I am listening to to Writing Excuses podcast, and they just said something that I really wanted to add to follow up the post I made on failure.
“There is no easy way. This is so much harder than you think it is going to be. Do it anyway because it is so much better than you dream.”
– Howard Tayler.
“Rejection is not negative-validation. You should not be requiring external validation to continue working on your craft. Keep writing. Those things you are tempted to see as negative validation will happen throughout your professional career, and if you can’t write while this is happening, you will have a problem. Learn how to keep writing.”
– Brandon Sanderson
On Quora I have been seeing some negative comments on the likelihood of becoming a web developer in mid-career. While that may be true, I am going to take these writing quotes and apply them to everything. I know I crave too much validation (I have been compared to Rarity, I’ll let you Google that one.) I want people to say my art is pretty and my story is cute and pat my head over the tiniest thing. No one but your mother will do that in the real world (though, on the Internet you can surround yourself with a circle of people who always like your work, but that’s just a bubble).
Anything worth doing is going to be hard – right at the beginning of Eloquent Javascript it points out the difficulty of the journey. As David says in 2 Samuel 24:24 you can’t offer up something that costs you nothing and expect to reap blessings from it.
Everything takes hard work.