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Have you ever noticed those ruthlessly competitive parents who live their own dreams through their children? Don’t you hate it when they approach 7-year-olds’ soccer practice like it’s the World Cup? It’s the same with art: Enjoying your art is the only way to truly become creatively good at it.

You might recall an old post of mine on whether writing skills can be taught. In it, I explained how hard work isn’t enough (and neither is talent, in case you’re wondering). What I didn’t say in that post (not explicitly, at least) was that enjoying your art is a crucial aspect of improving.

All those tiger moms who send their 3-year-olds to excruciating piano lessons or ballet – without even asking them if they like it – are a surefire way of creating technical gods and goddesses who have no goddamn clue what true art is.

Let’s see why enjoying your art is crucial – and how you can enjoy yours!

Yet Another Lesson from the Drumeo Sessions

This is the third post inspired by those Drumeo sessions after the one on confidence and creativity and that on selfish artists. This time, I noticed something fascinating about Dirk Verbeuren, the drummer of Megadeth, while he was playing along to some Megadeth tracks.

He loved every moment of it.

Click to display the embedded YouTube video

It’s obvious from his expressions and overall presence that he really, really likes playing. Indeed, his energy and approach to the entire session is like he’s playing to 100,000 people, rather than in an empty studio – minus a couple of camera operators and the host.

To me, this is fascinating and revealing. Indeed, if we tried to guess what the average person might think, it could go something like this: “Wow, this guy enjoys playing although he’s been doing it for years and is at the top of his game”. But ah! That’s where the trick lies. Such statements miss reality although it’s staring at them:

It’s because he enjoys playing that he’s been doing this for years and is at the top of his game.

Indeed, it’s even more revealing to hear Verbeuren himself talking about enjoying art – this is the same video as above, but a different timestamp:

Click to display the embedded YouTube video

In a nutshell, Verbeuren talks about how in the past he didn’t enjoy playing live, feeling self-conscious. Not only did this affect his performance, it of course also made the whole experience not worth it. So, he realized he needed a mental mind shift. And eventually, he got himself into a different place, mentally speaking. As he says:

Now I go on stage and I have a good time every night regardless […] Some nights it’s really good, sometimes I’m like I could’ve done a lot of stuff better, but I don’t beat myself up over it for three hours afterwards […] I enjoy myself a lot more and I can really focus on just the interaction with the crowd and with the band and just have a good time.

Enjoying Art: Technicality vs Creativity

Let’s here remember an important lesson: Technical skills and creative/artistic skills are two different things. As I said in the introduction, a person sent to e.g. piano lessons since they were a toddler, forced to play endless hours, hours away from experiencing, will very probably become technically excellent. They might become a professional soloist in an orchestra, even.

If they don’t truly enjoy their art, they will never become artistically meaningful.

To translate it into writing terms: Picture the stiff-as-a-corpse literature professor who spent their entire life in the academia, having become technically proficient, knowing the ins and outs of language and literature. Unless they love writing (and most of them don’t; they’ve become too enamored with the system), their fiction would be clinical, soulless, empty. Artistically void.

So how does enjoying your art actually helps with the creative part?

How Enjoying Art Helps You Improve

From a purely practical perspective, when you like something, you do it more often. To continue the tiger-mom metaphor, your own enjoyment acts like a very kind and supportive “tiger mom” that tells you it might be fun to write, play guitar, or draw for a while.

Importantly, if you enjoy your art you also tend to see it as an escape; a refuge. Not only does that reinforce the feeling that pursuing your art is a good thing, a rewarding act, you also tend to associate experiences with artistic expression.

For example, imagine you’ve had a bad day at work or whatever. You come home, plug the guitar to the amp, and vent your frustration. Not only does it help you unwind and alleviate the negativity, it actually does so by channeling it in artistic directions.

Enjoying your art teaches you the connection between imagination and creativity.

How to Learn the Lessons Enjoyment Has to Offer

The word “amateur” has mostly negative connotations today, which is a great shame. An amateur is literally someone who loves. An amateur does something purely out of enjoyment, rather than for monetary gain.

To me – though to you the answer will perhaps depend on whether you’re a writer or an artist – it’s far better to do something because you like it, rather because you want to make money. Money is temporary; art is forever.

Nonetheless, this is an ideal(istic) scenario. In more pragmatic terms, in order to enjoy your art and improve, the key is to focus on the enjoyment part and forget about chasing things. The process is what counts.

Unlike what all the writing gurus try to sell you, it doesn’t matter if you write every day or not. It also doesn’t matter how much you write. You write when you need to, and that’s that. You write when you enjoy it. If you have something to say, write about it.

In our era of “gimme, now, mine, I want it”, things that matter take time. I’d even go as far as saying that time disappears when it comes to enjoying your art and improving. I mean, yes, looking at my own writing progression, I can certainly see improvement. But there’s no end point.

The world-renown cellist Pablo Casals practiced regularly even in advanced age, and when he was asked why, he famously replied: “Because I think I’m making progress”.

So keep enjoying your art, and stop fretting about improvement or “goals”. They come as a natural consequence of true enjoyment. No, not everyone can become excellent. But everyone can become better.