Don’t Stick to What You’re Good At

It only took a global pandemic to make me realise I’m shit at painting. Like, really shit. For a while, I simply waved away the niggling doubt of my own genius by saying I was an 'abstract expressionist' and that my art simply adhered to the rules (or lack thereof) around the genre. Ha! Twat.

The truth is that I’m simply not good. I don’t have the patience, can’t draw to save my life, and struggle to translate what’s in my mind onto the page. The latter limitation is particularly frustrating for somebody who is better at writing but thinks in images - it's like being in a country where you don’t speak the language, or indeed any related language.

While in lockdown, splattered in rapidly drying acrylic paint and desperately trying to figure out if I’d washed my brush in my mug or if I’d just made the murkiest cup of tea in history, I came to the conclusion that I’m not a painter. I’ve made peace with that, and honestly it was quite a liberating moment.

Will my nephews' artistic capabilities soon surpass my own? Definitely. Am I going to stop painting? Absolutely not - and it’s all because of a particularly wise Instagram post I came across a few days ago.

‘Hobbies have been ruined for our generation’, the poster lamented, and they had a point. We’ve become a little too fixated on side hustles, building businesses, and putting our creativity up for sale. While there’s absolutely nothing wrong with this - all the power to you - it does tend to discourage people from doing something for the hell of it because there’s a lack of perceived reward at the end.

It’s not just a generational spin on entrepreneurship that’s bogging a few of us down either; raise your hands if you’ve ever heard the phrase ‘stick to what you’re good at'. In reality, this is hollow advice, because if we only ever stuck to what we’re good at, we’ll never have the chance to find out what we could be good at. OK, so your soufflé collapsed this time - it doesn’t mean it won’t rise to the occasion next time. Similarly, your portraits may look like haunted caricatures, but maybe you just haven't found your artistic style yet.

Or maybe you're crap at it, but painting makes you happy, your misshapen cookies are still tasty, and your gran still loves the scarf you knitted for her.

Seriously, take my advice: fuck it. If you enjoy doing something, just do it – even if you have the self-awareness to know that you’ll never be on Broadway, or your work will never hang in a gallery, or you’ll never make a million with your homemade candle collection. Cherish it yourself, share it with your friends, have a laugh, and enjoy yourself.

In short, don’t stick to what you’re good at – because where’s the fun in that?