Get Lost

My good friend told me something during our conversation that I haven’t been able to shake. He said the best work happens when you stop trying to know what you’re doing and just get lost in it. Just play around, mess with things, see what happens. He’s a successful artist, and even he admits that he doesn’t always know where a piece is going when he starts. He just starts, and the discovery happens along the way.

That stuck with me because I’ve been doing the opposite. I have to be honest. I’ve found myself watching more tutorials than actually creating. More thinking than doing. More consuming than making. I’ll sit down to work on something, and instead of picking up the materials and getting into it, I’ll pull up YouTube and watch someone else do it first. Then another video follows, and then another one after that, and before I know it, I’ve spent an hour watching other people create and haven’t made a single thing myself.

I think a lot of us are in that space right now. There’s so much information available that we’ve convinced ourselves we need to learn everything before we can start anything. We want to be prepared, we want to know the right technique, the right tools, the right way to approach it. Somewhere in that process though, the watching replaces the doing, and the doing is where the real learning happens.

Bob Ross used to say “happy accidents.” Those moments where the paint goes somewhere you didn’t intend and it turns out better than what you planned. Here’s the thing though. You can’t have a happy accident if you’re sitting on the couch watching someone else paint. Those accidents only happen when your hands are in it, when you’re lost in the process and something unexpected shows up that you never would have found in a tutorial.

Getting lost is uncomfortable, and I’m not going to pretend it isn’t. Especially the older we get, we want to know what we’re doing. We want to feel competent. We want to be an automatic expert and see results immediately, and that’s just not how it goes. The discomfort of not knowing, of fumbling through something, of making work that doesn’t look the way you want it to look, that’s the part most people avoid.

From point A to point B though, there is an exploratory process that you can’t skip. The only way to access it is to let your guard down, let loose and stop judging yourself. Let that inner child out, the one who used to draw and paint and build things without worrying about whether it was good or not. That kid didn’t watch a tutorial before picking up a crayon. They just picked it up and went wherever their imagination took them.

That’s the best part about making art. It’s a time to break away from the status quo, a time to step outside of the structured, productive, goal-oriented way we live the rest of our lives and just explore. In that exploration, you stumble across things you wouldn’t have found following a step-by-step guide. Techniques reveal themselves when you’re messing around with no plan, and pieces of yourself come out that only emerge when you’re not performing for anyone, including yourself.

I’m trying to get there. I’m trying to close the laptop, put down the phone, and just do it. Less watching, more making, more getting lost and being okay with not knowing where it’s going.

If you’ve been stuck in the cycle of consuming instead of creating, thinking instead of doing, planning instead of starting, this is your push. Close the tutorial, pick up the thing, and get lost in it. The best discoveries are waiting on the other side of not knowing what you’re doing.