Last October I decided I was going to sketch every single day of the month.
I broke out a fresh sketch book, I gave myself a few basic constraints, and I drew one sketch for each day in October.
Can you guess how many of those sketches were amazing?
Basically none.
Sure, there were a few solid works and I even shared a half dozen of them. But if I was seeking perfectionism—or worse, waiting for it to even get started on my artist journey—I would have drawn one thing on October first …and then very likely given up.
Instead, I embraced it as an incremental effort of modest improvement. The goal wasn’t to create thirty-one great sketches, no, the goal was to sketch thirty-one times.
The goal wasn’t fame or a viral drawing or something I could sell. The goal was creating on a routine.
It’s easy to aim too high. It’s easy to think that anything and everything we create should be a final, salable product to hold up to the whole world for judgement.
It’s actually pretty tough to recognize that almost everything we make should start off as something just for our own selves and maybe never become more than that.
January 12, 2026 – Audio Version
Terms FROm this POSt
- incremental
- If you’ve never come across the old adage “Rome wasn’t built in a day” you’re missing out. I tend to lean into the idea that when people are saying this they are trying to tell you good things take time, but my hot take on this is turn of phrase is that great things are built stone by stone, day by day, year by year: incrementally, be you talking about an ancient empire or some obscure skill and hobby.
