This is not a story about programming. But it is a story about mastery, and surrendering that fear of not measuring up. Back around 2000, I got my dream job: I

This is not a story about programming. But it is a story about mastery, and surrendering that fear of not measuring up. Back around 2000, I got my dream job: I started working at Spümcø, the animation studio responsible for "Ren & Stimpy". At one point I was working closely with Jim Smith, whose work is amazing - I normally don't give a shit about the big muscle dudes he loves to draw, but he does it with such grace and fluidity that these big beefchunks become beautiful. I was in awe of his casual knowledge of every single muscle in the human body, and the ability to deploy that knowledge in his art. I would never measure up. Then one day he brought in some old work. Kid work, teenage work. I looked at it and a lot of it was terrible - awkward posing, horrible proportions, a whole bunch of general classes of errors that I recognized from looking back at my teenage drawings. I looked at the dates. These drawings were older than I am. And it was like a light was switched on in the back of my head: of course Jim could draw rings around me with half his brain tied behind his back; he'd started before I was even born. Since then, I have looked at artists who are better than me at one thing or another with occasional envy in my eyes. And then it instantly dissipates, because I know I could learn to do what they do better if I want to spend a few years on it - do I want that in my toolset bad enough? And that realization freed me. I was able to look coldly at my work and decide that, yes, I'm good enough to get hired, I'm better at cartooning than like 90% of the people out there. I had the confidence then to embark on a year-long art project (drawing a Tarot deck), and then to move on to a four-year project (drawing a graphic novel) that I'm almost done with. I can't say I've worked on the comic every day by any means. But more often than not, I make myself spend at least a half hour on it. There's always something I can do without having to load the entire story into my head to turn it over and think about the shape it should be. And if I've only spent a half hour at the end of a day, it's still a half hour closer to being done than if I'd just spent the day playing video games. Step outside of the fear of failure, the envy of younger, more successful people. Look at them as things your brain is doing and ask yourself why; treat it as a programming problem if that metaphor works for you. And find a way to make time for your own projects, even if it's just a half hour in the morning most days. Let go, slack off, unclench your brain.