January thinking in December

December 20th, 2021

I love self-improvement. I love lists, settings goals, evaluating where I’ve come from, how I have failed, how I can succeed and what I could be doing to reach my full potential on this Earth.

And for those reasons only, I love January.

But this year I am not waiting until January to do my January thinking. I’m doing it now. On a blog available to the public. Fabulous.

At the end of 2020, I sat with my friend and we wrote our goals for 2021. I wrote them in categories (mental, physical, spiritual, relational and career). I went through them today and ticked off the ones that I had achieved. Interestingly, I achieved exactly 50% of the goals that I set myself and my most successful category was ‘Career’.

Ok, so I achieved 50%. And some of those were big old goals, but I didn’t finish everything I started or set out to do. Sometimes that’s ok and even good but sometimes it’s definitely not and RESISTANCE (Book recommendation: ‘The War of Art’ by Steven Pressfield) in its many forms has stopped me from doing lots of things this year. (More on that at a later date but for now read the book, very good.)

Also interesting to me is that I didn’t set ANY creative goals. Creativity is at my core. So that’s bizarre. It’s like I just assumed I would achieve creative things and create regularly, without any prompting or goal. And I do create, but for what purpose and with how much enthusiasm? Am I reaching my full creative capacity? When I create, why am I doing it at all?

I work in the commercial art sector. I am also an artist (although I haven’t touched a paintbrush in months, which feels heartachingly sad actually). And I have become increasingly disillusioned as an artist in recent months. The commercial art world is a place where value and worth often make little sense and are not usually attached to talent or skill. It is often a case of ‘I genuinely could do that, but I didn’t... should I?!’. As an artist, I then begin to question the point of my artwork because I am being told that if it isn’t worth any £££, it’s not worth making.

And as far as I can tell, what I might create would not be worth any £££.

The world of art is a game, and mostly (from what I have seen) for the love of money not (just) the love of art. Has it always been like that? Are we losing the magic of art in favour of commercialisation? How is it fair that one artist can pour their soul into their work and not even have two pennies from it, and another can just sell-out and make art with no meaning or purpose other than in response to a trend? And how does any of this make sense to children who should be being taught that creativity is in every single person and needs to be tended to and maintained and nurtured so that it evolves and changes the world!?

Maybe you see why I am disillusioned.

So I haven’t been creating as much as I would have liked this year.

This year my goals will be written differently. They will have a WHY section. (Book recommendation: “Start with Why” by Simon Sinkek) Why do I even want to do that? More motivational, and maybe I’ll find the answers to all those questions and strengthen my own belief that there IS and SHOULD be magic in art. And there CAN be magic in my art.