 Hello, is this working? Yeah, okay Last year I made a $1,000 bet with my younger cousin Normally when siblings make bets it's over something fun like you know Doing a backflip on a motorcycle or something crazy like that But mine was purely artistic so the bet was I had to get a thousand likes on art station Within six months for something that I'm terrible at which is 2d Painting and drawing and to make up things more interesting if I actually succeeded I would actually get nothing so the deal was if I failed I would give him a thousand dollars and if I if I succeeded I'd get nothing So why would I do that right? Why put myself through that? Basically, I've always wanted to learn painting Somehow the motivation was never there and then I learned about Loss aversion, which is that you're much more motivated to stick with something when you have something to lose And it worked so for the next six months Almost every single day. I was drawing painting going to drawing classes on weekends all sorts of things Learning to draw and I'm pleased to say that with just three days left in the challenge I disappointed my cousin by reaching the thousand likes on art station Now I don't say this to impress anyone of course I say it because while I learned a lot about drawing and painting I learned a lot more about how to be an effective artist because previous to this The way I'd learned blender was the way most people learn new things, which is you know They learn it when they have time they you know drift around they watch tutorials wherever But when you have something to lose like a thousand dollars it really throws things into questions into question So what I've done is I've distilled down the seven biggest lessons the seven biggest habits Into yeah into this presentation and throughout it. I'll also talk about Yeah, the habits that some of the world-class professionals today use so you'll learn what for example Stephen King Pixar and even Kanye West having Coleman So guys interested All right. Good. Yay okay, so first habit is Yeah deceptively simple daily work You need to be working on Your task your artwork whatever creative goal you have every single day Now when you think of this thing why every single day? Why can't I just do it when I have time like if I worked one hour Monday to Friday? By the weekend that's just five hours. Why can't I just do five hours on on saturday or sunday, right? Well, the thing is is that we these large blocks of time that we imagine they very rarely ever pan out um And this is why most great artists across history Achieve whatever it is that they do writing books writing music whatever it is by putting in time every single day So for example, JK Rowling wrote the world of Hogwarts Harry Potter um across five years and She did that whilst raising a child and instead of waiting for these big grand moments where she'd have free time On uh, you know a weekend far away where she could block it off with the child's at a babysitter She worked on any spare chance. She had every single day Jerry Seinfeld wrote the Seinfeld series by Putting an X on the calendar for every single day that he wrote jokes And then after he had a couple of days in a row his next goal was to just not break that chain Uh, Mike Babiglia another comedian and a screenwriter. I found that he was putting off writing his movie script um because uh Because he had too many meetings with other people So instead what he did he did something interesting which was to make himself a meeting with his script Every day at the cafe to sit down for two hours at a laptop and type away and he found by doing that he wouldn't put it off And personally from a personal experience Um, yeah, I could speak on daily work in that it's like it sounds simple Like who wouldn't want to work every single day, right? Like it's everybody would want to do that. Why doesn't people why don't people do it? And the thing is is that after you've worked a whole day at the office listening to your boss ramble about stuff You come home. You're tired Last thing you want to do is punish yourself by learning something new Instead you end up on netflix reddit Video games whatever it is, right? So one thing that I found work for me was to uh, agree to do the smallest amount of work possible So in my case it was to Put the pencil on a paper and draw one line So on days when I felt like I can't do anything. I don't want to do anything. I've had such a tough day I just want to sit and relax. I'd say all right. Well, can I do one line? So I go, all right, I can do one line So the thing is is by the time you clear the table get the notebook out You get all your pencils ready. You get the sharpener. You get the eraser You get the chair the lighting you sit down by the time you do all that Of course, you don't stop at one one line before you know it You've done a couple of hours and you've just lost track of time So that getting started is often the hardest part about it once you can do that It's it's fine. So that's what worked for me. Obviously, it's a much bigger topic motivation There's a bunch of books on it. Um, if you're interested daily work. It always trumps Uh short sprints the word trump looks funny now, doesn't it? It's like It's it's changed its meaning Number two volume not perfection right now Honestly speaking who here would consider themselves a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to their artwork show hands most people right Most artists have this affliction and a lot of artists would actually consider it one of their strengths to be a perfectionist Now while you should be striving for