Mindset

This has been a difficult week

There’s a game, Undertale, where you play as a human who falls underground into the world of monsters. My favorite thing about the game is that it gently — every few minutes — encourages you to be determined.

This past week my brother and I worked on a bug with gamepads in one of our games. That took a lot of time, we spent most days reading on possible issues and trying different solutions. It was difficult to feel motivated when we weren’t seeing any progress. And it wasn’t even our bug but a bug in the game engine that we were building our game in. So we weren’t looking so much for a solution as for a walkaround. We kept at it and now it’s fixed.

I suspect that this kind of attitude is what made it possible for me to have a successful store on Threadless. I know how it is in the beginning: you submit your designs and not sell anything. It is discouraging. I know many people give up. I wish they knew that if only they kept drawing they too could have a profitable store.

I’ve been thinking, maybe every now and then we all could use a reminder to stay determined.

Daily vs. Dailyish

It’s much easier to stick to a habit if you make it a daily habit.

For my whole adult life, I’ve been trying to make a habit out of going to the gym and exercising regularly. I had always assumed that exercising 3 or 4 times a week was enough, so I set rules for myself like: go to the gym at least 3 times a week, or go for a run once every two days. And sure, sometimes I managed to stick to it for a few weeks. But, inevitably, I would be too lazy to exercise on Monday, and Tuesday, and Wednesday, and Thursday. And then I would have needed to go every day for the rest of the week — it seemed too much, it wasn’t the plan to have to exercise every day. I would get discouraged and abandon the whole idea. And then try again a few weeks later.

It wasn’t until I decided to go to the gym every day that I managed to make it a habit and stick to it. Only when a task is non-negotiable, a habit can be built.

Sabotage

Recently someone asked for opinions about their designs. But they insisted on receiving “positive feedback only”.

What do you say to that? My standard response is, of course, to stay silent. If they haven’t asked for honest feedback, then it’s pointless to impose my opinion on them.

But I can’t help feeling that they are sabotaging themselves this way. They could ask for honest feedback, consider it, learn from it. If they don’t want to hear any criticism, how are they going to improve?

Making a children’s book – some notes

A few weeks ago, my brother and I started working on our first children’s book about cats. This is a good time to write a bit about the process and why we decided on this project.

From the start it was a challenge:

Both my brother and I are artists, but we make designs for apparel and 3D art for our games. We are not illustrators, we have never illustrated a book before.
We don’t have a publisher yet. We don’t know if we are going to find one.
We have never done anything like this before. We have no experience in making or publishing books. So if we are doing something wrong, we don’t know it.
At first, we wanted to make a simple book but soon decided to draw rich and beautiful illustrations — and that takes a lot of time.
From what I know, books don’t bring a lot of income. At times, it feels like we should be working and earning money instead of making a book.

Why make a book then? Our time would be better spent making a new game or starting another apparel store. We have experience with those so we would know how to make them profitable. But that would mean working on something that we are familiar with and staying in our comfort zone. That’s not good. It’s better to challenge yourself, work on something difficult, and learn in the process.

There’s another reason why it’s a good idea to have different projects — income diversification. If you have just one income source, then you are vulnerable. If that income source dries up, then you have to scramble to find work and might be forced to accept unfavorable terms. But if you have two or three income sources, then you are in a more secure position. Even if you lose one of your income streams, you are not going to be desperate. You will have time to figure things out, search for other opportunities.

You never know how successful your project is going to be. It’s a risk to work on something new, it might not work out at all. We had some failed attempts. But we worked on so many things that at least some of them became profitable.

There’s a risk that our book won’t get published or won’t get many sales. There’s also a chance that it will get published and become another passive income source.

Start before you are ready

When I started making designs for apparel in 2012, I could see that my designs weren’t that good. Nevertheless, I submitted them all to Teefury. Sure enough, Teefury didn’t want them. I received rejection email after rejection email.

But I kept at it and slowly improved. I sent all my designs, regardless of how I felt about them. After a while, my designs started to get accepted for printing. It went like this: rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, accepted, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, accepted, rejected, rejected…

If I judged myself by all those rejections that I got in the beginning, then I should have known that I wasn’t ready. But I was desperate, I wanted to see my design on a daily t-shirt on TeeFury, I needed to earn money. So I ignored the fact that I wasn’t good enough, and kept designing.

Unique beliefs

I’ve been reading “Oversubscribed” by Daniel Priestley. You should read it too. It’s full of insights that will make you consider your goals and how you approach your work.

I will write more about it when I finish it, but here’s one question that was asked at the beginning of the book:

What are your strongly held beliefs about what you do?

I have some strongly held beliefs but I want to do more research before I write about some of them. One of my beliefs, though, that I often write and talk about, is that you need to be good at a few different things so that you can earn money in various ways.

