Noah Lorang:
When you compress things down to a shareable size, you miss a lot. What you don’t see is the unglamorous parts: the sharpening of the chisels, the unclogging of your glue bottle, or the parts that don’t fit together. You don’t see the days where you are too tired or unmotivated to go down and work on anything at all, or those cases where life interferes and a ‘easy one weekend project’ ends up stretching to six or twelve months. […]
Any creative endeavor is highly non-linear, but the sharing of it almost always skips a lot of the actual work that goes into it. That’s ok; a clear progression makes for a good story that’s easy to tell. But don’t judge your reality against someone else’s compressed work.
Doing our best creative work is never easy. But when we live in a culture where instant gratification is celebrated and stories of “overnight success” are on every headline, it can lead to disillusionment regarding our own work and creative process. We see these compressed, linear stories like Noah is talking about, and we see those as the ideal for our own work. But, as Noah points out, there’s so much to the story we don’t see.
