From Stick Figures to Stardom — Why We All Start Somewhere
So I’ve been thinking about this quote lately that’s been bouncing around in my head like a ping-pong ball – “Every artist was first an amateur” by Ralph Waldo Emerson. You know how sometimes a phrase just hits you at the weirdest moment? I was literally standing in line at the coffee shop yesterday, watching the barista create these insane latte art designs, when it clicked.
I mean, think about it. That barista probably started out making coffee that looked like brown soup with foam blobs floating on top. But there she was, crafting these delicate little leaf patterns that made me feel guilty for even drinking them. It got me wondering about all the times I’ve been too scared to try something because I wasn’t immediately good at it.
Remember when you were a kid and you’d grab those chunky crayons and just go wild on paper? The smell of that waxy residue, the scratchy sound against construction paper – pure magic. Nobody told us we were “bad” at art back then. We just created because it felt good. Somewhere along the way, though, we started comparing ourselves to others and suddenly our stick figures seemed embarrassing.
Here’s something that blew my mind recently: Vincent van Gogh didn’t even start painting until he was 27 years old. Twenty-seven! That’s older than some of my friends who think they’re “too late” to learn guitar or try pottery. The guy who gave us “Starry Night” was basically a late bloomer, and look how that turned out.
I’ve got this friend who always said she couldn’t draw to save her life. Like, she’d literally apologize before sketching directions on a napkin. But last year she got fed up with her corporate job and enrolled in an art class on a whim. The first few weeks were rough – I’m talking geometric shapes that looked like they’d been drawn during an earthquake. But something shifted around week four. Her hands started remembering what her brain was telling them to do.
Now her whole social media presence is dedicated to her botanical sketches, and honestly? They’re gorgeous. Not museum-worthy yet, maybe, but there’s something raw and honest about them that makes you stop scrolling. She told me the other day that she can actually smell the pencil shavings from sharpening her drawing tools now — it’s become this weird meditation for her.
The thing is, we live in this instant-everything culture where people expect to be TikTok famous after posting one video. But mastery is messy. It’s about showing up when your work looks terrible and doing it anyway. It’s about the calluses forming on your fingertips from guitar strings, or the paint under your nails that won’t come out no matter how much you scrub.
I read somewhere that it takes about 10,000 hours to truly master something — that’s roughly five years of full-time work! But here’s what they don’t tell you: those first hundred hours are usually the most fun because everything is new and surprising. You’re not worried about being perfect yet; you’re just playing.
So maybe Emerson was onto something bigger than just art. Maybe he was talking about giving ourselves permission to suck at things initially. To embrace that awkward beginner phase where everything feels foreign and your creations look nothing like what you pictured in your head.
What’s stopping you from picking up that paintbrush or learning that language you’ve been thinking about? Start amateur. Stay curious.
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