387 - Stop Sabotaging Your Career!

Perfectionism holds artists back. It gets the best of us, both junior and senior artists like. It’s part of the inability to manage ourselves. 

It also ends up costing more: You’re spending so much time on the project, you burn through the budget. You end up paying the client for the privilege of working on their project.

There is a famous quote from Leonardo da Vinci, “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” But if you’re creating art as a business, you need to know when enough is enough. You’re the one who has to give yourself the constraints. Your goal is to create the best work within those constraints.

All of this can be avoided if you:

• Track your time; and
• Have a clear target of what you aim to deliver. 

Failure is also part of the process. It helps you identify the dead ends in the process and to avoid them. But the ego sometimes gets in the way and forces you to avoid admitting defeat. In addition, if you do your art every day – like Goro Fujita or Beeple (see links below) – you can see your progress. What gets measured – gets managed!

Speaking as a Studio Owner and VFX Supervisor, Allan McKay tackles the subject of perfectionism: how it sabotages artists’ careers, how to defeat perfectionism – with self-established constraints, clear communication and having a clear vision of the process ahead – and how to identify and avoid self-sabotage.

For more show notes, visit www.allanmckay.com/387.