This past week, on a video call with my coach, she asked me about the caricature sketch that hangs on my wall behind me. I said I didn’t do it, but I’ve always loved the style and think being able to draw and then hand that drawing to someone must be an incredibly fulfilling moment. She asked if that’s something I’d enjoy. I said yes. Then I thought about it some more.
The next day, I bought a sketchpad and looked up some YouTube videos on how to draw caricatures. (The two above are my first attempts.) Then, I emailed the local farmers’ market to see if I’d be able to set up there and do sketches in the future. They said “sure!”
This is yet another lesson in big goals versus little practices that carry you moment to moment. My goal is not to be a full-time caricature artist, because I don’t really even know what that means. Instead, it’s about seeing if I can learn to do a small creative task that is interesting to me but will also allow me some manner of pleasing other people. It’s doing what you want in the meantime versus planning everything out and trying to live up to an arbitrary standard. I have no idea if I have what it takes to be an actual sketch artist (destination), but that’s not going to prevent me from seeing what I CAN do and if I enjoy it along the way (journey).
Yesterday, I saw this update on LinkedIn from Adrian Segar: “I’m proud to have written three books (the latest was published this week) and over six hundred blog posts in the last ten years. After writing each book I was sure it would be the last one I wrote. Actually, I still am. Perhaps I’ll be wrong again about that…”
You don’t always have to know where you’re going to get somewhere worthwhile.
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