a high standard of excellence and for bettering the work that you did last Being a perfectionist actually undermines your growth because it prevents you from reaching the next Epiphany that the next lesson So ira glass um from the famous this american life Radio show said it best by saying that the most important thing you can do is a lot of work It's only by going through a volume of work that you're going to close the gap Or to give a more Well-known example think of picasso, okay Most people can really only pinpoint sort of a handful of his works and go like yeah, that's picasso, right? We know that But actually his library of work includes 1800 paintings 1200 sculptures 2800 ceramics and 12 000 drawings and this isn't including prints rugs or tapestries So picasso has a huge Volume of work and most of us can really only pinpoint the hits the big ones that really went on to success So he has this huge volume of work And if you're wondering if the volume of work had anything to do with the success Researchers say that it did so they did a study on 15 000 musical compositions from Beethoven Mozart things like that and they found that the the more Compositions that a composer produced in a five-year period the greatest spike in the odds that they actually created a hit so Volume is very important So from speaking from a personal standpoint I found that when I was creating these these 2d works that the perfectionism stage that last little bit where you've done most of the work But you know tweaking it zooming in really closely And you know getting the fine details and the shadows and the lighting and all that kind of stuff It eats up a lot of time And the interesting thing is is that it you don't actually learn a lot in that last bit The majority of the learning comes in the stuff before it where you're putting down the big shapes the You know getting the anatomy of the face all that stuff, right? That's the stuff that takes That that you learn the most from this the stuff at the end. That's easy It's putting reference next to the thing zooming in closely and just painting over it And that's the stuff that eats up a lot of time. So my point is is that if you're a perfectionist Um, you're not able to to get to the next lesson to get to the next big epiphany So volume not perfection get on with your next work. That's number two number three steel Right so um It's common to uh to look at the work of our idols and just assume that they You know, they were born to do whatever it is. They do the Rembrandt just first time he started painting He was uh, he was just had this idea for how to paint light and shadow Well, the Quentin Tarantino just was born to make these fun interesting stories, right? Um, but that's not how the human brain works. It's always built upon the ideas before it So our idols the stuff that we look at and go like they they're such an original how do they do this thing? They built upon stuff their idols stuff that they loved And this is why if you look across history, you'll find that most great artists recommend stealing So David Bowie says the only art I'll ever study is stuff that I can steal from are Steve Jobs openly admitted in an interview that they're shameless about stealing their great ideas And you've got Banksy stealing the stealing quote from Pablo Picasso. I love that one So if you're curious like well, why are all these people suggesting stealing stealing is immoral? That's what we grew up with that's that's that's wrong Well, there's a there's a difference between good theft and bad theft and this is outlined in the book steal like an artist um and uh really that there's a whole yeah, there's a list there But the one that really stands out to me the most important one is third from the top Stealing from many versus stealing from one person you steal from one person. That's called plagiarism you steal from many people can't tell or as Gary Payne to put it best If you have one person you're influenced by everyone will say that you're the next whoever But if you rip off a hundred people everyone will say you're so original so um, yeah, so one thing I would recommend Is uh, is find your idols find things that you truly love right now And this is very easy to do with the internet World today Um, you can just go on art station and find stuff you love. So this is what I did at the start of my challenge I started an Evernote file and I just went through art station And I just copy pasted the stuff that I loved and put it into one file Um, you don't have to be like don't overthink it don't over discriminate. I didn't even quote the artist I don't know who some of these people even are I just copied and pasted and this worked as both reference and inspiration in the future So when I was making a face and I didn't know, you know, something wasn't right about the eyes I just opened this up went to all these different ones and I'm like, oh, that's how they did that That's how they did that and then on days like really dark days when I really weren't wasn't motivated to work This also works as inspiration because opening it up reminds you of why you got started stuff that you love truly Not thinking about traditional painters or anything like that stuff that you truly love. So, uh, yeah That's still find your idols and steal from them Number four conscious learning. So show of hands. Um, who has heard that practice makes perfect most people and All the other one, of course is, uh, you know, if you want to get good at something you want to master something You need 10,000 hours of practice, right? Well, I used to think this was the case and this