticity in the face of this current surge of short-form video content.

Right now, there's so much trend-jacking and riding on the coattails of the truly creative, and I'm not alone in having a somewhat cynical, if not slightly outdated, view on it all.

But "the way that it has always been done" is perhaps one of the few sentences that give me nightmares, and so, my experiment currently is creating and sharing a Reel every day, for 30 days.

Historically, the side of me that has said, "just stick to what you know and ride this thing out. Consistency is everything, and you don't want your legacy to be short-form video anyway" has won right up until this point.

But as of March 1st 2023, I let the other side take over for a little bit. The side of me that says, "move forward with the industry, or the industry will leave you behind. Do what everyone else is doing because that will get you results, but as always, put your own spin on it and do it better than everyone else".

Two sides of me, still both very me. One hopeful and longing for the past, the other striving forward to the future.

And it's this struggle between these two distinct sides of me that has me thinking about who I am as a creator and how people perceive me to be as a creator.

As someone who puts their life on the internet, there's the way that you think you're portrayed by people, and then there's the way you're actually portrayed by people. Both matter, and one ultimately drives the other.

As creatives, we face this duality or even multiplicity of inner personalities that want to surface themselves to the world; it's a constant battle over which side of you wins at any given moment, for any given piece of work, or on any given project. Maybe if you're experienced, you might create a set of inner heuristics to make the decision easier for you, but most of us don't. We let the whims of our emotions carry us from day to day, moment to moment, and hopefully, those whims carry us to make something great that day. Maybe.

Our many sides, all competing with one another. We're all like that; we all surrender to the loudest voice within us at any given moment. That's how life is for all of us, and the longer I do this creative thing, the more I become okay with that.

So, the next time you're self-conscious about creating something and showing it to the world and your closest friends say to you, "don't worry about what other people think, just be yourself", well, which version of yourself might that be?

Something to think about.

See you next week, creative.

If you're a creative into photography, maybe I can help you further:

→ 30 Day Photography Fundamentals Accelerator - Is my comprehensive course for photography beginners wanting to upskill quickly.

→ Lightroom Editing Masterclass - Is for photographers who want to learn everything there is to know about Adobe Lightroom, all in one place.

Either way, you're in safe hands. Join thousands of students and learn photography skills in the most efficient way possible.

I had an interesting interaction with a new friend on our cruise towards Antarctica last week.

We had been shooting for a few days, enjoying our time in the scenic Antarctic landscape with penguins, whales, and glaciers galore. We got some great shots. During breakfast one day, she asked, "where are your photos?". She was jabbing me and said, "Everyone else has shown me photos of our expeditions over the last couple of days, and we've done so much! Aren't you a photographer? Aren't photographers supposed to, you know, have photos?".

From her perspective, it made enough sense. When you meet a photographer, and you see them taking photos of the things you're also taking photos of, yet you don't see any photos from them, I can see how that could be a little bit strange—a fake photographer.

But for me, that wasn't weird at all. I had a reason for not editing any photos and thus had nothing to show. That reason was a habit that I got into at the very start of my photography journey, a habit so engrained into my workflow that I do it subconsciously, without thinking.

And that reason is emotional space.

See, photography is a lot like gambling.

You can give yourself the best odds of capturing a great shot. You can learn all the skills and set yourself up with the best gear; you can plan your entire trip to the T, you can put yourself in the best situation to get the best setup at the best time of year, but ultimately, whether or not you're successful, or at least the degree to which you might be successful is up to chance; to mother nature and whether she decides to bless you with fantastic weather or not, to the traffic and whether your model arrives at the shoot on time, to being in the right place at the right time with the right person giving you the right expression or the perfect gate of their stride, or the right timing of their movement.

But when things line up, when our preparedness meets opportunity, and we get that shot, it's magical. It's exactly how we imagined it to be or even better. We're super excited about it and stoked about how it turned out; we're high on our emotions.

I live for that feeling. It's why I'm more than happy to set my alarm for 3 am for the mere chance of getting a lovely sunrise and a decent shot from it.

