The new year has just started, and I have decided to take on the Inktober52 challenge.
If you don't know what that is, you can refer to the story where I share my experience with the Inktober challenge last year. Inktober52 entails a drawing a week, throughout the entire year, thus amounting to 52 drawings. As I shared in that story, having a project like that is an excellent way of framing my drawing practice, the main reason being it's a well-defined project in different aspects, which gives a clear goal to pursue.
When I got the first prompt of the year in my inbox, I was really glad about it: BUILD. I like how inspirational it is to start the year, and a whole project, with the mindset of building. I like it even more because it seems to perfectly fit my current moment.
In my 2022 review, I mentioned that the last year was for me, in a nutshell, a year of discovering myself. I also have mentioned a few seeds that I planted, and how I'm looking forward to seeing them grow. Therefore, it looks to me as a perfect continuation to make 2023 a year of building: I want to build on top of what I discovered and started last year.
It was that thinking that inspired me to draw a bird building its nest for this first prompt of the year. I like that metaphor.
As far as we know, birds are born wired to build their nests. Different species have their own process and choice of materials when doing it, and all of that comes pre-programmed in their DNA. Birds trust that if they simply keep putting together twig after twig (or sticks, branches, leaves, whatever each species uses) at some point they will get to the goal they're set for. To me, that's the power of this metaphor, and it's inspired by that mindset that I want to progress throughout this year.
I have a few goals that I want to achieve this year, especially those related to my art. However, if the only thing I do in 2023 is this Inktober52 project, at the very least, I'll finish the year with a body of work bigger than I have ever produced in my art pursuit in these past years.
This birds’ nest metaphor is just one way of illustrating this idea that we see appearing in different ways in different places, but actually convey the same message. Mindsets like trust in the process, the power of habit, and the compounding effect, all rely on the main idea that any big achievement is made of a combination of smaller steps, and they work together for a journey of success: establish good habits, trust the process, and the compounding effect will lead to the big stuff.
Do you want to finish a book? It takes a sentence and paragraph after the other, a page at a time, chapter after chapter.
Are you into guitar playing? Learn the notes, the chords, the different rhythms, and how to combine those things. Play a song over and over, practice with different songs, etc. Whatever the learning method, it's certainly made of smaller steps. Even the most talented musician goes through them in one way or another, be sure of that.
Do you want to be a writer? Well, you can imagine the way to get there, right? It's not overnight, it takes small steps, one at a time.
That should actually be obvious to all of us, right? I mean, what would be the alternative to getting anywhere, to achieving anything in life? I can't think of any human endeavor that would not require smaller steps, time, and patience. If you find an exception to that rule, there's a big chance that it's just the culmination of the one-step-at-a-time rule disguised as something else.
More often than not, however, we're all led to believe that great achievements work in a more mysterious way than it actually does, or that it requires some special gift that only a few of us are handed in when we are born.
Newton didn't discover gravity because an apple has fallen off of a tree on top of his head. Beethoven didn't compose his pieces only out of sheer inspiration. Graham Bell didn't invent the telephone after a sudden need to communicate with a friend living far away. I also tend to believe, although I wasn't there to witness it, that Einstein didn't develop the theory of relativity out of thin air.
Think of any well-known genius in human history with their inventions and discoveries: even if those came in a eureka moment, that moment is nothing more than the accumulation of years of studying, of practicing, of trials and errors, of many smaller events that eventually built up to that one moment1.
If there's any genius in those famous folks in human history—genius in the sense that they possessed some sort of extraordinary capacity that most of us don't,—I'm strongly inclined to believe that it is the genius of trusting the process. If those individuals were born hard-wired for that, or if they lived their lives consciously telling themselves to not give up and take a step at a time, we cannot tell. To me, what matters is that by knowing this "secret” mindset, I can also apply it to my life.
It should go without saying, that I don't mean to compare the sort of achievement those people had in their lives with what I'm pursuing. However, if by trusting the process they were capable of such amazing feats, I'm sure an ordinary guy like me can at least put a stack of 52 drawings together within the time span of a year.
In the process I trust.
If you want to follow me along and see my progress with this project, consider subscribing to this newsletter—it's free, and I won't spam you (I wish I was that productive 😄). I won't write a story for every drawing, but I'll be publishing updates every now and then, together with stories on other topics that you might like.
You can also follow me on Instagram, where I'll keep posting all the drawings.
See you on the next one.
And when it comes to history, sometimes we cannot even be that sure that an invention or discovery was indeed the product of a single mind. More often than not, one scientist or inventor builds on top of the work of their contemporary peers or predecessors in the field, although one alone will take the credit.