Sketchbooks

A few weeks ago, my friend Jonathan took me to Crystal Bridges, the museum of American art in Bentonville, Arkansas.

About halfway through our field trip I started fixating on the small cards next to the paintings and sculptures, most printed with a name and a year.

I was thinking about everything those cards leave out.

Every person on those walls has a body of work that isn’t in the museum. Sketchbooks full of ideas that went nowhere. Years of trying where nothing came out right.

What’s hanging is the small slice that got celebrated. Most of what they made was never “ready” to share, or even meant to be seen.

Sometimes we forget that when we look at other people’s work. We see a successful launch and the company it became. Or the critically acclaimed release and the career it made. Then we hold that up against our own sketchbook, full of drafts and half-built things.

Of course we come up short. We’re comparing their hits to everything we’ve ever made.

I used to work at a Blockbuster. Not every VHS tape I had to rewind and restock debuted in a theater. Whole aisles were straight-to-video releases.

There has always been far more work made than work celebrated. That’s normal.

The trouble starts when we forget that the rough, imperfect work has to come first.

Some people are romanced by the idea of being an “Artist.” They want the title and the edgy uniform. They like the way it sounds when someone introduces them at a party. That’s artist as a noun.

But the people on the museum wall spent their years being the verb. They filled sketchbook after sketchbook, mostly where no one could see. Until one day, they could.

The same thing happens at work, and it gets worse the further along you are. “Founder” becomes a line of copy for a LinkedIn bio. “Leader” starts to mean a seat you’ve held onto for years.

Once those words harden into nouns, everything you make starts to feel like it has to be a hit, or it’s not worth starting. You start avoiding anything that makes you feel like a beginner. You stop sketching.

Success is a comfortable place to stop.

But a sketchbook is where you get to be bad at something again, on the way to being good. Every name on that museum wall kept one.

So where do you do your sketch work?

What would you sketch this week if feeling like a beginner was the point?

~ Jaime

This issue came out of season 2, episode 1 of Slackers, the podcast I co-host with Jonathan Sasse. Season 2 went live last week. Listen to episode 1 on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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