was the advice that I give to people in my podcasts or My tutorials I say someone emails and says I want to get good at blender. I say you got to practice practice practice practice practice But the thing is is that, um This isn't really that's that's not all it is because the human brain is wired to avoid pain So practice can actually if you're not careful about it, it can become a source of procrastination So we tend to think of practice like this like the more time I put in the greater the results will be and it'll be a linear graph But really it sort of becomes a little bit like this You get a little bit of growth at the start, but after that you can sort of stagnate with just pure practice so um, and I actually, um Before I started my challenge. I had the chance to um I just emailed some people that I liked and I was like, hey can I ask you a couple of questions about painting? And uh, one of them was the artist efflemersia, which I love his work incredible And he said something I'd never heard of before which was that One of the biggest ways of time is not being conscious of what you're doing or in other words doodling around And I didn't really occur to me until later on what he actually meant. So one thing I like to do Um by myself when I'm working at home just on the computer. It's very lonely work what I do I don't talk with a lot of people and so at the end of the day Sometimes what I like to do is I just like to hear people talk So I put on my headphones and I listen to podcasts Bill Burr or you know, your mom's house podcast a lot of comedian talk And it's just it's relaxing to me. So what I do is I'd open up a notepad I put on the earbuds and I'd listen to podcasts and I would just sketch Not really a goal in mind, but I would just sketch And um, what I was doing was not good It was really quite horrible actually Um, not some of them don't even look like people But I thought you know the age-old mantra practice makes perfect if I just keep at it I'll get better But I looked through the previous work. I flipped through the pages and I noticed that from a couple of weeks ago They weren't really there wasn't any difference between them. Like I wasn't getting better over time They were sort of about the same and I thought well, I'm putting in more and more hours here, but I'm not learning So I thought okay. Well, I've got to go back and I've got to learn something Even when I actually hate watching some tutorials Some tutorials, especially drawing theory videos can be incredibly dry stuff My wife took this photo of me when I was um Watching a facial anatomy course one of the most boring courses I ever sat through But I did this and I hated it like end of the day. I don't want to challenge myself I'm sure you you can relate to it after you've done a hard day If you're gonna sit down with blender sometimes you just want to do what you know, right? And I hated doing this stuff But in this this process I learned I discovered that I completely misremembered several facial measurements So I was drawing faces that were totally wrong and they never would have gotten better Unless I'd learned this so after I completed this my face has improved almost immediately Just like that Because I stopped to relearn how I continued just practicing practice makes perfect. It wouldn't have gotten better. So really This graph looks a bit better like this When you include conscious learning in it you you You go up a step your your your areas really improve at greater greater amounts than if you were just doing practice alone So practice is important. Don't get me wrong, but practice alone makes perfect. I don't agree with That's conscious learning. It's not always fun, but it's the fastest way to grow Rest So uh, who is had had an experience where maybe you're working on a scene in blender and then um You're just stuck. You hit a brick wall You don't really know what's going on and you just stressed out who's had that experience before He just like oh, yeah lots. Okay. That's good to see Yeah, not alone there I have this a lot and you've probably had this experience as well that Maybe you walk away and you start doing the dishes and then suddenly you come up with the solution It's weird. Maybe you're in the shower. You use something and you just go like, oh, yeah I could use put the lighting on the other side. I could change the color of the shirt That would match the thing, you know, and you just think of this thing when you're removed from the work So this is actually a strategy that most professional artists use So for example, steven king he reckons Uh, what would he know no steven king? He says that any novel regardless of its size Shouldn't take longer than three months to complete the first draft But then after the three months you should stop work and not look at it for six weeks Six weeks do something else go on a holiday or start another book do something else Then after that when you come back to it, it's like you're reading somebody else's work You see it from a completely different perspective one that you would never get never have gone Had you just sat there and just continue to type away Uh, oh I'm supposed to skip that anyways, um and from a personal experience, um, I found like I drew this Uh ray from star wars over a couple of nights and I didn't really know where to go with it I was like, uh, you know black and white so traditional got a black background Whatever, I didn't really know where to go from there Um, so I took a two day three day break I went and just I started some other drawings and did some other stuff Then after three days I came back