This is my rant about self-esteem, popular opinion, and controlling your thoughts. Fasten your seat belts.

About once a week, I read a message from someone who is thinking of dropping out of her current project because she’s afraid that her art isn’t good enough. I always wonder, good enough for whom?

Unless you’re a professional artist who depends on popular opinion to put food on the table, generating artwork to please others is the creative kiss of death. If your art makes you happy, or provides you enjoyment in the making, it has served its true purpose. If it makes someone else happy, or elicits a positive response from someone, that’s just icing on the cake.

For years, I’ve been saying to my students, my coworkers, and anyone else who will listen: art is not a competitive sport. It’s something we do for enjoyment, for self-expression, to learn, to grow—not to beat ourselves up over. Nobody’s keeping score.

Many of us feel the need to compare our artwork to that of other artists, and make a subjective judgment. It’s either “my work is better than that”, or more often “my work isn’t as good as that”. This kind of thinking is dangerous, and we must all teach ourselves to avoid it. There is no comparison necessary when you’re doing creative work! Teach yourself to replace comparison with appreciation, and you’ll be a healthier artist. Instead of “my work is better than that”, I think, “I would have made these choices instead”, and then I mentally list them—maybe it’s different color, different composition, different theme. That mental list always leads to things I would not change. These are the things that I feel are good about a piece, or that I might have chosen to do that work well. Instead of the superior “my work is better”, I’ve now learned something from this artwork—I’ve analyzed choices I might not have made, and filed them away for later use.

Now let’s try the flip side. “My work isn’t as good as that” is an equally useless thought. You don’t learn anything from mentally beating yourself up! Rather, look at the piece the same way we did earlier—what choices did this artist make that you have not? What makes it appealing to you? Is it the color combinations, the composition, the theme? Instead of thinking “I could never do that”, try “I could try that combination of colors” or “I could do a piece using those same elements”. Every really good piece of artwork becomes a learning experience, not a reason to throw down your paintbrushes in dispair. After all, if we did that, no artist who visited the Sistine Chapel would ever create again.

Here’s my creative visualization exercise to help you on the road to controlling those negative thoughts. Look at this piece of artwork:

Forget about the whole my work is better or worse thing, because that just doesn’t matter. What about the piece appeals to you? The colors? The composition? The images used? The techniques or media? Pick out one or two things you enjoy, and think about how you might incorporate them into a piece of your own. What things about it might you have done differently?

Retraining your though process is the first step to forever banishing those inner demons who prod you to attach better or worse to every one of your own pieces. Once you get past that kind of destructive thinking, you’ll feel a sense of freedom that can only mean good things for both your artwork and your self-esteem. You will find yourself less inhibited about showing your own work once you learn to get past the better or worse phase. Once you’ve learned to view other artists’ work as a learning experience, you’ll become more objective about your own as well. It’s no longer better or worse—it’s just part of the process.

Embrace the Philosophy. Wear the Shirt. I say this so often, I finally put it on a baseball jersey! (And a bunch of t-shirts, too.) Proclaim your freedom from creative competition by sporting this shirt to your next altered gathering, and help spread the word that we do not compare, we simply appreciate and learn! Click here to visit my Cafe Press shop, filled with AINACS goodies.