I love anime. I hate drawing.
I never understood the point of art class either. All I ever got was Ds. What’s the point of calling a class art and then forcing kids to draw a specific thing? Isn’t imagination what it’s about?
In 2007, at 16 years old, I had a moment: Let me try to draw something I really want to draw for once.
I opened one of my Dragon Ball manga books, remember those? I flipped to a page and found a really cool pic of Vegeta, which I tried to copy.
I found the image online just now, here’s the original compared to my version:
I messed up some of the proportions and had to cut it into pieces and glue it together on another sheet of paper, but to this day, I’m still proud of it.
It took me one or two days to make. That day, I learned two valuable lessons:
- Art class really is stupid. It had turned someone, who might have been a decent sketch artist, into a person who hated drawing.
- I’m not a sketch artist. I had no desire to spend that long on a drawing, ever again.
Even if you’ve been practicing for 10 years, the question is how many hours did you put in over that time?
If it’s one hour a week, I’m not surprised you’re not where you wanted to be. No matter how much talent you have – and your sketch clearly isn’t bad – you can’t thrive on that kind of work ethic.
If it’s one hour a day, and you’ve tried to draw everything in the book, from anime, to expressionist, to comics, it’s time to acknowledge that talent is real and take a good, hard look at yourself: is there something you’re more talented at than drawing?
As much as we overstate its importance when something isn’t working after 6 months, we understate its existence when something isn’t working for 10 years.
For every single skill you practice, there is a balance between talent & effort that gets you to your goal, and there is a balance you can sustain long enough for that to happen. If the two don’t match, the solution is to switch.
If you’re low on talent, but can put in a lot of effort for a long time, you can win.
And if you’re high on talent, you can get by on low effort and still do a decent job.
So take a second. Stop being romantic about your work. Audit who you are. Look deep inside yourself. Be honest about how much work you put in. And then find the right balance.
Whatever you end up pursuing, I hope you’ll do it long enough to win. So one day you can point back to a drawing, song, or book and say:
I’m still proud of it today.
Because even if all you ever do with it is write a post to inspire someone else, Vegeta already knew a long time ago that that’s the most important thing.
“You can take control of my mind and my body, but there is one thing a Saiyan always keeps…his PRIDE!” — Vegeta
