Getting it Wrong and Liking It

Trac Changes, a blog I basically want to copy + paste right here

recently reminded me of one of the most important things I learned 

from my favorite professor at Bing:

the freedom to fail gloriously.

As clowns and as actors

Professor Toomey

would remind us that there's nothing to learn

nothing to discover

in a small failure.Bigger is better.

And that to fail was not to lose,

but to learn another path towards success. 

A lot of time, as artists

(or human beings)

we expect to get it right the first time.

We want to be proud of everything we do.

I know that there's only so much time I'll spend on a drawing

before getting pissed off & giving up.

When I got the opportunity to sit with Bob Mankoff

he emphasised the importance for cartoonists

(and all artists) to draw and work and draw

and then work some more

on refining their style.

Because it's only through repetition that 

you're going to be able to reduce the world

to the essentials.

I was reminded of this when
 I listened to a 

"state of the artist" podcast from WNYC

where James Murphy described his creative "process"-

I also had this concept that I really liked called Good/Bad/Good. Like something that’s a good idea in that it’s a really bad idea, which kind of makes it a really great idea. Like it just kind of goes through things twice.

Or things that are like, you can say them as a joke, even. Or as an idea. Like oh, wouldn’t that be a funny idea. But then the gesture of actaully working through the problems of what would sometimes be a simple idea, but bringing them up on with as much labor as they take, something beautiful happens.

For me, it was always like, when we did the label, our record company we called “TFA Records”, which was just a series of terrible ideas that made everybody who worked there really happy- where we would be like [...] I had a meeting with my partner were we were like “We need a logo” and I drew a lighting bolt really badly with a ballpoint pen and wrote a little thing in the middle of it and we were like “well, okay, we could use that. And then we were like, no, we could just use that.” We did that, crappy, like we don’t get a designer to come and make that better. It’s not very big, it’s not going to blow up very well, perfect!

After doing this for long enough, we realized that, we had kind of kidded, as a means of making something that we wouldn’t let ourselves make if we had said “this is going to be art.” Like we had kidded ourselves into a place where we could be like [...] We had found we had made all these things that we really loved. And we did believe in them, and we knew they were bad. And that was part of what they were to us. That they weren’t pretty, and they weren’t - they were weirdly functional.

How to Move Back Home Without Killing Yourself and Everybody Around You

It happened. Despite your best efforts (or not) during your last year of school, you find yourself sleeping on the same bedroom set you came home to every winter break. You know that it's okay, and you have a plan for going forward, but some days you can't bring yourself to get out from under the covers. Let me help you.

Maintain a Schedule

While you were at school, you probably slept in as often as possible, but the fact of the matter is that you did have something to do on a reoccurring basis: go to class, write a paper, avoid studying for a test. Now that you're home and unemployed, your only scheduled activity is "Find a Job." This, my friend, is not the thing you want to see at the top of your to-do list every morning- trust me, I know.

Put together a schedule that works for you, and make an attempt to stick to it. Try going to sleep at relatively the same time every night. Eat breakfast. And speaking of schedules,

Have a Plan for Searching for Work

How many hours a day/week do you want to spend looking for work? After the first few tries, spending 8 hours a day looking for work is not only disheartening, it's downright depressing. Make sure you have a certain amount of time to spend each day polishing your resume/abusing your contacts/cruising Craigslist, but make sure you don't exceed your allotted amount of time each day, you overachiever you. Spending too much time worrying about finding the perfect job is going to stress you out and make you a total bore to talk to at parties.

Have an Activity
This feeds in to the scheduling thing: it doesn't have to be a do-gooder activity like volunteering at the local library (although that does look great on a resume); it can be a series of short-term goals like finishing a certain book or scrapbooking. Having a reoccurring activity will help keep you on track with your schedule- everybody knows that if you want something done, you should give it to a busy person.

Get some Exercise

You don't have to join the gym to do it, either. Join a local adult soccer league, go to the tennis courts with your little sibling, or strap on those sneakers and go for a nice, long, soul-searching walk.

It can be very easy to get so consumed with finding a job that you don't realize you haven't gone outside in three days until your mother mentions that your sweatshirt is starting to smell funny. Exercise not only gives you a change of pace (ha!), it gives you endorphins, which you probably need right about now.

And the last, most important tip....

Get Dressed

If I roll out of bed and plop directly down at the computer, sometimes it's lunchtime before I realize I need to change my underwear and get cracking on my to do list. 

Getting dressed tells your brain that the day has started and it's time for non-reddit things to be accomplished. The kind of psychology that applies to getting fully dressed for a phone interview applies here; what part of lying in bed under the covers with the laptop says 'worktime'? Nothing. Nothing about that says worktime.

Additionally, getting dressed means that if you need to run out to the grocery store and get some milk for Mom (or go to an interview right now) you've already spent the 20 minutes brushing your teeth and selecting a shirt, and you can just go.

If you never got "dressed up" (translation: changed out of sweatpants) to go to class, now is the time to break that habit, but that's an entirely separate post.

***

Here is a list of things somebody thinks you should avoid in your situation. CollegeAftermath.com is an okay site to click around for some more ideas.

Do you have any tips which worked for you in your unemployed life that I've missed here? Feel free to share them in the comments!