The Struggle

Trust Your Struggle

Garth Beyer

Trust Your Struggle Graffiti

I’ve talked about The Struggle before. It’s that time between seeing something you want to make in your head and that moment you realize while attempting to create it, that you aren’t skilled enough.

I’ve had too many of these moments to count, and what got me through them was following a piece of advice that a building told me (graffiti). “Trust your struggle.”

You have to trust that despite your inability, your struggle, and your frustration, that you will gain something monumental out of it. The majority of Struggles I’ve gone through, I have learned the lesson immediately after it’s completion (sometimes poor completion, but lesson learned, regardless).

Other times, it has taken awhile. When I was struggling through NaNoWriMo (writing a novel in one month), trying to force myself to write until it was manifested, I teared up because I was struggling so much. The struggle was real, it was frustrating, but I refused to let my mind, my fear, my inability to meet the perfection I saw for myself stop me from writing. It ended up being a fairly good first book.

If we ever want to create something that we picture in our minds, we have to trust The Struggle.

 

Stay Positive & Trust It, Again And Again

Photo credit

The Struggle

Garth Beyer

Ralph Steadman

Please tell me I’m not the only one that has had an incredible idea for a piece of art (painting, crochet, whatever) but when going to produce it, it turns out like garbage. And not the progressive kind of garbage where you do it enough times until it turns out the way you want, but the kind of garbage that not even a hobo would appreciate.

While you can read this article, and yes, it’s worth the read, look at the artwork first. It’s incredibly inventive, creative, and if you stare at it long enough, it seems like something we may be able to replicate..well, to some garbagy extent.

Enter: The Struggle

The Struggle is the place of frustrating emotions: between disappointment and geniusness; between euphoria and defeat. We feel The Struggle when we want, so passionately, to be creative, yet, can’t make the jump from our desire to our creation.

Something I’ve learned from Jobs and Pixar is that stories don’t really have a shelf life. Toy Story is as great as it was in 1995. Want to talk about artwork? Look at all the ancient art we still drool over. The fact is, we may not be able to replicate an image we have in our minds, but that doesn’t matter too much.

What matters is that we tell a story with whatever image we end up creating.

For those still worried, you can still create an art piece if you need to add a few lines to tell the story behind it.

 

Stay Positive & Don’t Let Your Inabilities Stop You From Telling Stories

Garth E. Beyer

Photo credit: Ralph Steadman