How Committing To a Routine Can Make You a Better Artist

When you are trying to build yourself into the artist you want to be, a little ordinary can help you do the extraordinary.

As I’m sitting down to write this, I’ve just had a quick peek over at the clock in the upper right-hand corner of my screen. It has just rounded 5:43 am, and I’ve already been at work long enough to have long forgotten about the sleep I wiped from my eyes when I rolled out of bed. To some, this might seem like an early time. Others might be wondering why I slept in so late. The exact time on the clock isn’t important. What is important is that this is all part of my process. The way I have structured my life to maximize my time and get the most out of my creativity and career.

I’m sure you have your own rituals with their own effects and origins. Mine started a little over twenty years ago. At that time, I was driving limousines as a day (night) job to make ends meet. This was long before still photography was much of a consideration in my life. Back then, as is often the case now, my writing, specifically screenwriting, was the thing getting me out of bed. In fact, my job driving limousines until ungodly hours of the night was a direct result of having spent my entire bank account to produce my latest short film and needing to take whatever job I could find to get back on my financial feet. I loved driving limousines. At least between the hours of 8 am and 8 pm. I got to meet a lot of interesting people and now know the city of LA in ways that most locals will never truly comprehend. Of course, the fact that I worked six days a week and most of my days started around 3 am and didn’t end until midnight (yes, there was eventually a class-action lawsuit against the company for unfair employment practices) did have its downsides. A complete loss of sanity being one of them. But it did introduce me to one side effect that I would carry on throughout my life.

Los Angeles County, at the most recent count, has 9,721,000 residents. Much to my chagrin, it does seem that whenever I decide to go out for a drive, all 9,721,000 residents will inevitably end up on the same freeway as me, leading to endless hours sitting in traffic. So I’ll never forget that time, that one time, that I had the entire city to myself.

It was around 3:45 am. My pager woke me out of a deep sleep to go pick up a passenger from a ritzy local hotel. The assignment was a familiar one: drive them to the airport. I spent a lot of time driving people to the airport. And, believe it or not, even at 3:45 am in Los Angeles, you are not immune to traffic jams. But this night/morning was different. That’s because this day just so happened to be New Year's Day. With so many people still sleeping or hungover from the revelry of bringing in the new year, apparently, the city en masse had made the collective decision to stay in bed. So there I was, a half-asleep client in the back seat, making my way through a Los Angeles that had been transformed into a ghost town. Hardly another soul in sight. It was so, well, peaceful.

After a couple of years of zombie driving through the streets of LA, I eventually saved up enough money to leave the limo behind and took a day job at one of the movie studios. It wasn’t my dream job, just something to help me get by with better hours than driving limousines. But after so many years of sleep deprivation and a body now attuned to waking up before the sun, I found I suddenly had a competitive edge.

Most people waited until the city came alive to pursue their dreams. Then, inevitably, the chaos of life itself would get in the way and leave them ending each day wondering how their plans always seemed to get away from them. It’s not their fault. Life complicates even the best-laid plans. But I had found my own cheat code. I knew about a time of day when there were very few distractions. A time when I could have the world to myself.

So, even though my new day job didn’t require me to arrive at the office until 8 am, I left my alarm clock set to 4 am. Every day I would wake up before the sun, before my neighbors, before most of my colleagues. And I would get to work. The real work, I mean. Not that slog of a day job. But my true calling as an artist. The career I was building for the long term. So, even though I would eventually have to strap on a suit and tie and head to the office, in the hours before the commute, I could write completely uninterrupted for hours before any phone calls or emails would arrive. No television yet to watch. No overly loud car speakers blasting me out of my silence. It was just me and the blank page.

By the time I did have to go to my actual job, I had already done more writing in my morning than most other aspiring writers I knew would do in a week. This is not to say I was a better writer than those other writers or even a more committed human being. Rather, making a habit of sacrificing a little sleep to access those early quiet moments simply worked to my advantage to give me more time to spend writing than most people. Now, whether what I wrote was any good or not might be up for debate. But there was no denying that I had put in the work. I’d put in far more than my 10,000 hours. And every one of those hours, one after another, added up to make me a better artist than I was the day before.

Those days continue to add up. True, 4 am has become more like 5 am. I no longer have a day job to worry about, so I figure adding an extra hour of slumber seems reasonable. And nowadays, I split my early mornings between a multitude of tasks. Still writing, but now mixed in with a great deal of marketing for my photography and directing projects. Of course, the point of the story is not so much what I am personally working on at any given moment or even the time I choose to set my alarm clock. The point of the story is the power of routine.

Whatever goal you have set for yourself, you are the only one that has the power to make it happen. Sure, it would be nice to sit on your couch, covered in Cheeto shavings, and have a mythical angel still somehow notice your talent and pull you to success without you having to lift a finger. Sure, it’d be nice to be able to buy a new camera and suddenly be in the “big leagues” without ever having to learn how to actually use it. Maybe it’d be grand to be able to just practice your craft from time to time, whenever you happen to feel in the mood, and still have your singular talent make you into a superstar. But, the truth is that success is a result of a million and one small steps that eventually add up to something bigger. A function of resilience and a willingness to push yourself harder and further than you previously thought yourself capable.

Discipline isn’t the kind of thing that happens in a haphazard way. It’s intentional. It’s consistent. And forming your own rituals, whatever those might be, are going to help keep you on the straight and narrow in your journey to be the best version of yourself. Of course, the way forward will be different for us all. For me, I’ve found a discipline and work habit that helps me maximize my own gifts. But your gifts might be best exploited through an entirely different approach. Perhaps it is setting aside a specific time every day from hour X to hour Y to practice lighting. Maybe it’s committing to doing four test shoots per month or sending so many cold emails a day. Whatever methods work best for you, it pays off to commit to them and commit to yourself. I know that, when you’re taking small steps, it might not seem like you’re getting anywhere. But, big step or small, you are still moving ahead.