to it and I remember feeling completely detached from it in a good way in that I could basically, uh, just Yeah, work on it like like I I wasn't um, like I I wasn't I wasn't in it anymore like I could I could experiment with it So I remember like seeing a brush that I'd never seen before in photoshop And I just drew over the top of it and I was like, oh that looks kind of interesting and then within about 15 minutes I had this uh This this interesting effect like this sort of like force kind of like weird sort of aura about it And I never would have gotten there had I continued to work beyond those two days So that break that rest period gave me a period where I felt yeah detached from it So having this rest period is is very important. Um, it's also actually now what we do at blunder guru As a strategy So if we're working if we've got three artworks we want to create for like a trailer like grass essentials trailer or something Instead of doing all three of them Like we complete one to completion then start the next one and then the next one to completion start the next one We do all three of them simultaneously So we'll go on this one for one day this one for the next day and this one for the next day Then loop back and every time you loop back to it and you repeat the cycle and go through one by one again You see things that you never would have seen before and I'm sure you can all relate to this feeling. Anyway So that's rest take a break take a break and see your work with fresh eyes All right. Number six is feedback So we sort of imagine when we think of like original thinkers great artists cross history that they were you know, they They were original so they had to thumb their nose to the critics and the naysayers and people that said oh, that's not good You shouldn't do that and they had to just do because they knew what they were doing was the right thing um, but if you actually look at professional arts and you listen to interviews or biographies You'll find that the exact opposite is true They seek feedback more than anyone um And that's the one thing I found true like looking across musicians writers anything like that They all seek incredible amounts of feedback Um, so for example pixar they have a room I believe it's called the the brain trust which is that when you walk in the room Your role is removed and you are free to speak your mind So you could be a junior artist day one and you could sit down and you could say this movie sucks You know just like Sitting next to you could be the ceo of disney, you know and you both have equals saying and you're not going to get fired You're not going to get any repercussions. It's a free process to speak your mind And this ed capman the co-founder of pixar says is one of the most crucial parts to their their success um Because their early movies suck and he he went on to great lengths to remind people how bad the first versions of their movies are He said they are not these great masterpieces that they just come out from day one and just make it It's through a process of iteration of feedback. They changed the movie to be totally different from what it started with That's the that's the only way that it gets there um, and in terms of people Seeking feedback the one person you'd imagine that would be least inclined maybe to seek feedback Will be maybe this guy, right? Guy that's sort of sure of where he's going, right? Kanye West, um If you look at his most popular most, um celebrated album My dark beautiful twisted fantasy This album that was like unanimously loved by critics some people said it's the best hip-hop album Of the last decade or decades of our generation Um, just unanimously loved by all critics. This was the work of several artists I actually had a look there was 38 artists and producers that contributed to the album So he actually rented a um a studio in hawaii and then flew in his favorite artists So people like j z rihanna drake A bunch of people to come and both contribute to the album, but also critique it So push a team mentioned in an interview the the process for it Which is that he would basically take people in a room and say what do you think of this? And he was sincerely interested in what they had to say Um, and when you compare this with Pixar, it sounds a very similar process No one's going to be persecuted. It's it's true honest feedback and that is what um, that's what can contribute to the success To give a 3d example. This is a sort of 3d conference Um nomin school, right? Who knows nomin you guys heard of nomin? Yeah, great stuff. They are the actually the number one CG school in the world. I think they have a 97 placement rate And I think the second school underneath that is like 50 percent like crazy. They're doing some amazing stuff there And they actually came to australia to melbourne and they had like a weekend event. I went there Um, and yeah, I was talking with um, alex alvarez who's the founder and um, he was saying that although All students there have a high standard of excellence They uh in in every classroom. There's about one or two people That go that are the rock stars that will go on to huge amounts of success and have no problem finding work in the future And so I asked him I said well what separates the rock stars from All the other students and without missing a beat he said They seek criticism and then they actually listen to it He didn't mention composition Lighting storytelling any of that stuff. It was the sole thing That actually that separates the rock stars from the the rest of the pack Very interesting. Um, and from a personal standpoint, I