But for people who care immensely about their art and craft, emotions are very individual to the person and don't necessarily translate to whether or not a piece of work is "good".

When we look at our work critically, we often forget that viewers of our images won't experience the same emotional rapture we had when we initially captured it. How could they? They weren't there.

I think it's a mistake to associate that emotional rapture we had for the capture with it being objectively "good". Just because you're stoked about it doesn't make it a good image. Not every time, at least.

That might sound a little harsh. But if your objective is to improve your photography over the long term, it is essential to discern why a particular composition might make a good photo without your emotions giving it extra points.

That's why, even though we had fantastic conditions in Antarctica and saw so many amazing things and I was SUPER stoked about some of those images, I didn't show anyone anything for days.

Emotional space.

Rather than getting caught up in your emotions, definitely feel stoked about the shot when you take it, but rather than rushing home and into Lightroom to edit it, give it space. Let it sit for a while, let your emotions settle down and look at the image again a few days later with a clear head and an even keel. If it still looks fantastic to you a few days later without your heightened emotions, then your image just passed a significant litmus test, which probably means it will end up being good.

Developing the practice of putting just a little bit of emotional space between you and your work makes your overall work better over the long term.

And you can take this practice a step further. Rather than only using it on a micro level for your day-to-day shots, you can apply this same practice to your portfolio images that you make year-to-year.

As an artist who wants to constantly progress in my craft and grow and improve every year, new pieces will hopefully be added to my portfolio every year. But again, the emotional rapture of an image can creep its way into the opinion of a photo and taint whether or not that photo is worthy of remaining in the portfolio.

And look, we're all human. There will always be some emotion wrapped up in our images, and honestly, I’d hope you like your work enough to have some there. But when it comes to portfolio images, one of the things I do every single year is to go through my portfolio, and armed with the emotional space of an entire year, I cull some of the images that I was excited about last year, but I now perhaps don't feel so enthusiastic about anymore.

Then, as the years pass, some images will persist in your portfolio. They would have survived the gauntlet year after year. All of that emotional space. Those pieces are your best ones. Those are the pieces you know are going to follow you for a lifetime. Those pieces represent your true style and who you are as an artist.

But you only get to know them by giving your work some emotional space.

See you next week, creative.

If you're a creative into photography, maybe I can help you further:

→ 30 Day Photography Fundamentals Accelerator - Is my comprehensive course for photography beginners wanting to upskill quickly.

→ Lightroom Editing Masterclass - Is for photographers who want to learn everything there is to know about Adobe Lightroom, all in one place.

Either way, you're in safe hands. Join thousands of students and learn photography skills in the most efficient way possible.

I don't condone the use of drugs, but also, you're a grown-ass adult (probably), and you do what you like. I also can't be too critical of people who use them because I've been there too.

Drugs are an interesting place to start this issue because they can focus you on something so intensely; you see every detail, every shape, every shadow, every fine decoration, every minute intricacy. We can become lost in the idea that someone designed this - someone thought it was a good idea to use this material over another; someone thought it was a good idea to solve the problem in this specific way and not some other. We put ourselves into their shoes; we start to think about their process, how it came to be, what thoughts led them to that point, and how they must have felt when they completed it all.

This was my favourite thought train to fall into when I went through my own fun-loving, chemically-induced phase way back when (and never since); the micro and the macro—stuck in the flow of observation.

To be in this flow of observation is to put yourself in the seat of empathy, and empathy is the cheat code to understanding art.

Often, we lump the words "art and design" together. Many things can be art. Many things can be artistic. To be an artist is simply to be a person who expresses things. However, design is just as simple. Design is nothing but solving problems. To be a designer is to be a problem solver. Where that problem lives and the domain to which it is solved is the type of design or art it can be categorised in.

Art and design are related and often go together because expression mainly involves solving a problem, releasing a pent-up emotion, communicating a certain feeling, inspiring someone to do something, and showing a solution to a complex issue. There are artful ways to express the solutions to all of these problems.

