It’s funny. I kind of look at Elon Musk as a success story for doing all these different projects successfully, never mind the level of arrogance I have to think I’m talented enough to achieve anything even close, even with something less physically impactful on the world.

But you’ve highlighted something that I know but keep forgetting. Not all of my projects need to be earning money for me to live on my art. Rather than trying to succeed a little bit on all of them, it’ll probably be not effective to succeed with one first. And while I don’t know if any major compromises are absolutely necessary to make money from my work, I better be willing to accept failure if I’m not willing to make those compromises.

I think a lot of my frustration stems from social media. I actually spent a lot of time to learn the algorithms and work with them but as soon as Musk came in at twitter, all the momentum was lost and it’s been really hard to recover. I tried adapting and even tried to buy that dumb checkmark. I took out ads and all that. Everything had the opposite effect. I think I am still coming at it from what I want to make rather than what the market wants… to be honest, that approach makes me feel like it might be better to seek my well-being through other means, like maybe I need to accept not being able to quit my day-job for a long time, or maybe ever.

I appreciate your advice a lot and I’ll keep thinking about if there is any kind of artist grind that I might actually be willing to work at, but on the other hand I kinda feel like maybe I should shut up about earning money from art and just appreciate the fact that I can make a few dollars from this post. I’ve never cashed out so the hive earnings have never really felt real to me, even after 6 years.

I think a strong enough connection to community can bypass some of the issues of social media and trends, but for that I’ll have to build up the energy to go out and do more. That combined with lower expectations and keeping some of what you’ve said in mind, I think it’ll be fine.

I still have a lot of thinking to do.