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Shiny Object Syndrome often referred to overlapping or actually, I would say even being mistaken for flakiness. I don't
know if technically they are the same thing, but I can tell you what I think the differences.
The person with shiny object syndrome might be working on something. Now they see a shiny object sometimes that's
in the form of an idea or new inspiration. It can come in the form for people in other fields have maybe a new
activity that they are interested in trying, whatever the case is, and suddenly, there is very strong need to hunt
down that shiny object, draw a picture of it, hang it on the wall before
lunch, or depending on what time of day you saw it maybe dinner.
If it's not draw a picture, maybe it's do something else with it, write a
paper or a book or whatever about that thing is. And the problem for the person with shinny object
syndrome of course is they keep seeing and shiny objects.
If you're hardwired to receive inspiration, designed to see inspiration everywhere, you're going to keep
seeing those shiny objects.
The way I think of flakiness, on the other hand, is someone who even if they're working on something, they
just dropped the ball and it's not because they saw the shiny object. They just don't stick with things.
Unfortunately, shiny object syndrome, you might say could produce the form of flakiness in which you can't
stick with things. After all it's hard to stick with one thing, and go running after the shinny object
you just saw both at the same time.
Well, so why talk about this? This is a problem I've faced as an artist on repeated occasions, and I have
heard it suggested that it is not an uncommon problem. I deal with all this inspiration coming in. It is
all wonderful ideas, and I can't pursue it all at once (not for lack of wanting to). In fact, that's one thing
that I was told about once: You can do it all. You just can't do it all all at once. There's some irony in who
told me this because they are actually one of the people who contributed to me developing shinny object
syndrome. But this is an expectation a lot of people face in some form, that you are going to do it all,
all at the same time, and excel at all of them all at once.
One place I've also seen shiny object syndrome come from is trauma. At one point, I went through this
myself, I don't want to go quite into what happened. But in that situation, people you're very strongly pressuring
me to do some things I could not do.
This ended with me looking for ideas all the time to figure out a way to make everything work in my life, and
not to have massive problems and not be in over my head trying to deal with their demands without going back
down a road that had already cost me my health once. In short, the related situation and pressure applied to
me resulted in shiny object syndrome because I spent several years doing that.
So I actually had to hear it from someone else who has a six figure art business and I'm glad I listened to
that person. Because they said something that amounted to if you are running after every little shiny object
you're just not going to be able to give focus to the few things that you can do well & the quality of what you
can do well is diminished.
It's just not going to result in what you're looking to have it results in actually will take you away from getting a good result.
Now this is the complete opposite of what I've been hearing. Hearing from someone who actually I would have thought
wasn't exactly clueless up until I was hearing this & it was kind of a shock and I felt like something physically
came off when I heard this, because like I said that this was this other experience being so contradicted. It was not
something I was prepared for.
After hearing that advice. I was finally able to have a little bit of peace about not running after every little shiny
object having to draw a picture of it and hang it on the wall before lunch or whatever
the next meal is. To me after years of bad advice that I was drawing on (pun very much intended) I was definitely needing
to hear that advice.
The part that might shock a lot of people is this I did not find this impacted the actual drawings I was drawing, at least
not massively. It was probably very minor change at most in the actual artwork. Though
I suspect at least something small did get changed as a result.
The place where I really saw this happen to me was a lot more on the back end of things dealing with the monetization.
So once the art is created, what do I do with it?
One thing I do with it is print on demand. So I use CafePress
for a lot of stuff. I've had a lot of really great experiences with them, not only as an artist, but also as a
customer. So of course, I'm all too thrilled to be able to use a company that I've had good experiences with as
a customer to put my artwork on. And that was about one idea, I've also done kids books, coloring books, I want
to be able to take my artwork and get it printed on fabric I would like to be able to at some point do something
with 3d printing. At the moment. I don't even have the resources to go near of starting with the 3d printing idea.
I hope that changes someday but with every one of these things, there's a process attached. In some cases, it's a
learning curve. It's learning something you've never done before, or had only enough of a taste of in a class to
know I want to do something with it but not any meaningful amount of training, like 3d printing.
In the case of something where I'm doing a print on demand.
If I'm setting up with someplace that's new to me, I have to check the licensing agreements I have to check a lot
of other stuff all the terms of use and then all of this is on top of the actual creation of whatever the
product is. So for example, when I did
CafePress, I had to put my design on different items
that was its own process. And I repeat that process routinely that part of that process. And that's actually
very fun But as fun as it is, if I get distracted by too many shiny little ideas, I don't have the capacity
to follow through on anything. And this is true with everybody. I don't care what field you're in. I don't
care what walk of life you're in. If you're getting distracted by shiny objects or shiny ideas more precisely.
It's just that it is distracting. Now those shiny ideas are pretty. You want to pick them up and do something
with them for a reason. So a trick a friend taught me and that I've seen a lot of people recommend this as well,
which is not something that comes naturally to me but does up to a point help me and some other artists might find
far more helpful than I do (several people I know certainly have) is doing something to get things anchored outside
your skull on either paper or digital files or whatever form you need them to take and just enough that you can
circle back to them in a more convenient moment. And so when I see ideas, like I said, for me, this has played out
primarily in the monetization of the art. How do I monetize my art what I
have tried to do with that is going ahead and writing stuff like that down.
Or there are projects where maybe I would like to go through them at some point later, because I couldn't have
chased all these shiny objects down anyway no matter what it is going ahead and just saying okay, I see the shiny
object. I'm going to take note of where it lives where it is. I'm gonna just write out those coordinates on that
metaphorical map, and I'm going to go ahead and say I will circle back to this.
It has given me a lot of peace about not pursuing them right away. And it has also helped me to come back and
pursue these ideas later. In fact, this article that you are reading right now was one of those very ideas and
I probably would have just completely dropped the ball and let it fall through the cracks if I had not taken that
advice because I couldn't have pursued it when I originally had the idea. I just did not have the bandwidth.
So for any of you wondering if that idea works, I'm someone it doesn't work that well for and you are reading
proof that it works.
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