Currently, I'm writing this from Dallas, Texas. I'm at the airport on a 5-hour layover, and I'm sitting in a lovely chair after evacuating myself from an overpacked lounge. This chair is most certainly the best one I've sat on all day, and there are many like it. And while the vast majority of these chairs will go unthought about, I'm sitting in this one right now, thinking about how nice it is and why that is so.

For me, it's the butt support. The perfect height of squishy foam wrapped in fake leather gives my bottom a tremendous amount of relief compared to the hard aeroplane seats of the 13-hour flight I just got off. It's also preparing me for the next 10-hour flight to come. But I also like the lumbar support. It's perfectly positioned for my height. And while the armrests are slightly too tall, I can understand why whoever designed it made it this way—it's for lounging on, and the height encapsulates you while you sit in it, providing a faux private experience while you're stuck sitting next to someone else, and if you so decide to lean on it, there's ample seat space to shift your weight over. It's thoughtful.

My current situation, in these chairs.

Out of all the hundreds, maybe thousands of people who have sat in this chair before me, I bet absolutely zero of them spent 206 words over two paragraphs talking about it. But, somewhat poetically, these words pay homage to the anonymous person who designed them.

Someone took the time to think about the use case, the setting, the types of people who would sit in it, the wear and tear of the materials, the exact shaping and look and the visual aesthetic of this chair. More time was spent solving these problems and designing this chair than you will ever know, only to be mildly appreciated momentarily by travellers who need more butt relief than what's provided to them on a long-haul flight.

And yet, it's in putting yourself in the shoes of the designer; it's in putting yourself in a position of observation and empathy that is the cheat code to making good art, to making good solutions, to becoming a person who solves things well. This chair solves a particular set of problems for a specific type of people. Other chairs solve specific problems for different groups of people. And if you're into making chairs, the more chairs you see and the more you analyse them for why they are the way they are, the better chairs you will make.

The more photographs you study from good photographers and the more you're able to put yourself in their shoes and understand their perspectives on why and how they shot those photographs, and the better photographs you will make.

The more documentaries you analyse the structure of and emphasise with the decisions (especially if you don't agree with them), the better your documentary structures will become. The more styles of illustration you expose yourself to and understand why those artists create in those styles, the more open your style will become.

It seems so simple; to just sit down and try to analyse a piece of work and emphasise with its creator. Perhaps too simple, which is why most people don't do it, but imagination and connection are our biggest weapons as humans, and that's the genesis of empathy.

Something to think about the next time you're daydreaming.

See you next week, creative.

If you're a creative into photography, maybe I can help you further:

→ 30 Day Photography Fundamentals Accelerator - Is my comprehensive course for photography beginners wanting to upskill quickly.

→ Lightroom Editing Masterclass - Is for photographers who want to learn everything there is to know about Adobe Lightroom, all in one place.

Either way, you're in safe hands. Join thousands of students and learn photography skills in the most efficient way possible.

Watch this issue on YouTube if you would like the spoken version

Money is hard to talk about.

Not only in general life, but significantly more so in the context of being an artist or being a creative.

There's a lot of social shame and anxiety that comes with it; how much of it we make, how little of it we make, how we spend it, how we save it, where it goes, and all the other hundreds of micro-decisions we have to make.

And then, on top of that, as an artist or a creative, learning how to make money is a whole other skill that is confusing and can feel kind of icky and gross, and it's just something we don't usually want to talk to others about. And I get that.

But I think that the best artists in the modern age have the ability to make money off the thing that they love doing.

More importantly, they make enough money to continue doing the thing they love for as long as they want to do it.

Now, this doesn't apply to you if your creativity or passion is a hobby or if it's sustained by your job doing something unrelated. If creating things is a part-time thing for you, then you already have some avenue to support yourself to keep doing it, and you might want to keep it that way, and that's totally fine.

But for the full-time artists, the creatives who currently do or want to do this as a long-lasting, fruitful career, the idea of being self-sustaining in doing what you love to do is of PARAMOUNT importance.

Because to be renowned at anything, you need time. And a lot of it. 

