Don’t Get Stuck

IN A LECTURE at the California Academy of Arts (CCA) in 2011, both illustrators Jillian Tamaki1 and Sam Weber2 presented a Venn diagram to the audience. I was in the small auditorium, which was full of people. I don’t remember if they showed the diagram or merely described it. The diagram is so simple it can be conveyed either way.

If we glance at the diagram, we might be drawn to the central message: “Make money doing what we love!” However, discerning exactly what that work entails or how to monetize it can be elusive. In contrast, identifying work on the left and right tends to be easier.
The diagram offers this guidance: to find the middle, we must continually balance paid work with the unpaid work we’re passionate about. This middle ground is reached through a back-and-forth process. The risk is staying too long on one side.
In San Francisco, many people have jobs that pay well, offer great benefits, and generally provide a positive work environment. This situation is often called the “golden handcuffs”: comfortable incentives that make it hard to discover the middle ground.
As I was writing this piece, I came across an example of a mindset we might adopt. In Haruki Murakami’s latest book, Killing Commendatore, the main character makes the following decision[^3]:
“Since it was impossible to make a living painting what I wanted, once I graduated, I started taking commissions for portraits to make ends meet… They were looking for a realistic, dignifed, staid style, totally utiliarian types of paintings to be hung on the wall in a reception area or a company president’s office. In other words, my job compelled me to paint paintings that ran totally counter to my artistic aims… I made plenty for a young, single man to live on… Several years went by, and I decided that I’d focus on portrait painting for a fixed period, and then, once I’d made enough to live on for a while, I’d return to the kind of paintings I really wanted to do. Portraits were just meant to pay the rent.” - Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami, p12-13
So don’t get stuck on one side. Keep moving, and let the center appear.
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Jillian Tamaki: www.jilliantamaki.com ↩︎
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Sam Weber: www.sampaints.com ↩︎