Progress and Motivation in Business and Art

July 1st, 2010

It can be hard to stay motivated, it can be hard to measure your progress. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an artist, an entrepreneur or both. In a lot of cases you don’t have time to breathe, let alone take a moment to reflect on your accomplishments. It’s important to make time for that though, to work with the understanding that you will have to look back at it as well. The reason is pretty simple, the best way to move forward, or to even to know which direction to more forward in, is to know where you’ve been. More specifically, you need a reference point. If you take that moment to reflect and all that surrounds you is the horizon you’re going to feel pretty lost, that you’re going nowhere and haven’t moved an inch since you last took a look.

Having said all that, you can look at what I’m going to talk about from another perspective as well. Consider it sort of like reverse-goal setting. Myself, I don’t find setting goals all that useful. There’s a lot of reasons for that, but I’ll get into that at a later date. The main problem though, is that I’m constantly adapting, both to the environment and to each new piece of information. If you’re anything like that, you might have the same problem I mentioned that I do, everything in front of you becomes the horizon. You might have some broad goals, but you don’t even know how close they are until they suddenly go whizzing past with barely a nod to your existence. That’s where evaluating progress comes in as being more adaptable/broad than goal setting and it also lets you determine your next move based on something concrete (rather than basing it on what you think you can do, you know what you can).

The flaw in this, is of course that you need to have actually been doing something for a while before you can use it. I’ll address some potential workarounds for that near the end, but now onto the main event.

A benefit of art and business is that you should have easy access to a lot of specific points of information. With art, it’s that you finish a piece and move onto the next one, they’re distinct blocks of time. The same with business, you have your financials and customer tracking (or you should!) and that has the additional benefit of being uniform blocks of time. I’ll use my art in this case as the example, as it is the more complex of the two to evaluate and provides a nice visual representation.

I did what follows not all that long ago, it was directly in response to my feeling that I hadn’t managed to accomplish anything. I couldn’t tell if I was any closer to being able to consider myself “an actual artist” or not. That’s partially because I tend to be a vicious critic of my own work, but it just shows that the benefit of being able to reach out and touch points in your past is directly linked to your motivation. Looking at it, I was able to see that I had actually progressed, but it also allowed me to see some weak points which hadn’t changed enough. Knowing that, I was able to fine tune my direction and feel energized to push on. (Click to enlarge, a little scrolling will be involved).

Progress Points

You might ask why two of the images are comparatively recent and the first is much older. Basically, the first image is my anchor point, the one that started it all. I’d just quit my day job and decided that, yes, I wanted to pursue art (a mildly crazy decision, by the way). It was the first piece which I focused upon and so it works to give me a long term perspective. The next two pieces are much closer together, and that’s to try and give me an idea of if there’s been any changes in a shorter and more immediate span. Looking at both of these is important, too restricted a time period might not give you enough of an understanding/reference point. And looking only at short periods might make it far more difficult to see the progress (or lack thereof) clearly. That’s not to say you need to wait over a year to do one of these, but it becomes more effectively as time marches on.

You may notice as well that I included the time spent to create the pieces. This is important because it also gives you an idea of if you’re becoming more efficient in the use of your time. Generally, you’ll develop time saving techniques/shortcuts/know what works and what doesn’t naturally, just as your skill increases, but it’s important to know if you’re not. If you don’t notice an increase in efficiency it might be worthwhile to take a bit of time familiarizing yourself more with your tools or looking (asking) at how others work and getting some tips. Remember as well though, that efficiency isn’t just about time, it’s time and quality. Taking the same length of time, but creating work that is far superior still shows you’re advancing.

Note: If you’ll have trouble remembering how long it takes, put a little text block in your PSD, or a little text file in the folder with it with the information. Or for the more technically advanced users, put it in the file metadata.

These considerations are easily transferable to the business side as well. Though instead of evaluating lines/perspective/values/etc, you might be comparing number of sales/clients and your expenses/time to delivery. I’ll mention though, that on the business side one of the indicators that would be very valuable is that of “repeat customers/clients”. If you’re having trouble getting feedback on the quality of your service/product, this might be the best indication of whether you’re making the grade or not. If you have no repeat customers over the course of a year, it might be because once people have tested your product/service and it just wasn’t memorable or of a high enough quality to justify repeating. If however, you’re getting repeat sales constantly, you can be pretty sure you’re doing well. And the benefit of the loyal customer is that they are usually more open to being engaged/asked about their experience. (Note: As a bonus or if you’re into the sort of business which is more one-time, try finding out how people heard about you, the number of referrals can be a good addition/substitute to help evaluate quality). You might be able to measure this to a degree on the art side as well, with repeat comments or constant fans, but it probably isn’t nearly as reliable as having the hard numbers, in this case.

A couple of other ideas on how to evaluate your progress:

• In art, pick a random (or one of your best) old works and repaint it from scratch. You don’t need to restrict yourself, new composition, new color scheme, are fine. I’d say stick to the same theme/subject matter though, so you can still compare the two works afterward.
• For business, try approaching your product/service as if it were brand new. See what comes up as you go through the planning or design of it, you’ll probably find that the voice of your experience gives out suggestions, or you may find an entirely new approach. If it seems worthwhile, don’t be afraid to implement the new ideas/approach and see what it does, remember that business is not static.
• In art, define an exercise for yourself, one that relates to something you really enjoy or to what you’ve identified as a weakness. Every couple of months, repeat the exercise under the same conditions and see if there’s any change. You can try out the 25 expression meme, which is pretty popular (here), it’s designed for another purpose, but I think it’d be just as effective in this format (especially as capturing the subtleties of expressions is probably a never ending journey).

To end off, I’d just like to address the flaw in this approach for those just starting out and discuss how this methodology can be applied to just about anything. Experience is pretty transferable, especially when you’re looking to identify more about yourself. If you can remember the progress you’ve made in any subject, you can use that to compare the progress you’re making in a short period in a new subject. It doesn’t always work of course, but generally your skill in an area is more a factor of experience/training than inherent talent, if you can remember far enough back in a subject to when you were just starting out, you should be able to determine generally how fast you should be progressing in the new subject. If you’re struggling or not seeing the progress you expect, you might want to try a different approach, get support, or even just an outside perspective as to why you may not be progressing as quickly. If you apply this thought process to everything you do, it’ll allow you to push towards your maximum potential each time. And more than that, it’ll help your motivation in that you’ll acknowledge your progress and be more focused on understanding why there are problems and how to correct them, rather than falling into the trap of believing you are simply incapable.

I hope you found this post is useful, expect more to come along, I’m aiming for one post about every week or two weeks. If you have any thoughts or questions, be sure to comment, I’ll definitely respond.

I’m curious as well, do you have any suggestions for how to evaluate your progress? Any exercises you use to do so?

Be well,
Norm

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