And I want to stress here; I'm not talking about just being good, or better than average, or great, or even excellent at your art. And I'm not talking about one year or two years, or even 3, 4, 5, or 6 years.

No, I'm talking specifically about mastery and decades.

The idea of the 10,000 hours rule was popularised by Malcolm Gladwell, the author of five New York Times bestsellers, in his fantastic book, Outliers, which I highly recommend you read.

It's this idea that to achieve mastery, true mastery, at any complex, complicated skill; most people get there by the time they've put in 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. Not sloppy, wishy-washy, half-focused practice, but intentional, directional, deliberate practice. And this can take around a decade, or ten years, for most people.

If you worked a 40-hour workweek doing almost anything, you would reach 10,000 hours in just five years. But if you're honest with yourself, when you're at a job, how much of that time is genuinely intentional, considered, feedback-driven work deliberately progressing your art and craft forward? And how much of that time is spent in meetings, on lunch, or goofing around?

The timeline of mastery is far longer than what most people think it is.

Now, the specific timing of 10,000 hours and ten years is not that important, so don't get stuck on that, but what is important here is that this is a great goal to strive towards when we're thinking about deliberate work because we need to do A LOT of it to reach mastery.

And this journey is deceiving because in any given skill, with enough effort and deliberate practice, we can reach a skill level that is decent, average, or even above average in just a few years. This is the 80% of skill acquisition. But the problem is that everyone else gets to this level too. 80% of others will also reach 80% of the same skill level. This, by definition, is what average is.

But the rest of the journey, the journey to the upper 20%, the upper 10%, the upper 1%, this journey takes just as long, but probably longer, than the time it took to reach the starting point of that average.

So 10,000 hours is more like a commitment to your craft over the long term. It's a metaphor. It's a north star. It's something that 99% of others will fail to achieve, and it will put you in rare air.

Remember, what is both difficult and rare is valuable, and the result of achieving mastery in your art is all of those things.

But you need the money to do all of this.

Money is freedom. And as an artist, you need the freedom to be able to continue doing what you love doing for as long as you can do it; for the sake of pursuing mastery, for the sake of growth, for the sake of enjoying life.

In the past, artists used to have "Patrons". Superrich people who would pay a salary to an artist to keep doing what they loved doing. You were set for life if you were an artist with a Patron.

In 2023, we have the internet. And regardless of whether you're thinking physically or digitally, the way forward to make money doing what you love doing is found on the internet.

So when I see self-sustaining artists and creatives who are not only killing it in their passions but also killing it in their finances, these are the people that I genuinely respect, because a long-lasting, generative journey pursuing your craft is one of the most challenging but noble things you can do as an artist.

So if you are an artist or creative, I'd implore you to change the mindset around how you think about money. It's not some icky, shame-filled thing, and you're not "selling out" by doing it. Rather, it's quite the opposite. Making money doing what you love compounds your abilities towards mastery. Selling your art gives you time to make more of it. And that is a pretty noble, rare, and valuable thing.

See you next week, creative.

— Pat

If you're a creative into photography, maybe I can help you further:

→ 30 Day Photography Fundamentals Accelerator - Is my comprehensive course for photography beginners wanting to upskill quickly.

→ Lightroom Editing Masterclass - Is for photographers who want to learn everything there is to know about Adobe Lightroom, all in one place.

Either way, you're in safe hands. Join thousands of students and learn photography skills in the most efficient way possible.

When I was 12 years old, I had my first real taste of Adobe Photoshop.

At the time, Photoshop was already a decade old, even way back in 2002. I don't remember how I ended up stumbling on the program itself, let alone how I managed to download it before I was even a teenager. Still, I remember slowly discovering its potential and the learning process was dynamic and organic enough to stick with it (somewhat).

By 17, I was really into Graphic Design, and I was able to put some of those Photoshop skills to use in my Art finals in high school.

Later, that led me to Web Design, where I started my first career. From there, I taught myself how to code. After that began my longest career so far in my life, developing a skillset of User Experience Design and Product Design over some 10 years or so.

