^drawing + collage i made in my mossbüch

study to death what tools + tactics highly functioning creators use. what life hacks + daily rituals they practice. read about optimum ways to design your work space: standing desk vs treadmill desk vs under-water-on-the-back-of-a-whale desk...

if you've noticed, there's a huge industry that's been brewing on high heat for the past few years all about productivity tricks, what things you can buy and what habits you can inhabit just to get you to sit down and make something. hours + hours of your week go into eagerly learning about how your favorite people come to make the things they do. pumped with hope you set up plans to utilize these new tactics into your day tomorrow. on + on, you pile tricks on top of each other.

i've only started to really see the negative effects of my participation in this industry recently and i'm horrified to discover that it's just entertainment masked as education + self-improvement. another elaborate way to put off actual work that our hands + mind are already capable of. another way to hide and not make. it's definitely a shiny light to run to when you want to escape work that you fear might end up in failure. we trick ourselves to procrastinate in such sneaky ways.

the time we dedicate to learning what other people's practices look like, is time we're not building a practice of our own. the trust we're putting in other people's way of producing work we admire, is trust we're not putting in ourselves to draw a path of our own.