Justyna Dorsz

Mindset

A note on motivation

I’ve been thinking lately, I am very lucky that my family and friends are not very supportive. Most of them don’t believe in my success. My mom used to tell me I couldn’t draw — and it was after I’d been working as an artist for years. My friend said that I will probably not make a successful game, ever.

I also have friends who believe in me and tell me so. Maybe all those unsupportive and supportive comments cancel each other out, and that’s why I am never discouraged.

I know there’s a lot of talk about how important supportive environment is for achieving your goals. But I think this is wrong. For me, having only supportive people would not be a good thing. The best people to have around are people who are a bit like adversaries — you need to show them you can succeed, you compete with them, you want to prove them wrong,

Homunculus

There are many ways of dealing with hard decisions.

For example, there’s a method called “fear setting” which Tim Ferriss is fond of. In short, he describes it this way: imagine the worst-case scenario and you will realize it’s really not that bad.

There are many more methods, of course. Here’s a collection of them.

My favorite is Homunculus. Nate Soares describes the technique, and it goes like this: imagine you are a homunculus, which is a tiny human, and you get to steer your body however you want. Now, imagine also that you are a very new homunculus, and arrive in your body for the first time. What would you change?

As a new homunculus, you have the privilege of pruning the things that obviously need pruning. Maybe you’ll look and say “Ah, yes, we’re going to cancel lunch with that person; this body was secretly dreading it. I also see that this body is currently spending a lot of cycles feeling guilty about a date that went poorly last week; we can dismiss that, it’s no longer useful for this homunculus. And also, “exercise” doesn’t seem to be on today’s schedule at all! How strange. This body definitely intended to exercise today; somehow it fell off the list. I’ll put it back on.”

– Nate Soares “Be a new homunculus”

It’s a very easy method. I’ve already imagined my new homunculus, and it made me delete 3 items from my to-do list. That’s one of my major struggles — I keep adding things to my list and have a tough time recognizing which tasks are not important. But my homunculus knew right away.

Do people laugh at us?

I was watching a presentation by David Perell, a writer, and Jack Butcher, a designer. They talked about how they started their careers, what lead them to the work they do now, what were the setbacks and failures. It was a very motivating talk. But one thing that David said surprised me. Around minute 40, he said that when he was starting his business, his friends mocked him. He even got an email from a friend who told him that some people that they both knew were making fun of David’s efforts.

I’ve never really thought about it. Maybe some of my friends were making fun of me too? My first designs were awful. My first game had a lot of problems. Did my friends think I was ridiculous? Not that it would have mattered.

Anyway, the whole video is worth watching (but I time stamped when David talked about people making fun of him):

5 Year Plan for Remarkable Life

Dear Readers, you all know that I listen to Tim Ferriss’s podcast because I mention it a lot. One of the recent episodes gave me a lot to think about. It was an interview with Debbie Millman, a designer, and she mentioned an exercise that her teacher had assigned. They were to imagine their life in 5 years and write it all down.

Here’s a quote that describes it:

we had to envision the life that we could have if we pursued everything that we wanted with the certainty that whatever it is that we wanted, we would succeed.

Debbie did the exercise, she invented “these long ranging, far-fetched goals”. And then, years later, she was shocked when she realized that almost all of it came true. “It is spooky, spooky,” she said. It’s not so strange, though, that she achieved her goals. Studies show that just the act of writing down your goals makes it much more likely you will achieve them.

Tim asked Debbie for details on how to do the exercise. You could listen to the episode to find out more about it. In case you don’t but want to do the exercise, here is another quote from Debbie where she lists the questions that you should answer in your essay:

So, let’s say it is winter, 2027. What does your life look like? What are you doing? Where are you living? Who are you living with? Do you have pets? What kind of house are you in? is it an apartment? Are you in the city? Are you in the country? What does your furniture look like? What is your bed like? What are your sheets like? What kind of clothes do you wear? What kind of hair do you have? Tell me about your pets. Tell me about your significant other.

Do you have children? Do you have a car? Do you have a boat? Talk about your career. What do you want? What are you reading? What are you making?

What excites you? What is your health like? And write this day, this one day ten years from now. So, one day in the winter of 2027; what does your whole day look like? Start from the minute you wake up, brush your teeth, have your coffee or tea, all the way through until when you tuck yourself in at night. What is that day like for you? Dream big. Dream without any fear. Write it all down. You don’t have to share it with anyone other than yourself. Put your whole heart into it and write like there’s no tomorrow. Write like your life depends on it because it does.

How to Design a Life — Debbie Millman (Tim Ferriss Show #214)

I like this idea. I will do the exercise today.

We are bad at judging our own work

I made a lot of designs, and sometimes I hesitated before publishing some of them. I never know how something is going to be received. Sometimes I think, “no one is going to buy it, what’s the point”. But by now, I also know that it’s impossible to predict how well a design is going to sell.

Take this Space design as an example:

I think I first submitted it to my Threadless store, where I sent most of my designs. It wasn’t very popular. But I knew that sometimes different websites have different audiences — what might sell well on Threadless might not sell on, say, TeePublic or Redbubble, and vice versa. So I added this design to my Redbubble store. And it has been selling very well there. It’s my most popular design on Redbubble, and I often get messages from customers when they buy it. Here are some of them:

  • This is going in my husband’s space-themed reading nook for his birthday. Wonderful job guys!
  • Thank you. My future space travel buddy will love this 😉
  • Perfect for my next astronomy courses.
  • Love the simplistic design!!
  • Absolutely love this design, can’t wait to receive my phone case – thank you for your creativity!

