My One Thing (Taking it 1 Day at a Time)

As an artist (yes, that’s how I’ll be calling myself from now on. I don’t like it but I’m trying to), I’ve gone through many phases and endeavors throughout my life. Combine my creativity with my incessant need to learn new things, I’ve done everything from purses out of magazine paper, macramé, crochet, and the list goes on and on…

With so many interests and passions, I wanted to figure out the BEST way to go about them. The “best” being the most efficient and that’s where I kind of messed up. After consuming lots of productivity advice that was given for setting projects and achieving them, I took one particular advice to the extreme. “Focus on ONE thing.”

(originally published on Substack)

Before we get into it, I’m not saying these productivity tips don’t work or anything like that. They do work for a lot of people and, after trying them for myself, they really REALLY don’t work for me at this moment in time. Some of them do, but not without adjustments (I know, nuance! who would’ve thought?). I understand now that, as a human being, it is okay to customize things to fit my life, needs, and wants.

With a new mindset of going about things, I wasn’t sure where to start, but after a bit of thought, I knew I had to start with setting priorities and goals that mainly focused on my day to day and how I wanted to live my life rather than what I wanted to accomplish. My routines, habits, and commitment to work on not only getting to the best version of me, but being the best version of me right now.

After many ups and downs, I’ve tried to “get my life together” more times than I can count. The thing is, I wanted to get back into the groove of things when, in reality, there was never a groove to get back into. I needed to build everything from scratch and, to no one’s surprise, this was a lot to process. Once this realization hit, I found the way to go about things very overwhelming to figure out.

To deal with this overwhelm, a few years ago, I made up my own personal lifestyle challenge that I titled the “12x5x100 challenge” that consisted on doing 12 activities or habits, for at least 5 minutes, every single day for 100 days straight. I consider that challenge the first step into getting out of the slump I was in. It was customized for me and it did what I needed it to do which was to get me out of my bed and spend time, however little, on things that matter to me.

Once I had that done, it was time to work on my mindset around some things. First, I had beef with the idea of universities, standardized curriculums, and their purpose. In this video, I talked about how changing my mindset around the efficiency of universities, helped me enjoy being a student not because it would prepare me for my career, but because of the interpersonal and environmental experiences I was getting out of it.

Next, I had to adjust my mindset around some details… You know, like my mindset around life, productivity, and happiness. (Nothing that required a lot of effort…) And that’s when I decided to tackle my concept of fresh starts.

As a person who loves the concept of a fresh start, I try to find it in the most random moments. Sometimes it’s challenging but, for some reason, the bigger the time frame to start afresh, the more convinced I am of the fresh start. For instance, a new year is the ultimate fresh start for me; but a new quarter, month, week, day, and even sudden moment can become a fresh start if you put your mind to it. Though it may be hard to grasp it when you’re in the moment; a bad instance or event doesn’t automatically equate to a bad day, week, month, year, nor life.

In an effort to fully embrace this mentality, I’ve decided to be as present as I can be and not go berserk on the planning phase of things. For someone like me, that’s kind of challenging because I’m a planner girlie by nature but when I say “embrace the present”, I’m not saying I’m going to completely forgo planning, I just won’t get TOO ahead of myself and meticulously plan every little detail of my life. Although it’s taken years, I’ve finally understood that that level of planning is not healthy nor efficient for me which is why my intention will be to grow with the flow.

I’ll be working around and with my planner mindset. If I want to start working on a novel, I will outline and plan out the story but I don’t need to plan out the novel I want to work on plus the rest of my creative writing projects and career before getting to the first one. Up until now, that has paralyzed me and gotten me in a place full of overwhelm in which I don’t even get to the first brainstorm of ideas and I end up with all of these ideas floating around and accumulating through time and, as a creative, that’s just not the way to go about it because, aside from story ideas, I’m thinking of video concepts, products, stationery, animals, the earth, life, and so on…

For the longest time, I wanted to make sure I had an optimized system for my creative brain. It not only had to work for all of my creative projects, but it had to be efficient. That’s when I took the “focus on one thing” advice to the extreme. Instead of fully embracing the thing I wanted to work on and felt passionate about, I felt it restricted my creativity and began to resent it to the point where it simply annoyed me because I either wanted to work on other creative projects or try a different system while working on the thing I was focusing on. It took me a while to remember that when I felt in my prime creatively, I worked on all sorts of things that I did plan, yet with enough flexibility to take it day by day.

my one thing…

The project that I worked on that gave me the flexibility, creative challenges and satisfaction, was the re-brand I worked on for the beginning of 2023. The deadline was the New Year and I worked 3-4 months on this project that had all sorts of elements. From motion graphics and banners to page layouts and content ideas. Though I referred to it as one project, the tasks ranged from sketching and illustrating to writing and configuring my website. That made me love every step of the way so from now on 🎵these eyes will not be blinded by the light🎶 (sorry I had to), if I feel like writing a blog post or working on a YouTube video or even work on short-form content, I will do so without feeling guilty for not focusing on one because I realized that the thing I’m actually focusing on… My one thing… is expressing myself creatively through what is Be Yourself Studios.

That’s the reason why I started this in the first place. I loved and still love the idea of working and learning all of the different concepts and steps of content creation. Whether it be written, audiovisual, vertical, horizontal, static, digital or analog, the possibilities are endless and that makes me so happy and excited to work and figure out.

With all of that said, welcome to my journey of love for the arts, the world, and life. Going forward I will work consistently on Be Yourself Studios. This week you see this newsletter/blog post, next week may be a video, a short, a carousel… Who knows? I just know that it’s going to be a lot of fun.

Be Yourself, Be Happy, Be Human.
Sending you lots of love, Patrick.