Should you diversify or focus?
Image by PactoVisual from Pixabay
For the past 216 days I have created a painting/sketch every day. For the first months I used a timer set at 60 seconds, no more, no less. In the beginning I tried out some different techniques and tools, and I quickly settled with Autodesk Sketchbook on the iPad pro. Simplicity was the key. You can just fire up the iPad, grab the Apple pencil, choose an object to draw and then you do it. Indeed, extremely fast, and simple. But there is a drawback: When you are travelling, the iPad is too cumbersome. That’s why I went to Panduro and bought a small artist sketchbook, some graphite pens, an eraser and a sharpener. As an artist, my kit is perhaps as portable as it gets, considering the infinite possibilities on offer. I was planning to use it only when travelling and go back to my iPad when I got home. As it turns out, I haven’t used my iPad for weeks now. I stayed with the pen and paper.
One of the most enjoyable aspects with learning a new skill is that when you are a beginner, everything is new. You can start running in any direction and whatever you do, you will learn and improve a lot straight from the start. As you gain experience and improve, you discover what you enjoy, what your talents are, and by necessity you start to focus a specific direction. You cannot run in all directions continuously. In the beginning, it is fine, but if you don’t focus later, your growth will stagnate. You can compare this to school. First you learn a little about everything. All topics are on the schedule. When you grow older and enter the next tier of school, you choose a program. You start to focus and thereby you close some doors. But there are still many doors open. The next step is university, and by now you really start to focus. You close most doors and focus strongly on a particular discipline. Should you go for a PhD you enter the final phase of hyper-focus and create your own final door to walk through. The flipside of the coin is that when you grow and learn in a specific domain, you understand the process of knowledge creation. And this process is valid in all domains. Which in turn, makes it easier to acquire new knowledge even in an unrelated discipline to the one you have studied. The further you climb in the educational hierarchy, the better and faster you can climb in any direction. Thus, you must focus to get access to the wide-angle lens later.
Personally, I have found the process to be extremely enjoyable in the beginning. That part where you can run in any direction and see what happens. Whatever you do, it feels like you become 20% better after a single session. As your skill and experience grows, you will need to put in more and more hours to improve. To achieve the percentual growth that you acquire in the first month as an aspiring artist, will likely take several years if you are an experienced artist. That is why I love learning new things. I love that feeling of growth. When that feeling starts to fade, I know it is time to learn a new skill. This is exactly the feeling I had when I grabbed the pen and paper on my last journey. The feeling of growth! It felt as if I had stagnated on the iPad. As soon as I got some new tools in my hands, my inspiration exploded once again. Another important observation is that I am still growing as an artist. I just needed a shift in perspective. I will continue working with graphite for now, it is hugely enjoyable. In some weeks or months, I will experience the stagnation once again. And then I will just grab some new tools, and the process starts over again.
All of this is of course strongly related to your personality type. I am extremely high in openness, which is why I find it insanely hard to focus on one specific task indefinitely. Simply put, I am too interested in many things! Other people on the other end of the spectrum will perhaps find the same love that I describe, by instead staying with the same skill and polishing and improving it as far as they can. And most people are in the middle somewhere between these two extremes. However, one thing is certain for all of us. If you never try new stuff, you will never know whether it is for you or not.