STEP ONE

You start out like everyone else, making bad art.

No technique, no theory, and nothing to say. You make tedious, one-dimensional work that appeals to absolutely no one.

But you keep at it. You’re compelled by a vague sense of destiny, however misguided. You want others to judge you by your potential, not your output.

Youthful arrogance is a powerful tool.

Allow yourself to get high on your own supply —  believe in yourself even if your friends and family won’t. That’s what it takes to get the ball rolling.

STEP TWO

You work, work, work, work, work for years and years. And you improve.

But hard as you try, there’s still a gulf between what you want to make and what you’re capable of. Ira Glass calls this stage “the gap.”

“For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you…”

One night you show your work to someone you admire. They say something dismissive and it cuts you to the bone. It hurts because you know they’re right.

After years of hard work, you still suck. You realize how you’ve willfully deluded yourself in order to get this far. It‘s humiliating.

Most people give up at this point. But you don’t. You behold your own inadequacies with clear eyes and ask yourself the question: What must I improve upon, and what concrete steps must I take to move forward?

Congratulations, you’ve just graduated wishful thinking. Self-delusion helped you in the beginning, but you’ve outgrown it. By committing to favor truth of over comfort, you develop the single most important habit of the rest of your career.

From here on out, your ego takes the back seat. You’ll evaluate your work with brutal honesty.

STEP THREE

Your realize that you’ve been approaching your work from the inside-out —  coming up with an idea and then using the tools of your medium to realize it. But nothing has turned out exactly the way you want.

Time to recalibrate.

You think about the projects you’ve finished — what worked and what didn’t. You’ve developed an understanding of your craft. Unlike when you started, you’re cognizant of the capabilities and limitations of your medium, as well as your own strengths and weaknesses.

Instead of trying to overcome them, you accept your limitations and use them to your advantage. Now your work is dynamic because the content fits the form. No longer will you ask an audience to imagine something that isn’t there. Your work doesn’t pretend, beg, ask, plea, or describe; it demonstrates.

This is the real beginning of your aesthetics, the birth of your style. It’s what taste, hard work, patience, grit, and honesty afford you.

If you’re fortunate, this stage will repeat itself several times throughout your career. Nurture your inner critic and watch out for complacency. Your work must evolve and evolve and evolve. This is the (repeating) last stage of your genius-progression that you have any control over.

STEP FOUR

Sometimes there’s a serendipitous intersection between the evolution of a single artist and the evolution of an entire medium. It’s all about timing, which is all about luck.

At any given time, there are influential people paying close attention to your medium. And if you have a well-publicized growth spurt at just the right moment, your work might cross through their headlights.

It’s true that you can improve your odds with networking and marketing, but in the end it’s up to other people to assign importance to your work. Because if the best things about your art coincide with another person’s ideals, they might interview you, write about you, or give you lots of money. They might even elect you as a symbolic representative of what’s happening in your field.

STEP FIVE

You’ve died, so the game is completely out of your hands at this point.

If human civilization is still around, and if art is still important, and if your medium is still fashionable, your name might be associated with one of the most commonly agreed-upon peaks of a bygone era.

Congratulations, you were an earth-shattering, iconoclastic genius.