You should never be dependent on just a single income source. It’s particularly important for those who have regular jobs. So many people consider being employed a sign of stability — it’s anything but that. People who are employed are most vulnerable to factors that they can’t influence at all. Nearly all my friends that had jobs were at one time or another fired or disappointed with money or their bosses or other demands of their contracts. And yet, they could do nothing.

With the pandemic, it’s even more visible. I read an article today about airports firing hundreds of employees. And what will most of those people do? They will look for another job where they will be as vulnerable as they were now. It’s not even their fault. We were all conditioned at school to want to be employed.

The only option is to break the pattern. Don’t get comfortable. Have side business. Find ways to monetize your hobby. Look for opportunities.

Ask people to be harsh

This is something that happens too often. It goes like this: An artist posts their art, or a writer posts their story. And they ask for feedback:

“do you like it?”

Or like this:

“tell me what you think, please be kind”

Some try to guilt you into feeling sufficiently awed:

“what do you think about it? I spent 150 hours on it”

To top it off, when they receive critique, they get sad and offended.

This is not a way to improve at anything.

If you want to get better, you have to be fine with receiving negative feedback. More — you have to ask for it. People don’t want to upset you, so if you ask them to be kind, they won’t tell you that your work needs improvement. If you ask: “do you like it?”, you imply you expect a positive response. Rarely will anyone tell you that no, they don’t like it.

To get honest feedback don’t ask if they like it. Assume that there’s a lot to improve and ask about that. Tell them you want to become a better writer or a better artist. Tell them you want to know anything that might help you. Even if your art is awful — you need to hear it.

Don’t ask anyone to reassure you that your work is fine. Instead, ask them for advice.

And whatever you do, don’t get upset or angry, unless you want to make sure that they never tell you their honest opinion ever again.

Tell people NOT to be kind. Ask them to be harsh.

How to spook an artist

I have been an artist for a while and I know a lot of artists. Sometimes, instead of making art, we do what other humans do — talk. Every now and then a topic of this one scary thing comes up and everyone chimes in with methods on how to deal with it.

If you are an artist, then you already know what I am talking about. If you are not an artist, then you must have googled “how to spook an artist” and now you are here. Worry not, you will find out soon enough.

As you may know, the first company that accepted one of my designs was TeeFury. It was in 2012 or 2013. TeeFury was then at the precipice of huge growth and the profits rose year by year. Around 2015 they must have run out of ideas on what to spend money on because they introduced a new incentive for artists to send in their designs. It was called an artist pack and it was a bundle of a few various gifts: markers, Lego bricks, pencils, stickers, gift cards, and so on. Every time your design got accepted for print they mailed you an artist pack and you never knew what you were going to get.

One time they sent me a small sketchbook. It was by a company called Field Notes, which I hadn’t heard about before, but it looked fancier than my usual sketchbooks, so I always remembered the name.

I’ve kept hearing about Field Notes over the years because every now and then they run a limited series of Field Notes notebooks. I’ve just checked their website and I can see that the previous series was based on National Parks.

Recently Field Notes did something new — they made a limited series called “Snowy Evening” and this one is truly unique.

Take a look at the picture below. Here are 3 sketchbooks, each with a unique cover:

Here’s the description from the store page:

Field Notes’ 49th Quarterly Limited Edition for the winter of 2020 is Snowy Evening, which features 99,999 unique cover designs created by artist Brendan Dawes. Just like the infinite shapes of a snowflake, no two notebooks are identical. Inspired by the physics behind how ice crystals are formed in the atmosphere, Brendan crafted an algorithm that produced and rendered 99,999 lovely snowflake illustrations.

There are 99,999 covers, every cover is unique, and the covers are NOT designed by artists. Every cover is made by an algorithm. An algorithm replaced the artists! Soon we might all be redundant when AI robots roam the earth and make art. That’s not what scares artists, by the way, I am just setting the context here.

Well, maybe some artists are scared that they will be replaced by computers, but no one’s worried enough to talk about it. Yet.

Now, there’s this thing that scares artists, which I mentioned at the beginning. And it’s this:

Blank sketchbook - or how to scare an artist. — Photo by Mike Tinnion on Unsplash

Yes. A first blank page in a new crisp sketchbook. The moment when you are about to start drawing the first thing in an empty sketchbook and you know that you will mess it up. The anxiety is so prevalent that there are “Conquering the first page” videos on YouTube and tutorials on overcoming the fear of the first page.

Now, starting a new sketchbook is scary, but let’s imagine something scarier. Here’s an idea. How about making the first drawing in a sketchbook that is special and one of a kind and so unique that among all 99,999 sketchbooks ever produced, there are no two identical ones? How about that? Would you draw in such a sketchbook? I can tell you that I would not, that if I ever got the Field Notes sketchbook from their “Snowy Evening” limited edition, it would sit on my shelf until I withered and died, and my grandchildren would inherit it, and they would keep it on their shelf until there came a generation that didn’t remember that the lonely sketchbook on a shelf was one of a kind, and they needed to make a grocery list.

