Staying motivated — Project discovery

Another Friday, another article! Welcome back guys!

This week I'd like to continue the topic that I started on my very first post here on Project Discovery, my struggle with finishing projects. In my post, I am a Pro, I talk about my struggle taking my art to a professional level. In this weeks article I'm here to give you all an update on my process so far:

The reason why I haven't really progressed as much as I would have liked to comes down to a couple of factors. One of them is definitely the fact that I have no real urgency to have to finish anything, the pieces that I make are for myself and do not provide any source of income. I have a full-time job at a great company with an awesome team, it pays the bills and allows me to live a reasonably comfortable life.

Besides that, I am still struggling with procrastination. Or is it actually procrastination? I believe you have to intentionally keep yourself occupied with other things in order for it to be procrastination right? Hold on, let me look up the definition real quick, brb..

“Procrastination is the avoidance of doing a task which needs to be accomplished. It is the practice of doing more pleasurable things in place of less pleasurable ones, or carrying out less urgent tasks instead of more urgent ones, thus putting off impending tasks to a later time.”

Yeah see.. I don't think that applies here.. I love sculpting! It's just scary as fuck.. I sometimes even start cleaning up the house instead of sculpting, I don't think that qualifies as more pleasurable.. right....? RIGHT!?!

I do tend to get lost on "The Interwebz" a lot of the time. There's simply too much clickbaity stuff out there that I actually find amusing. Take FAIL video's for example.. yesterday evening I just got stuck watching one YouTube fail compilation video after another.. that's not extremely productive..

Anyway, getting distracted again.. Where was I.. oh yeah, the things I blame for me not finishing any personal projects.. Next up.. concentration.. I seriously have the concentration of a young puppy these days. Everything is fun, everything is interesting.. I used to be able to just sit down and play a single player game for hours and hours straight but these days I already lose focus after a couple of quests in The Witcher.. and then I go back to creating a new Magic deck, or playing Overwatch.. or Hearthstone.. or watching Mr Robot.. you get where I am going with this. It used to be so different though, before social media absolutely destroyed my ability to focus.
For example, the amount of hours I played Fallout 3 straight was just nuts.. I think it's time for a little side story about my experience playing Fallout 3!

Fallout 3 came out during my second year of college, at the time I was on a very limited budget but I did just buy a new laptop which was supposed to be top of the line. An Acer with very respectable stats (seeing as I needed to be able to run Maya, Unreal Engine, Houdini, ZBrush etc.) It should have no problems playing Fallout 3. Not long after my first tests playing Unreal Tournament 3 I noticed some glitches in the video card. It seems it overheated quite easily.. I contacted Acer customer support about this issue and after no reply for a week I got an answer that if my Blu-Ray player wasn't working I should try and download the latest drivers.... thank you.. Acer customer support... I actually believe the contacted me again right after my warranty expired that I could send in the laptop for repairs.. (costs not covered of-course) So in the meantime I had already bought a laptop stand with built in fans and everything which kept down the temperatures a little bit but not enough to keep the game from crashing every 20 minutes or so.. To counter this, I played the game in the winter with my windows wide open and me wearing a thick coat and gloves.. I simply stopped when my fingers turned into ice-cycles. Some of the best times playing a game I've ever had!

So, to get back to my original topic. I need a plan of attack, just have a set schedule on which I sculpt! My plan is to stream on Twitch again this weekend and by announcing it right now to you fine people here, it'll leave me no choice but to actually go through with it and actually continue sculpting! Brilliant, right?! There's this project I've been wanting to continue for a while now and after having received awesome reference photo's from a friend I really owe it to her to continue!

So! Hopefully I'll see you bright and early on Saturday morning 10:00 AM Amsterdam time (GMT+1) to make sure I do my work!

And if not, have a great weekend guys!

- Robin