You will never be a great artist.
Intro
In my experience, artists are either the most narcissistic individuals you’ll ever meet, or the most self-conscious and insecure. This is likely a consequence of the culture they are conditioned in, which pressures them to succeed beyond any reasonable measure.
When I say “artists”, I’m not very particular with the meaning of the word. I believe what I’m going to say applies just as much to musicians, animators, game developers and writers, give or take some specific examples.
Artists have unreasonably high standards.
Making it as an artist entails being praised by your peers as innovative, unique or talented, never mind the fact that regular ass people know nothing about your niche. Ultimately, success is measured by one's impact on one’s craft or its history, and every artist wants to be an inspiration to future generations, everyone wants to be “one of the greats”.
That is a monumental undertaking, and to think that you will be the one to achieve this is unrealistic. Even worse are those that assume they’ve already made it, the egotistical types that hold everyone below them to their standards.
This level of self importance is not common in other fields. The doctor that invents a new way of performing heart surgery is no doubt thrilled to be praised and remembered for it, but for most doctors, simply providing aid and care is fulfilling enough. The teacher that comes up with a thesis to revolutionize his or her field will obviously want an award for it, but for most teachers, guiding the new generation of that field is enough. Why can’t artists be content with just making art?
Here are some hard truths.
The likelihood that you will be remembered in history by everyone as “one of the greats”, out of all your peers, is so astronomically low that you have better odds at winning the lottery twice. If you want an honest lasting legacy, It’s better to work for your friends and loved ones and be good to them, since they’re the only ones who can remember you genuinely and with love.
The current generation has shown that they are too insecure or immature to learn from history, and would rather destroy it, tearing down historical figures for not being “progressive” by today’s standards. Cancel culture has come to prove that even art, which is meant to be a medium of expressing free thought, is subject to censorship and scorn, even by other artists. Given that art is interpretive by nature, there's no way of knowing what you might be accused of down the line. So even if your legacy is somehow alive and well in the distant future, there’s no guarantee that strangers will respect and honor it.
Success comes in small bursts.
You will never be a great artist as long as your standards for greatness are unattainable. In every other subject, progress is made in incremental steps, and art is no different. The goals you set must be easy enough so that you can move on to even greater challenges, but hard enough so that you truly learn something each time. You shouldn't hold yourself up to standards that you wouldn't hold other artists to, neither should you think of yourself as the standard.
If you set an objective that’s too difficult, you won’t be able to tell how much you’ve progressed, because on that scale you will be too far from reaching it and too close to where you just were. Consequently, being too close to where you started makes it easier to start over, and in the end you’ll have nothing to show for your effort. Don’t try to be the best, just do your best, and if that’s too tough, do what you can.
This college thesis I wrote is loosely based off of a short conversation I had with some friends on the purpose of our art, and along that chat I realized just how stupid our expectations of ourselves is. Everybody wants to be the one to make the next big thing, it becomes an obsession. If there's anything I've learned in my time on this site, it's that you're allowed to have fun when you make things, that's really the whole point of it. We're in a garden full of giants and we spend too much time looking up at them to stop and smell the roses.