can vouch and say that um, yeah, I had this work here Wasn't happy with it. I posted it on twitter I got a bit of feedback, but I wasn't really it wasn't really sure, you know where to go with it And uh, it was actually at the nomen event that uh, there was dylan ecrin there Who's a character artist from disney and I came up to and I'm like, hey, can I show you some work? You know bust my balls tell me what you think of it And he said sure took out my iphone and straight away he pointed out he goes You got two different sources of lighting looks very odd back lit and front lit doesn't match and also you got two different styles You've got a cartoony style face and then you've got some realistic hair You have to match them up like interesting Straight away. I knew exactly what he meant and it only took like a minute But it saved me hours of work. So my future works. Um, I worked on this and it improved a lot All right, I'd hope to I'd hope to say it improved a bit So let's get feedback. It's worth its weight in gold number seven Is to create what you love So I personally think that motivation is a hugely overlooked area of art Like we tend to imagine that the great artists you could give them any topic And they could make it great like that's what we we sort of imagine But really if you look at the work that the great artists and musicians of today are making It's stuff that they are personally interested in so Christopher Nolan, that's his name, right Christopher Nolan. Yeah Christopher Nolan. I don't know why I don't remember like uh He makes movies about things that he's really interested in about the state of mind and being trapped in things And like sci-fi sort of elements. He's really interested in this stuff And he builds these stories and these worlds that have a depth that you often don't find and that they're sort of missing from you know, some some similar movies, right Elon Musk. He's not an artist, but somewhat successful His three companies spacex tesla solar city He created these companies because he has an interest in humanity and seeing it succeed So this is that's it's like a personal intrinsic motivation and it's stuff that he's interested in I'm sure if he started a company on I don't know if he started a bakery. I'm sure it would suck Like he's not a he's not a genius. He's a genius But uh, he can't like the mid-ass touch that that mid thing I think it's really it's stuff that It's themes that that particular artist is interested in To give a more artistic example, Brian Eno, who's a great arse makes this ambient music He said he got into it because he was interested in listening to music that he wanted to hear and that really shows through his music And from a personal personal story, I remember when I was doing some drawings I was posting them up on twitter and facebook and you know, these little sketches and things And pretty soon after a couple of months people said Oh So you're only going to draw cute girls And I was like, oh, it's like it affected me. I'm like, oh, no, I'm going to become one of those guys It just just draws cute girls. I'm like And like and this was like family members telling me people online people on instagram They're like, oh, will you just draw girls, you know And I was like, oh, I got to balance it out. I got to start drawing some dudes Right So I started drawing some guys and I just didn't work My heart wasn't in it, right? Hector Salamanca. I love the series, but I just wasn't interested in it and The effort required to make something look good Like you need that intrinsic motivation So my heart just wasn't in it and I remember there was um So this was at around the time that mythbusters was hitting their decade of being on air or something like that And uh, I don't really watch mythbusters. I know it's a cool show and you know science all that stuff But um, I yeah, I wasn't really interested But I thought, you know other people would like it if I probably drew a nice picture of you know the two guys on it didn't really work and uh Yeah, again, my heart wasn't in it. It's a great show, but I just I just don't watch it, you know So, you know after a while of having these failed attempts. I was like eating time I forgot, you know, six months to achieve this thing and I was wasting time and then I had this epiphany like Like who gives a shit what people think Right like who cares And so I went back and I started doing the stuff that I really loved which was like honestly I find girls to be a lot more of an attractive subject than most guys Right, that's just what I think and look there's enough red tape in life Like the government telling you what you can do your boss telling you what you can work on Art is one of the few fields where you get to do what you truly are interested in And so I personally think that when you start letting other people interfere and tell you what you should and shouldn't do I think it's a big mistake So create what you love you'll make better work honestly will and you'll stay motivated in the in the long run So that's the summary daily work put in work every single day focus on uh on habit building very important Don't be a perfectionist. Although you think it's a good thing. It's generally not Find your art your idols steal from them Um and uh conscious learning although it kind of sucks You do need to go through and find what your weaknesses are and attack them Have a break that's often better than just working through it Get feedback from every everybody It's not a good thing to be putting your head in your sand and going through it and then finally create what you love Thank you