Take Your Time

August 29, 2025

It’s one of the simplest pieces of advice, but perhaps the hardest to absorb, especially when you're an artist navigating a world that moves fast, celebrates overnight success, and rarely shows the years of unseen effort that come before a breakthrough. In the age of social media, it's easy to be swept up in the constant scroll of highlight reels: another artist lands a major exhibition, someone else sells out a collection, and another has a write-up in a major publication. You watch their triumphs unfold, and quietly, maybe even unconsciously, start measuring your journey against theirs.

But creativity doesn’t answer to urgency. It answers to truth, persistence, and patience.

Art is not a race. There is no universal clock ticking down toward some ideal version of success. What others are doing, what they've achieved, it was all done on their timeline. From the outside, it might look effortless, but make no mistake: no artist arrives fully formed. Every celebrated name you admire has been where you are. They’ve wrestled with doubt, obscurity, rejection, and the long, quiet hours of making work that may never be seen. The collectors, the galleries, the accolades, they come, but not without the dues paid in solitude, in studio time, in making and remaking until the work finally says what it needs to.

And you? You’re not behind. You’re not lost. You’re just on your path.

Taking your time doesn’t mean slowing down your ambition, it means grounding it. It means not rushing the process in hopes of catching up to a version of success that wasn’t meant for you. It means not putting the cart ahead of the horse, not expecting the rewards before you've lived the questions, taken the steps, made the work. There’s a quiet confidence that comes from trusting where you are, even when it’s not where you wish to be yet.

So take your time. Focus on what you're building, not what you're missing. Every brushstroke, every sketch, every idea explored in earnest is laying the groundwork for what’s to come. The artist you admire today was once in your shoes. And the artist someone else will admire tomorrow? That could be you.

But only if you stay the course. Only if you trust the time it takes.