It’s not easy to write, or draw, or cook, or form any type of creation. It takes work, tinkering, and a whole lot of time to get things just to the point where you want them. Believe me, as an avid writer and baker, a lot of the things I do take time. Not everything is going to turn out exactly like the Pinterest pictures the first time, and there’s nothing wrong with that. This is the reason I respect artists of all kinds. They have gotten themselves to a point in their skill level where they may either be happy or unhappy with the quality of their work. No matter their level of satisfaction with it, they still continue to work to better it.

Take my earlier example of baking, for instance. My mom loves to bake. She’s graduated from solely using box mixes to using box mixes and also baking from scratch. And she wouldn’t have gotten there without making mistakes. We were once out of the standard canola oil you’d use for any cake mix, and I remember getting a text asking if she could instead use olive oil. At the time I said no, because it would change the cake’s entire flavor. What I didn’t realize was that there were recipes for olive oil cakes out there, even if that wasn’t what my mom was going for. She ended up not serving that cake to her coworkers, and instead brought something else, and she remembered to have canola oil from then on, or we just wouldn’t bake.

Another example is all of the artists who post progress comparisons or redraws of their old art. Not only is it stunning to see how far they’ve come, but it’s also pretty inspiring. It’s what got me into wanting to start drawing again in the first place. It’s what sparked my interest in mashing two of my greatest passions, writing and drawing, into one and creating my desire to do webcomics. And while I’m still pretty far from ever releasing my first page, I know that eventually I will get there, and I’ll look back on now and be proud of myself.

I know when people speak about perseverance, they’re mostly using the examples of athletes. Athletes are seemingly the easiest example to use because it’s a lot more physical, and that’s what people imagine when they think of enduring or getting through something. But if you’ve never met an artist as they power through any sort of creative block, I honestly think you haven’t seen one of the coolest kinds of perseverance. An athlete can put everything on the line and come out with nothing. However, artists, bakers, painters, and creators all come out of it with something to show for it. It may not be something good. It may not be something that ever sees the light of day. But they will still have something they can share with the world, no matter how it turns out. They will know that they did not struggle for nothing.