While I'm now, again, doing something completely different in the form of Photography and other digital media, I can trace my success, both former and current, to one thing: Skill acquisition.

In what I do today, I find myself constantly using the skills I acquired many decades ago. In over two decades of being a "creative" (or perhaps you could count my entire lifetime of being one), I can clearly see the points in my life where I developed skills that, at the time, seemed single-use, pointed, and directional. Now, as a mature creative, I see that every skill I've learnt that is tangential to my main passion has deeply attributed to the success of the passion itself.

I first learned the concept of "T-shaped" skills when I started Product Design well over a decade ago. It's this idea that you have a base skill, something you're really good at, something you've spent significant time developing. This is the long, vertical prong of the "T". But over time, you develop interests around that base skill. These interests complement the primary skill in some way and are an excellent method of increasing the effectiveness of what you do every day without deliberately working on the main skill itself.

A great example of this is in Web Design. You might learn Photoshop, Sketch, Figma, or something else for your wireframes and designs. But suppose you also learn parts of the Graphic Design skill set, such as Typography, Colour theory, or Spacing, in Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, or something else. In that case, your websites will look significantly more aesthetically cohesive and impressive than another Web Designer who doesn't have those skills. And you can do a lot with that advantage. Charge more, get a better role, create a team etc.

If you're an Illustrator and live in the digital world for all of your work, trying out Photography, learning calligraphy or understanding video could be skills you could leverage and bring into your illustrations, making them far more unique compared to other Illustrators.

As a creative, as you spend more time doing "your main thing", hopefully, you're doing other things that are complimentary to it too. Every additional skill helps.

Eventually, the "T-shape" becomes more like an "E-shape". The letter becomes rotated 90 degrees right, and each prong of the E represents a skill next to your main skill. You'll be better at some skills than others, so the prongs will invariably become different lengths, but you can start to see that we have a skill set developing here. Skills that help you thrive as a creative.

The next level from there is to really look at all the surrounding skills that encompass your main skill, and learn them all, deeply.

To be a Lead Product Designer, I needed to not only have the traditional UX skillset (Research/academia, Visual Design, Interface and Interaction Design, Code) but you need to have good business skills too. It's a composite skillset.

At the highest level, all creative endeavours end up like this; they're a blend of many, many skills that sit within many skill sets.

At this point, your skillset looks more like a hairbrush than an "E" shape. You would have been in your career for a minimum of 5-10 years. At this point, you should know what you're worth as a creative and be able to either continue down the path of mastery within your current situation or strike it out on your own with relative confidence.

Over the last 7 years, I've been on my own "hairbrush journey" in my current career in Photography. To strike it out on your own, to make a full-time living doing what you love, you need to understand Business, Marketing, Sales, Accounting, and everything else to ensure you make money and keep yourself afloat. To do that, you also need to understand the digital landscape, how to understand your customer/audience/users, create a brand, and a website, get good at social media, and all the other tactical things that are customer-facing. Not to mention mastering all the skills that surround your main skill if you've already mastered it. There's a lot to learn.

Skills acquisition. That's what it's all about.

So then, time for something actionable.

If this concept of "E-shaped" skills is new to you, write down for yourself what the auxiliary, related skills are to your main skill, and then endeavour to learn them. Create a plan for learning them all.

Over time, with enough skills under your belt, you'll come to see that developing yourself in this way, investing in yourself in this way, is the single best thing you can do for your creative career.

Best of luck with the pursuit and I'll see you next week, creative.

— Pat

If you're a creative into photography, maybe I can help you further:

→ 30 Day Photography Fundamentals Accelerator - Is my comprehensive course for photography beginners wanting to upskill quickly.

→ Lightroom Editing Masterclass - Is for photographers who want to learn everything there is to know about Adobe Lightroom, all in one place.

Either way, you're in safe hands. Join thousands of students and learn photography skills in the most efficient way possible.

Watch this issue on YouTube if you would like the spoken version

When you finish your creative journey, where will you arrive?

What does your life look like at the end of that journey?

