How To Be The Best At Your Creative Work

There’s a saying around Straight Blast Gym, “If you don’t train it, you don’t own it.”

If you don’t dedicate yourself to consistently improving your jiu jitsu, then you won’t be able to use the skill when you need it the most. when someone is threatening you or someone you love. You master the art by practicing consistently and improving your craft each time.

In creative work, the stakes are never that high, but the concept is the same. You aren’t the best at your work because you pull off one magnificent thing and call it a day. You are the best because you practice consistently and improve your craft each time.

For some, the idea of overnight success is intoxicating, but you are going to have a brief and unremarkable career if that’s your game. What’s even left for you after that?

What is your incentive to keep going?

What are you really in it for?

It’s worth reflecting on that question.

Maybe you dream of a life on a beach in Mexico or Bali.

Maybe you’re intoxicated by the idea of being an influencer.

Maybe the work terrifies you because it confronts you with your own shortcomings and limitations. (That alone makes people quit things that are worth doing.)

Maybe you freeze, because you don’t have it all “figured out”.

Maybe, like me, you have a perfectionist streak in you. I struggled with that for a long time, dragging out blog posts and my first novel because they never felt “ready”.

If that sounds like you, this is a perfectly normal thing to experience as a creative. All artists feel inept when they take the idea in their head and put it on paper, post, musical note, video, canvas, or clay. The final product never meets the ideal in your head, and that is something you simply have to accept.

None of us has it all “figured out”, and the challenge of chasing that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is half the joy. Sometimes you get close enough to that ideal, and it fills you with the sensation that you are part of something bigger than yourself.

Recently, I re-wrote my About page for my new website, complete makeover. It’s just over 200 words and says exactly what I need it to say.

Writing it felt effortless, but that would not have been possible without the 18 months of blog posts that came before it on my old website. I practiced consistently and improved my craft each time. When the stakes were high and I needed to be great at my craft, I was ready.

If you don’t train it, you don’t own it.