Success Tip Number Seven – Don’t give up

The picture in this post is something I did a few years ago for a friend of mine who wanted a business card for her make-up artist business.  When anyone asks me to do an illustration for them, I’m immediately filled with dread thinking “What happens if it’s crap?  What if they don’t like it?  What if I just can’t do anything?”  I went through this process with the illustration for this business card.   My first attempts were rubbish….really rubbish.  I became despondent and I decided to go back to her and tell her I couldn’t do it.  But because this was something a friend of mine had asked me to do, I felt bad about letting her down and stupid at the prospect of going back to her saying I failed, I couldn’t do it.  So I decided to persevere and give it another shot.  In the end it turned out pretty good.  She loved it.

I’ve been quite good at giving up on things.  I enjoy the first bit when I feel like I’m making good progress, and then as soon as I hit a sticky patch….that’s it, I’m crap at this, I hate doing this, why did I think I’d be any good at this?  I’m off!  What I failed to realise until quite recently, is that this is a natural phenomenon of doing something new.  There is a steep learning curve where we feel like we’re making progress and then…bam!….we hit a plateau, where we struggle to get to grips with what we’re trying to do, and often feel like we’re getting worse rather than better.  At this point, a lot of people, like me, think they’re not very good at it or stop enjoying it and give up.  But the ones who persevere realise that that plateau doesn’t last long, and you eventually get out the other side and start improving again.

I still go through this process almost every time I do a new drawing. I always hit a patch where I think it’s rubbish, I can’t draw, it’s going to look awful and get despondent.  But now I realise that if I persevere, I can get over that phase and it usually works out ok in the end.  Doing this blog has also helped me to persevere, purely out of fear of looking stupid if I draw a crap picture or if I fail to produce anything.

“The only failure is giving up…..As long as the possibility to achieve your goal on a different day still exists, you haven’t failed.” (Mark Rhodes, author of “Think your way to success: how to develop a winning mindset and achieve amazing results”).