✏️ TREE 482: Talent is less important than you think

While I was preparing for our move, I looked through a box of things my mom saved from my childhood and discovered something surprising. I wasn’t very good at drawing! All my kids were better child artists than me. (My daughter the biologist is still a better artist than me.) I’ve done drawing workshops with bunches of kids who were better childhood artists than me.

Fortunately I didn’t know I wasn’t very good at drawing. I ignorantly drew and drew and drew. My mom saw something there and sent me to summer drawing classes. She put me on a commercial art correspondence course that somehow survived from the days of paper magazines and ads filled with illustrations. She made sure I learned the craft. I kept drawing. By age 16, I was actually pretty good.

You don’t need to be the most talented at what you do. (Even if you are super talented, there’s sure to be someone else who is super super talented.) You just need to be a person who shows up consistently and cares enough to keep improving.

I would show you an example of my not-great childhood drawing but the box is buried in the furthest recesses of our ginormous cupboard under the stairs, so instead here’s a bike I invented.

I discovered Genesis Owusu last week. His debut album Smiling With No Teeth is very impressive (Spotify).

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Welcome to a new week!
Jeff