If I had to give one piece of advice to young creatives it would be that at some point—if you have any self-doubt at all—there's a good chance that you'll have the very strong internal sense that you should just give up on something you don't think you're very good at. It will feel so strong and foreboding that you'll be tempted to convince yourself that it's telling you the reasonable, mature thing to do—that you're just fooling yourself if you keep going.
If this happens to you, please indulge me and follow these steps:
- Go to YouTube.
- Press "play" on this video.
- Okay, now that the little fucker is distracted, listen to me very closely. You have to tell it to shut up. You have to. It does not know better than you. It is not wiser or more mature. It's using the same logic dipshits on Twitter do when they say they're just a realist for accepting that they weren't born with the razor-sharp jawline that's biologically necessary to attract women. Brains are very good at protecting your ego by finding justifications for why it's better to do nothing than to fail for a little while, and you have to remember that just like anyone can go on Twitter and post authoritatively as though they have it all figured out when they're really crying into their tomato soup, your brain can just post thoughts.
- If you don't tell it to shut up, there's like an 80% chance you'll eventually come back and start doing the thing it told you to give up on anyway, only you'll be twenty or thirty years behind where you would have been if you'd just kept going. So just keep doing it now.