How will you feel when you get there?

If your creative pursuit is a hobby or something you're doing for fun, then perhaps you don't need to reach into your existentialism to answer these questions; the ride of the undulating unknown is a fun one to be on, after all.

But if you take your creativity at least somewhat seriously, if you're a creative by trade, or you're not currently, but you'd like to be, then these are the questions you'll eventually have to answer.

As corny as it sounds, this is goal-setting for creatives. And I'd argue that for us creatives, it's perhaps more critical for us than for anyone else.

Creativity, art, and the idea of doing something that is inherently a luxury (which all art is), lulls most humans into a sense of comfort and satisfaction.

As creatives, we have the requirement to not only have an eye on the success and the future of the thing that we're doing, but we also need to enjoy the process of doing it. More so than many other professions, there's a sense of play that's necessary to be at our best. And when things are going well, when we have that confluence of moving towards something in a state of play, we're successful.

But, in a twisted turn of events, it's this same state of play that, when left to their own devices, cripples most creatives from moving their lives forward.

Many creatives think that if they just produce more art, the success will arrive; that if they make the work, the people will come.

And this is why many creatives aren't financially stable, long-lasting, or successful.

I'll be honest with you. The half-life of a creative in 2023 is short for most people.

I've been in this game long enough to see creatives burst onto the scene in a flash of alluring and captivating brilliance, only to fall into irrelevance a few short years after, or even worse, forgoing their passions altogether and returning to what they were doing before.

And while there are many reasons for this, one of those reasons is a lack of direction.

The idea of a “north star” harkens back to a time when GPS and satellites didn't exist. A time when you knew where you were going because you were further from or closer to a particular star in the night sky. That's how we navigated the world once upon a time. We used the stars to orient ourselves.

Today, it's very "enterprisey" to have a “north star”, but the idea itself is no less valuable.

And what do you receive by going there? What will your life be like once you're there? Or better yet, how will your life be like once you're there, in a world dictated by you, on your own terms?

The answer to that is how you'll orient yourself as a creative, and it's how you'll set the direction of where you want to go.

From that understanding, the path is the easy part. Reverse-engineering how to get there takes about an hour on Google and a little bit of forward planning. It's not complicated. 

The hard part is knowing where to go because a destination worth pursuing is a path worthy of staying on and sticking to. The latter is the hard part here—sticking to it.

But if you do, perhaps your creativity will lead you to a long, fruitful, satisfying career leading an agency or a company. Or perhaps your creativity is a long string of education-infused moments, each touchpoint impacting more people than the last. Or perhaps your creativity successfully blends art and commerce, leaving the entire industry better than when you arrived.

What is the goal 10 years from now? 20 years from now? A lifetime from now?

And then, to take from Peter Thiel, how can you achieve that goal in 6 months?

I mean it. Think of your biggest goals; think of your future life and lifestyle. Something you think would take decades to achieve. And then, as a thought exercise, think about how you could achieve that in 6 months. And then go and try and do it.

The time it takes to reach that success, regardless of whether or not it actually does take six months, is always going to be shorter than you think it will be. And once you reach that success, do the same exercise again. Think ten years out, then think about how you can cut that by 95%.

As an example, for me, the big themes of my last decade have revolved around the idea of freedom.

Time freedom, location freedom, financial freedom. I first learned of these virtues in Tim Ferris' landmark book, The 4-hour workweek.

Freedom for me is to be able to control all of your time. To not be booked up with meetings or obligated to do things you don't want to do. To not be tied to any place at any time; not for career, not for finance, not for anything, to stay in a place only because you want to. And then, to have enough money to do whatever you want. To not worry about where the next meal will come from, or how much flights cost to the other side of the world, or whether it was economically feasible to splurge on a nice hotel.

These were the themes behind my most recent goals, most certainly a decade or more worth of goals for most people.

But I set these goals for a future, decade-older version of me five years ago. And it took me just three years to reach them all.

That's not to brag; I care next to nothing about what people think of me. Rather, it's to show that if I can do it, if I can condense down a decade's worth of goals into just a few years, then you can do it too.

