Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

You are not your Flickr photostream.
You are not your DeviantArt account.
You are not how many likes on Facebook.
You are not how many followers you have on Tumblr.
You are not your page views. You are not how many people press the favorite button.
You are not your Reblogs.
This is not a popularity contest.
Never, ever let any of this dictate how you make art. If you’re drawing, or painting, or have a camera in your hand and in the middle of your creative process you start to think “Hey, this will get a lot of reblogs/favorites on “insert your website you go to for validation here.”
STOP IT. STOP IT RIGHT NOW. Dictate yourself. Create yourself.
Make Art from you, for you, by you.