Why Bother?

Your smallest personal achievements increase your ability to build stronger, healthier and more cooperative communities.

What does it matter if I design a slightly improved version of a digital pencil I created last year? Why put time and energy into such a seemingly trivial pursuit in the midst of our reckoning with the climate crisis, multiple armed conflicts, political turmoil, A.I., economic inequality, and all the rest?

Because every personal achievement, no matter how small, contributes to the strengthening of our community, be it local, national, or even global.

How? It comes down to this: personal achievements produce positive emotions.

I don’t know if true happiness even exists, but the concept of happiness is tied to positive emotions, like love, joy, pride, confidence, and feeling valued. Personal achievements automatically gift the achiever with one or more of these positive emotions.

And along with these immediate and personally felt positive emotions, there are usually correlating emotions; emotions that have the power to positively impact people other than the individual achiever. These include feelings of generosity, patience, sympathy, and a willingness to compromise.

Scenario A: You just lost out on a painting commission and are now waiting in a long line at the grocery store. A man behind you has fewer items, and you could let him jump in front, but you’re feeling grumpy and impatient to get back home, so you remain in your spot in line.

Scenario B: You just found out one of your logos was accepted into a design annual for publication and you’re now waiting in a long line at the grocery store. Seeing the man behind you with only a handful of items, your feelings of accomplishment and pride more easily bring out feelings of generosity and you invite him to jump in front.

He thanks you, explaining that he’s trying to get home as quickly as possible to relieve his wife who is looking after their sick toddler. You discover that you both have children in the same preschool. You share your respective professions, a common small-talk topic, and after hearing that you are a designer, the man shares that his sister-in-law, Sonja, is a commercial photographer in town. After glancing at her Instagram profile, you discover she would be a perfect collaborator for an upcoming project at your studio.

The work Sonja does for your studio lands her a bigger commission with an international agency. Sonja (whose aunt uses a wheelchair) now has the financial security for the next month to spend time on a personal photography project that raises awareness about much-needed funding for more accessibility ramps in town. Her powerful photography for this project pushes fundraising efforts over the goal line and dozens of new ramps are installed where they are most needed.

This domino (or “butterfly”) effect is well-trodden territory, so I won’t go on, but there is hard truth in the notion that positive emotions experienced by the individual will often spread to others, both near and far, like the most wonderful virus.

Right at this moment, you may be feeling like your creative work doesn’t matter. You may be feeling like there is no point in learning a little more about color theory, or composition, or trying to better understand the anatomy of a hand. Phooey.

It’s not that your work, itself, will change the world; no, only a few people in history will create something that resonates so strongly that it forces people to stand up, pay attention, and actually act on the feelings your masterpiece has stirred within them.

Instead, it’s the mini-milestones you achieve while doing your work that matter because each of these little ‘wins’ makes you feel good. Feeling good is the foundation for doing good. Positive emotions facilitate cooperation, unity and understanding in a community.

We are living in a time where there are forces at work that are explicitly engineered to make you feel inconsequential and helpless; there are systems in place that are designed to promote apathy and inaction. But the moment you feel even a flicker of optimism — the tiniest twinkle of a positive emotion — you have the advantage.

You don’t have to be an activist, a community organizer, or president of some board or another. It’s enough to just get a little better, day by day, at the thing you love to do, and let the positive feelings you derive from this improvement move outwards from the source.

So, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to carry on making a slightly better digital pencil, I’m going to feel good about it, and then I’m going to go out and smile at a stranger. Let’s see what happens.

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Apologies for my absence here. Several things prevented me from taking the time required to write something I considered worthy of your time:
1) I had to cram for my German driving theory test (failed it, though).
2) I traveled to London with some lovely Procreate colleagues for InMotion.
3) I was deep in ‘brush world’ both here at home and then in Tasmania for a couple of weeks.
4) I had to cram for my German driving theory test again (passed a few days ago!).
5) I reached 10,000 subscribers for this newsletter and honestly, I just felt so much pressure to write anything “good,” I had writers block for a while. Seriously, thanks for all the support and, wow.

Glad to be back. More writing is on the way. Here is some random art that came out of my brush-building experiments over the past month.

Click to enlarge.

Until next time, take care of yourselves, take care of each other, remember to be kind, and I’ll say, Ciao for now.

Kyle