How 50% off sale punishes an artist

It doesn’t. But we will get to it in a moment. First, let’s see why so many artists think that it is wrong and unfair when there is a site-wide sale and items with their art are sold for a discounted price.

Every few weeks every website that sells clothes runs a sale. And when that happens artists complain about it on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit. Why? Well, when there is no sale, an artist gets, let’s say, $4 or $7 in royalties from a t-shirt sold with their design, but when there is a sale, an artist gets $1 – $2.

Let’s take Threadless as an example. When there is no sale an artist gets around 25% of the price of an item. But when there is a sale they get only 10%.

Now, you may ask, “Won’t artists make more money when there is a sale since more items are sold?” Yes, they do. More t-shirts are sold so artists make much more money during the sale, even though they get paid less per item.

How is it possible, then, that artist complain about it even if they make more money?

I am going to explain it with a story about “World of Warcraft”, which, on the off chance you don’t know that, is a video game. “World of Warcraft” developers didn’t want players to play too many hours in a row. So they devised a system where players got fewer experience points the longer they played. To get the usual number of experience points players needed to take a break and come back to the game later.

Players hated it. Gaining fewer experience points the longer they played felt like a punishment. To fix that, the developers changed it and implemented a resting mechanic. This means that when players are not playing the game, they gain a resting bonus. Then, when they finally come back to the game, they get more experience points based on the bonus they accumulated. The resting bonus gets used up over time, so after a few hours, players need to take a break again to restore it.

I haven’t played “World of Warcraft” but I heard this story here:

Those are the same systems, of course. The developers themselves even stated that those were the “same numbers seen from the opposite point of view.” It makes such a huge difference to think of something as a reward instead of punishment!

Now, back to designers. Designers think that the base price is the price when the item is not on sale. Then they get 25% of the price. If there’s a sale, designers get only 10%. It feels like a punishment and artists complain in Facebook groups about being treated unfairly.

What’s wrong with this situation and how to make artists see the situation from a different point of view? Can the solution from “World of Warcraft” be used here? Here are two things that any website working with artists should realize:

First, the base price of an item is not the same for a customer and for an artist. The base price for a customer is the full price, so, when there’s a sale, they feel they are rewarded for buying an item for less money: they get the item AND save money.
The base price, in an artist’s mind, should be the discounted price, not the full price. Why? Because the sale period is when artists sell the most items.

Second, don’t hide how much artists earn. Any website that advertises to artists that they make 25% of a price is guilty of making artists feel punished when they inevitably earn only 10% from items on sale.
I love Threadless, I do, I make a lot of money there and amazing people work there. However, look at this table, where Threadless claims that you get $7, or around 25%, per t-shirt:

From blog post: “Announcing a massive increase to artist earnings”

There’s no mention of the 10% profit that an artist makes most of the time when their design is bought.

Of course, it’s not surprising that Threadless advertises the $7 that an artist makes from a $25 t-shirt. Threadless wants to pay artists a lot so that artists publish artwork on their website. And in the case of Threadless and Teepublic and a few other websites, I actually do believe that they want to pay artists fairly and support them.

The table looks nice but overpromises. Artists expect a 25% profit, but instead, when there is a sale, they earn a lot less than they thought they would, and so they feel punished.

How should this table look to make an artist feel rewarded instead of punished? There should be two columns:

one column with a 10% profit for when an item is on sale,
and another column with BONUS PROFIT for when an item is not on sale.

Threadless does an amazing thing here, which they don’t advertise at all. When an item is not on sale, they give artists a disproportionate percentage of additional profits. This is an opportunity to make artists feel rewarded.

Lulled

What would happen if you were fired today? Do you have a plan? — Photo by Dan Gold on Unsplash

Matt worked at a large company producing branded fruit juices. He was a marketing director, one of the four marketing directors there. But when the profits decreased the company restructured, laid off hundreds of people, and fired 3 of the 4 directors. Matt was one of them.

They let him keep his business car. I met Matt when I took an Uber and he was the driver. He’s been trying to find a new marketing job for the past 3 years. He said there were no marketing jobs for guys his age, and at least he had his car but he worried about the wear and tear on it. He had to bide his time until retirement.

I talk with all the drivers that want to talk so I hear stories like this often. I used to worry that I would fall into this trap too — that I would be good at something and get comfortable but then somehow lose it all and not be able to earn money anymore. Every time I heard about someone being fired and not having any other skills, it was scary because I could see myself following those same steps.

A regular paycheck lulls you into a false sense of security. Most people feel safe when they are employed and then when they lose their jobs their world shatters.

“In times of peace, prepare for war.”

Does it sound dramatic to you? What would happen if you were fired today? What if no one wanted to hire you for a similar job? Do you have a plan? More importantly, do you have the skills to earn money anyway?

Mindset

This is not a way to improve at anything.

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