So, what's at the end of your creativity? Many people can make things. But few people stop to set themselves up to spend the rest of their lives being able to continue doing it. If they want to, of course.

Play, with purpose. Creativity, with direction. Life, with intention.

Set those creative goals and pursue them. Go and explore the end of your creativity.

Have a successful journey, creative.

If you're a creative into photography, maybe I can help you further:

→ 30 Day Photography Fundamentals Accelerator - Is my comprehensive course for photography beginners wanting to upskill quickly.

→ Lightroom Editing Masterclass - Is for photographers who want to learn everything there is to know about Adobe Lightroom, all in one place.

Either way, you're in safe hands. Join thousands of students and learn photography skills in the most efficient way possible.

Over 15 years ago, when I first started formally being a person who makes things, there was no such thing as a "content creator". The use of the word "creator" was never something you identified with, nor was it a career you could go into. The term "content" wasn't even close to the kind of catch-all phrase it is in our current social media-laden world. The general zeitgeist of the creative community had yet to create such labels or even such activities similar to what we know today.

Back then, people were "artists". They were "creative people". They were "creatives".

Since then, creativity, and the entire industry that surrounds it, has accelerated at a pace unseen in history, and now everyone is a creator, for better or worse.

I find some happiness in the fact that everyone is now armed with a camera in pocket and an avenue in which to share their photographs. I love that there has never been more avenues to write about something and have someone read it. It's fantastic that people can enjoy recording themselves dancing and posting it on the internet.

Technology and innovation are awesome.

But somewhere along the way, alongside the democratisation of creativity, the old idea of what it is to be a "creative" has lost much of its meaning. And, not to sound like a boomer, some ideologies deserve to be preserved as we move along the speeding train of innovation.

One of those is the idea of being a creative person. A person who enjoys discovery and expression and problem-solving. A person who cannot help but move through life and learn all the many gifts it has along the way. Someone who craves originality and forward-thinking. A soul who cares about the craftsmanship and the artistic nature of whatever they created. The creative who obsessed over the resonance of the thing they made. Someone whose life is as much art as it is life.

This is the creative of the nineties and noughties. A multi-skilled, discipline-agnostic mindset. The ability to wield many skills and mesh them together into something unique.

When I find people like that in 2023 — people who are photographers but have also taught themselves design or illustration, or illustrators that have taught themselves videography or CG, or CG artists who have taught themselves traditional media like painting or drawing but also know how to build a website — these are the people who make me stop and gush a little about how amazing they are.

Because ironically, even though we now have more terms to define ourselves as creative people at a level we've never had, the advent of social media has funnelled creativity into a few well-trodden lanes optimised for clicks and taps, likes and comments.

While I don't have any problem with other people who do that — you do you, whatever it is — What I am trying to advocate for is creativity as a lifestyle because I've seen what it can do to your life and to your work.

In 2010, Kirby Ferguson created a 4-part documentary series named "Everything is a remix", and in the 13 years since its release, my understanding of creativity has never been quite the same.

The creative of old was a person who (consciously or instinctively) knew that. They deliberately learned skills adjacent to their primary skill. They absorbed themselves in the influence and inspiration of media and art within or adjacent to their principal thinking methods. Divergent thinking and uniqueness was the name of the game. And engaging in it meant that the new work would come with a flavour and a variance unlike anything before it.

It's easier than ever to scroll through your favourite short-form video app and, within 5 minutes, pick out several "trends" — variations of the same thing. This is fine, and fun, and whatever. But creating or consuming this content doesn't push you forward as a creative person as much as learning how to draw, or discovering photography for the first time, or finding the art in code, or any of the thousands of other auxiliary skills you could learn to bolster your main creative avenue and drive.

As a teen, I stumbled upon a saying that "art is cyclic". I can't remember who said it or in what context it was said, but having been a creative person for coming into two decades, I can see that indeed, cycles are everywhere in art. By and large, the creative cycle currently is a return to the idea of "fitting in"; we're so defined by the lanes we engage in that we become comfortable and operate solely within them.

