ADVICE FOR YOUNG MAKERS

For years I have noticed a repeating desperation in my inbox, comment sections, DMs, physical mail and even when meeting people in person. The desperation is best summarized in these three questions:

How did you decide to go all in on what you do?

How did you pick the right career so that you weren’t miserable?

How did you find a way to make things and make a living doing them?

I know in these moments not to attempt to become some life coach or worse, some bad version of a creativity Yoda that leads an admirer to circle back around in two or three years with a big “no-thank-you for your horrible advice old man.” Because of this, I generally listen more than I talk — a skill I have worked hard at in this overwhelmingly loud world. Listening does an amazing thing because what we all need most in times of uncertainty is the opportunity to speak out of our mouth the tangled up web of thoughts that are jammed inside our mind. All these years have taught me that the first thing I should do with my problems is to put myself face to face with others who have done great work as makers and tell them where I am.

It has never not worked for me.

So my first advice is simple: Don’t sit alone in your thoughts longer than you need to. Find someone you trust and start saying out loud what you are doubting, what you can’t figure out and what scares you. If you don’t have someone you trust, take a chance on someone you don’t trust yet. They exist. They are probably closer than you realize. They may seem boring. They may even wear Crocs.

Over the years I have heard in some regurgitated way that “The thing that you are willing to suffer for is the thing you were made to do,” and “the life-changing question isn’t what you want, it’s what you’re willing to struggle for.”

I think I believe this but I also think that the sentiment needs to be more grounded in reality.

I believe it’s important to define suffering so that we don’t fall into the trap of semantics. My career as a person who makes things is now well past the two decades mark, closer to three, and I think I can honestly say that I have suffered.

Because of my choices as a maker, I have lost money — lots of money. I have lost even more sleep. I have struggled with my physical and mental health. I have held crippling stress for long periods of time, seemingly invisible to those around me. I have watched as friends seemed to live their “normal lives,” going home at 5pm and eating dinner at the table with their spouse and their beautifully perfect 2.5 children. At times, I have wondered if my marriage would survive. I have questioned if I am a good father — often trading small sacred moments with them for the inexhaustible and tormenting hunger I had for an idea. I have missed funerals — having to decide if my grief for a person was somehow less than the task at hand — an impossibly dumb thing to think out loud. I have missed the voice of my parents more than I care to recall. I have spent years of my life on work that no one will ever see. I have embarrassed myself publicly over and over. I have seen friends drift away out of sight — quietly but loud enough to bother me in the back of my mind. I have been misunderstood in ways that brought tears to my eyes. I have neglected a life of normal things for a life that at times feels like a parking lot carnival where the roller coaster isn’t bolted down to the ground.

I have made choices that I regret.

Go to the funerals. Don’t trade the sacred.

Disassociating from myself (which any good maker does at times) and reading back all that I just admitted, I’m not sure I would enjoy being my friend. That guy seems selfish and out of touch with what matters. A workaholic? Insensitive? Obsessed with the wrong things?

As hard as I can be on myself — and most makers are — I know the scales tip the other way as well. I am not what those confessions make me out to be.

I have to remember and to say out loud the overwhelming good I have done and been a part of as a person who makes things.

I have employed hundreds of people in a workplace that I am not hesitant in the least to say is amazing. I have provided for my family in a way that no other person in my entire family history (on either side of the tree) was ever able to do. I have served my underserved community in a physical way, impacting real lives and a real economy. I have made things that have impacted the world at home and at large. Not in an “I cured cancer” kind of way but nonetheless in a real way that has come back to me in a beautiful feedback loop of constant emails, handwritten letters, comments, and personal conversations from people across the globe. People who tell me that what I have made has helped them tremendously in the hard places they have passed through. I used to shrug these messages off and not face how real they are because I felt like a fake and not at all the person they thought I was. But I have finally begun to let myself see that my successes are not held captive to the failures I feel.

So — have I suffered?

Not in a first world problems sort of way. No. Not at all.

In the way of fighting to prove myself to an invisible person in my mind — fighting to believe my ideas are worthy of attention — fighting to believe that the work of my hands is helpful to anyone other than me. Yes — I have suffered, but I believe I have done (and am doing) what I was made to do. So as the salmon suffers swimming upstream or the border collie suffers a field full of scattered sheep, I have suffered, and I think the suffering is one of the most misunderstood and beautiful parts of this life.

I have been successful (so far) in doing the things I feel inside myself to do. I can see now that the answer to making might be as simple as being ignorant enough to recklessly try things and as serendipitous as truly not being capable of doing anything else. For years I saw these as my defects. Now I think they were my answer. I didn’t choose my work so much as I never had an exit from it.

Life handed me a desire that my abilities couldn’t match. I kept digging until I found those abilities — and then I turned the desire into reality.

My advice is to locate that version of yourself. The one who has no other options. The one who is ready to dig. The one who accepts that the risk of failure in what you dream about is less than the risk of doing what you were not made to do. I don’t say any of this from some far-off and impractical cloud in the sky. Some of you stumbled into this Substack and are wondering what you are reading. You are made to be an accountant. You are brilliant. You solve problems for idiots like me who can’t make a spreadsheet or understand numbers that constantly move. Without you, nothing I make gets made. Some of you are pragmatic and averse to risk because that part of your brain that senses danger is fully functioning while that part in mine seems to be burned off. Be that. Don’t be me. Don’t buy the lie that a creative person is more exciting and more valuable. We are not. We are just another way of living in this skin we all share. What matters is to walk your path without excuse and without care for what anyone else thinks your path should be.

One final advice. All throughout history, the people who succeed most in making can do one thing for extraordinary amounts of time without needing an immediate reward. They can wait while working.

They are not unlike the cold-blooded snake who can dwell underground and feel zero pain or loss from its disappearance within the normal world above. Doing the thing is enough. The process is more fun than the product or even people’s opinions of the product. Some of you need to disconnect the umbilical cord of instantaneous gratification and practice patience while you make what you make.

Maybe the saying I brought up earlier should be rewritten to this:

“If you can do something simply because you cannot not do it — patiently doing it, improving it, being a student of it — that is what you should do.”

Why?

Because patience can be best defined as longsuffering. That’s one thing the King James translation of the word got right and you don’t have to believe the Bible to believe the definition.

So I guess I will return to the original questions this way.

How did you decide to go all in on what you do? How did you pick the right career so that you weren’t miserable? How did you find a way to make things and make a living doing them?

I can’t answer these for you.

You have to make a decision and accept that you are responsible for you.

Also. You already know the answers.

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