Those are all comments from people who loved the design. And there are many more. Whenever I read the messages I am always surprised — they not only liked my art enough to buy it but they also took the time to write to me! Just imagine — had I listened to my inner voice telling me not to publish it, those people would not have an opportunity to see the design and get something they liked so much. They sometimes even thank me for creating the design, when it should be me thanking them for supporting me.

We artist notoriusly doubt ourselves. This is maybe the most accurate visualization of all this:

image
Artist: stuffman Source: the-artist-putting-a-simple-cake-next-to-a-much

Stop that

The other day I was at a hairdresser’s, and a woman sitting next to me was complaining about everything, and I mean everything. That she had to cook dinners and it took a lot of time and she hated it. That it rained too much. That these were difficult times. That it was too hot on sunny days. That women were shallow and cared too much about their looks. That men preferred those kinds of women.

Real-life situations often inspire my designs. I had to suffer listening to all that, but at least I knew what I wanted to draw when I got home:

“Stop That” in my TRUFFLEPIG store

That reminds me of an article I once read: “How Complaining Rewires Your Brain for Negativity”. It’s worth reading, but in case you don’t read it, here’s a relevant quote:

Repeated complaining rewires your brain to make future complaining more likely. Over time, you find it’s easier to be negative than to be positive, regardless of what’s happening around you. Complaining becomes your default behavior, which changes how people perceive you.

Bad output

I stumbled upon an interesting tweet by Julian Shapiro. I know it’s a few months old but I liked it so I am sharing it here in case you find it useful too:

To finally start creating good stuff you need to create a lot of bad stuff first. It applies to writing, but also to drawing —a drawing usually needs a few tries too. You draw your first idea, see that it doesn’t quite work, iterate on it, until you arrive at something good.

Personal Monopoly

My approach to work has always been: find an interesting project, work on it, then work on another interesting project. Sometimes it meant making apparel designs, sometimes it meant creating games. The most recent project is a cat book that I am making with my brother.

It has occurred to me recently that I have never really planned my career, I don’t even have any projects planned in advance. I focus on one or two projects at a time, but I have no idea what I will work on in 3 months.

I’ve recently watched “How to build a Personal Monopoly” where David Perell and Jack Butcher talk about defining a path to a successful career. They are both writers but what they talked about applies to other professions too.

Watch the video and get inspired:

I made notes while listening:

  • A Personal Monopoly is a combination of Curiosity, Competence, Character.
  • To find your Personal Monopoly answer these questions:
    • Curiosity: What do you care about?
    • Competence: What are you good at?
    • Character: Who are you? What are your unique traits?
  • When you define and combine these things, you can then package them into a product.
  • Dice methodology:
    • First, you collect everything you are interested in.
    • Then you connect the dots — all your interests and experiences come together.
    • And then it all combines and emerges into a final form.
  • Strip away all things that don’t drive you towards the outcome.
  • Listen to feedback. Talk about what you are interested in. Attract like-minded people and find out what they need. Based on that, create a product.
  • “The greatest source of wealth will be the ideas you have in your head.” — a quote from “Sovereign Individual”.
  • Thanks to globalization we get to become citizens of the Internet.
  • If you want to create a Personal Monopoly you need to find skills that are:
    • Complementary — skills that reinforce each other,
    • Specific — find a niche,
    • Unusual,
    • Experiential — gained through experience.
  • Path to Personal Monopoly
    • Write what you are interested in. Have conversations about it. Get Feedback. Share it. Create articles and content. Repeat. This way you find your niche.

The Strangest Secret

You know, I have never really thought about my goals. And I know now that to be successful you should have clearly defined goals. But it certainly wasn’t something obvious to me for a very long time.

I’ve just read “The Strangest Secret” by Earl Nightingale. It’s very short, you can get it for $1 on Amazon or listen to it for free. Don’t be surprised by the quality, it’s from the year 1956:

“People with goals succeed because they know where they’re going,” says Earl Nightingale. And then, “Plant your goal in your mind. It’s the most important decision you’ll ever make in your entire life.”

I know a lot of people hate these kinds of motivational speeches or so-called self-help books. Maybe because this is all obvious to them. To me, however, a lot of that stuff feels new. My family has never talked about settings goals. When I was in high school, and then at university, no teacher ever said anything about goals. I don’t remember my friends talking about it either. I didn’t even know that I was going through my life without any direction — I wasn’t thinking about it at all. I only found out about it later, from books, and YouTube, and blogs. I wish I had access to all those things years ago.

Conformity — people acting like everyone else, without knowing why or where they are going.

—Earl Nightingale

If you don’t have a goal, if you feel aimless — “The Strangest Secret” might be good for you.

Newsletter overload

I used to like reading newsletters. Not anymore. There are just too many of them. At any given moment I have emails waiting in my inbox. I can’t keep up with them all.

Oliver Burkeman wrote recently about this feeling of being owerwhelmed by all those podcasts to listen to, all the books and blogs to read. There’s a neverending pile of things requiring our attention. The solution is to accept the inevitable — there’s always going to be an overload of information, and we need to realize that just because something is on our “to-read” list, it doesn’t mean that it needs to be read.

For the past week, I have been unsubscribing from most of the newsletters. I definitely have the feeling of missing out on something interesting. But if I want to create things, then I need more undistracted time. I can’t keep thinking about all the emails and articles I still need to do read.

I don’t want to spend my time consuming what others have created instead of creating my own things.