But as always, to break any mold, to stand out, to be different, is to do the opposite of what everyone else is doing. Rather than observing how everyone is fitting in to certain tropes, types, or trends, I'd encourage you to follow your individualism, find and pursue the many things you're interested in, upskill in them, and then blend them together in a way that no one else has done before. That's where you'll find your uniqueness.

Good luck out there, creative.

— Pat

If you're a creative into photography, maybe I can help you further:

→ 30 Day Photography Fundamentals Accelerator - Is my comprehensive course for photography beginners wanting to upskill quickly.

→ Lightroom Editing Masterclass - Is for photographers who want to learn everything there is to know about Adobe Lightroom, all in one place.

Either way, you're in safe hands. Join thousands of students and learn photography skills in the most efficient way possible.

Who is it for?

On the surface, that’s a perfectly innocent, seemingly innocuous question. A simple line with a simple answer.

But dig a little deeper and it turns out this simple question is the gateway standing between you and a successful exchange.

“Who is it for?” requires you to know not only the recipient, but also the content and the context of whatever you’re expressing.

“Who is it for?” means that you understand what that thing is, and you’re trying to find the right person to give it to.

“Who is it for?”, when answered correctly, means that you might have something that matches exactly with the person who needs it the most.

“Who is it for?” is something you can create art towards, in hopes that you can express yourself and communicate in the right way to the right person.

Whether that’s through the vehicle of inspiration, motivation, or even just letting someone mentally escape for a few seconds in their busy day, the art we make ultimately serves others, even if it seems like we’re only serving ourselves. Creation is a generous act.

And to know who you are serving is the ultimate form of focus when it comes to making something.

When I used to do Product Design, we used a technique called a “Persona”. A Persona is a broad collection of information about a particular subset of people, amalgamated into a singular representative — a person, a persona, to represent the entire group.

Using a set of Persona’s when creating anything allows you to tailor your creation to the recipients’ experience. It allows you to speak their unique language. It allows more avenues of perspective to latch on to. But most importantly, it allows us to feel empathy for others, providing a greater opportunity for connection.

And isn’t that what art and creativity are all about? Expression IS connection. Ultimately, we create things so we can be heard. But if you’re speaking different languages, then the dance of interpretation is a lot harder than it could be.

So, “Who is it for?”. When I was thinking of creating this newsletter, I was thinking about a creative person who loves to improve themselves. Someone who expresses themselves, solves problems, or ventures out where others haven’t. Someone who has the feeling of art and service and generosity in their hearts.

But it’s a confusing time right now for creative people, and just the mere act of making anything in 2023 comes with so much baggage: “is this art? or is this content?”, “which social media platform do I post this on?”, “how does anyone make money doing what they love?”. Not to mention the mental fatigue of social pressure, anxiety, and stress that comes along with all of that. Heck, most creative people cant even figure out whether to call themselves a “creative”, or a “creator”, or a “content creator”, or an “artist”.

I’m with you. This stuff is tough. And I want to talk about it.

This newsletter is my attempt at enabling you as much as possible to thrive as a person whose passion it is to make things, regardless of what it is that you make. And it’s my hope that I can make something here that helps you make even more considerate, thoughtful, and expressive things in the future.

Like all things in life, work, and our passions, this is a work in progress. But I’m stoked to be of service to you, and I’m stoked that we get to share part of our journey together.

Let me know if there’s anything you’d specifically like me to talk about when it comes to the creative journey by replying back to this email or hitting me up on my socials below.

Thanks for being here on day 1, we’ll get into it deep from next week.

— Pat

If you're a creative into photography, maybe I can help you further:

→ 30 Day Photography Fundamentals Accelerator - Is my comprehensive course for photography beginners wanting to upskill quickly.

→ Lightroom Editing Masterclass - Is for photographers who want to learn everything there is to know about Adobe Lightroom, all in one place.

Either way, you're in safe hands. Join thousands of students and learn photography skills in the most efficient way possible.