Lego Tower

As a creative person it’s easy to get distracted by new ideas and side projects, which ends up being frustrating because you can quickly dilute the effort spent on achieving primary goals. Recently my wife reminded me of a metaphor I used with my son when I was teaching him about learning piano.

One weekend many months ago my 6 year old son had just finished his first piano lesson. Although he made significant progress in just one short 30 minute session, he was frustrated and disheartened about all the mistakes he made and started talking about focusing on something else that he already felt more comfortable with.

I saw his Lego lying around his bedroom floor and I had an idea. I took a block and I told him “imagine this block represents the piano lesson you just did”. I then put it on the floor.
Then I took a second block and said “now imagine this is the next lesson you do”, and added it to the top of the first one.
I then repeated this process until I had built a tower of Lego that was taller than him.

He stared up at it grinning, already seeming to understand what I was getting at.
”Each block on its own is seemingly small and unimpressive, but with patience and perseverance you can build a tower that can reach the moon! The same is true with practicing something like piano. If you stop focusing on the mistakes you made or how little you mastered in one lesson and instead just focus on being consistent, eventually you’ll get there. You can master anything so long as you keep trying and learning”.

When my wife reminded me of this metaphor, she expanded it by saying “there are only so many blocks that can be built in a day and if you start building other towers it’ll just take longer to achieve your main objective. Build one tower and expand from there”.
It was sound advice. I can of course work on more than one project at a time, but between parental responsibilities and having a full-time job already, my time is limited. I need to keep focusing my efforts on one goal - illustrating, and treat everything else as a ‘nice-to-have’.

For most illustrators looking to go off on their own or who are building their brand, it’s all too easy to get caught up in maintaining a social media presence, working on a website, building a print store, finding an agent and a myriad of other small side projects designed to build a following or make money. The reality is if you focus on building a habit of consistently working on mastering your craft or completing that one important project, a lot of these other considerations will seem less important. As someone once told me, “do the work and the rest will follow!”