Me, 16ish, dumb as a box of hair.
Armed with a pencil chewed raw by anxiety.
A library book titled Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (Betty Edwards, bless her witchy soul.)
A crippling fear of failure.
The book’s thesis? “Learn to see.” Not with your eyes. With your guts. Shut off the left brain. The nagging, rule-obsessed nerd that screeches “HANDS DON’T LOOK LIKE THAT” and let the right brain, the feral, ink-stained beast, take over.
How?
Upside. The fuck. Down.
Take a drawing. Flip it. Copy it. Suddenly, you’re not sketching a face anymore. You’re chasing lines. Shapes. Energy. The left brain short-circuits. The right brain screeches. And what comes out isn’t a potato with eyes. It’s art.
It took 2 years of grind.
Wake up.
Flip the paper.
Draw until my hand cramped and my left brain wept in a corner.
Result? My art went from “did a 3rd grader do this?” to “holy shitballs, sell this to a museum”. I’d hacked the matrix. Found the cheat code.
Writing emails? Building a list? Same. Damn. Game.
You think you can dabble? Post when the “muse” whispers? Wrong. The internet’s a hungry beast. Skip a day, and it licks its chops. Skip a week, and your audience? Gone. Vaporised. A post-apocalyptic wasteland of unopened emails.
THE RULES:
Write. Every. Day.
Send. Every. Day.
Even when it feels like squeezing diamonds out of your urethra.
Especially then…
Doing anything consistently is key. Drawing. Painting. Writing emails and telling people to join your list. Do that shit every single day.
Stephen Walker
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Stephen Walker
Unit 146317
PO Box 7169
Poole
BH15 9EL
United Kingdom