— While coaching one of my artists recently (an incredible talent, about to step up to a whole other level in her career) it occurred to me that everything really great I’ve ever accomplished came from completely immersing myself in the process for a good chunk of time.
“Living the Photo Artistic Life” is all about making your photo artistry a constant companion, something central to how you go about your days.
The idea is for art to find its way into all the nooks and crannies of your life.
And that’s vitally important.
That’s where it all starts, and I’m convinced it’s where you find your lasting joy and contentment as an artist.
But if you’re like most artists with ambition, you eventually reach a point when you begin to plateau, when you glimpse something more, just beyond your reach …
And when that happens, the only way I’ve found for consistently pushing through and making a major advance in your life as an artist is through blocking off a big chunk of time and completely immersing yourself in the creative process — usually for no less than a weekend, and preferably for a solid week.
Immersion.
Meaning no distractions, no other obligations, just you and your art for at least 8 to 12 hours a day, solid, totally caught up in the process, and ideally with a clear result you’re working to bring about. Like:
— Creating a fantastic online portfolio of your work
— Designing your first coffee table book
— Assembling a full exhibition of prints or canvases
Could be anything. But it should be something. Something very specific, something that excites you.
I go into the idea of distraction-free immersion in my “21 Days to Creative Abundance” course, but in there I focus mostly on the idea of simply finding an hour or so each day to focus on your creative projects. That’s a powerful idea in itself when you approach it the right way. But what I’m talking about here in this post is something beyond that. I’m talking about SERIOUS immersion for LARGE blocks of time. Not for their own sake, but in pursuit of some clear and important objective or next step in your career as an artist.
Now, I suppose there’s also the possibility of simply sequestering yourself for the sake of pursuing a fresh breakthrough in your work. You go into it not knowing where the journey is about to take you. The excitement is in the mystery, in the unknown. You’re throwing yourself into your work with complete abandon, and there’s no knowing where you will end up.
I can see that.
But usually, in my own experience, these periods of complete immersion have some clear end result I’m determined to accomplish or something big I wish to build.
Which is why I think if you’re new to this kind of zero-distraction total-focus creative immersion, you should probably go into it with some clarity concerning what it is you want to get done.
The point of it all is to focus. To make something important happen.
You can almost think of it as your artistic equivalent of hitting the studio and recording an album.
There’s long been a myth that the Beatles spent 700 hours in the studio recording their masterpiece Sgt. Pepper’s. Actual exploration of the studio logs (from Mark Lewisohn’s The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions) shows that the real figure is probably closer to 333 hours … or about 25.67 hours per track.
Whichever figure you go with, that’s a lot of time in the studio, spread out over a 4-month span. Starting at 7PM each night they worked, they put in a solid 6 to 8 hours of time hammering out the songs that would make up what has come to be considered by most rock critics as the greatest album of all time.
Sgt. Pepper is an extreme example though. A rarity. MOST great rock albums take less than a week to record (indeed, that seems to be the accepted standard — if you go much beyond a week in the studio, the work begins to lose its mojo), often with the artists hammering away writing and recording at the same time, working around the clock in an effort to capture something potent and inspired.
The magic is in the immersion.
But most artists will never experience that magic, because most artists never invest more than an hour or two in their work before getting pulled away by the distractions of email, Facebook, video games, television programs they can’t possibly miss.
An hour here, an hour there. You can actually become really, really good with an hour here, hour there.
Put in an hour a day on your art (assuming you’re studying the right stuff, approaching it seriously) and you’ll get quite good over time.
Quite good.
But great?
I’m not so sure.
My experience is that when it comes to most endeavors, accomplishing something GREAT or IMPORTANT requires more than that. But not necessarily more of the same — not an hour and a half or two hours each night instead of an hour. Rather, it requires “more” in the sense of real IMMERSION. It requires what many pros call “Deep Work”: long stretches of time each day spent working without any distractions.
I’m talking deep work on the order of entire days, entire weekends, an entire week if necessary.
This isn’t something you do all the time. That wouldn’t be sustainable. Instead, this might be something you take on two, three, four times a year. But if you begin orchestrating big blocks of time like this for your work, I assure you, these high-intensity chunks of time will become the jam-packed, whirlwind bouts of creative work that will make the biggest difference in your life as an artist.
And then, when you look back over the years, these periods of complete immersion will stand out as the clear pivot points on which everything else turned.
So give it some thought.
What’s something BIG, something IMPORTANT you would like to make happen as an artist?
When (and in what way) could you set aside a solid weekend to totally lock in on that and work like you’ve never worked before?
Is it something you could accomplish at home, where you’re at right now? Maybe after setting some ground rules with the spouse and kids? Or is it something that would be worth taking a short trip somewhere to get away from the distractions of home life, allowing you to just do your own thing, spending your meals with a journal at hand, waking whenever you want to wake, going to bed whenever you want to go to bed, and working like mad in between?
Really plan it out. Orchestrate the experience.
What music would you listen to? What books would you take with you? What movie might you want to relax with at the end of the day? Would you take your favorite coffee and a French press? Would you lay in a bottle or two of wine?
However you arrange it all, the most important thing is to have a clear idea of what you hope to accomplish and a commitment to the hours you’re going to put in.
If you do this, what I think you’ll find is that what others might dilly-dally over for months you’ll accomplish in a single weekend.
When others talk and talk and talk about all the things they’re going to do someday, you’ll just commit and flat out get it done.
And if your experience is anything like mine, what you’ll get done in those periods of complete immersion will come to define the most important milestones in your life and career as an artist.
– Sebastian