First, there are the clichés: write what you know. Learn the rules before you can break them. Practice every day because practice makes perfect. (Or does it? According to  Twyla Tharp, “Perfect practice makes perfect... Art is a vast democracy of habit”). They’re tried and true because they do have merit; you don’t get to be a cliché for nothing. But they’re also boring and non-specific. If our teachers, idols, and mentors are the ones spouting these clichés, it’s hopefully because they’ve found them to work. Ideally, they combine the familiar with more curated advice. If not, well, you can’t squeeze blood from a stone. Knowing what advice to take is as much about understanding your own potential as it is about seeing other people’s limits. 

When I asked my network on Facebook about the worst advice they’d ever gotten, much of it was vague, like “make it more real.” (What does that even mean?) Other notes seemed downright insensitive. “Write less weird” or “don’t be so emotional and all over the place” with your acting are not constructive comments and give away the critic’s (negative) opinion without taking into account the intentions of the artist. Ouch. Though it’s easy to dismiss such sloppy advice, that doesn’t take the sting out of it. 

Here’s a tale of three teachers: in grad school, one teacher told me my stories had no emotional weight. I was crushed (no pun intended).  This guy, a supposed role model, thought my work was meaningless, or so I believed. Then, another teacher in the program told me to write from my own experience to add heft to the work so that I could eventually write empathetic characters who were far removed from myself. The two were essentially telling me the same thing, but the packaging was different. The latter was also more specific: he told me what to try vs what not to do. I followed this advice and began to produce more experimental, emotionally resonant stories, resulting in a novel in the form of semi auto-biographical prose-driven vignettes that completely perplexed a third professor. “You’re a poet,” she said, throwing up her hands. It wasn’t meant as a compliment, or an insult. She wrote linear, realist work and had no idea how to talk to me about what I was doing. Out of the three, only one knew how to effectively offer constructive feedback that was specific to my work. Knowing the difference was my job.  

Then there’s advice that would be brilliant for someone else but just isn’t your style, perhaps because we tend to advise others to tackle obstacles in the ways that have worked for us, vs coming up with new strategies based on what we know about the other person. You will have to trust your gut enough to resist such well-intentioned suggestions, or else try it and be ok with it when it doesn’t work out—don’t fret over false starts, instead see them as part of the process, then move on. For example, a professor I know was advised to have papers in different stages of the publishing process at all times, which is similar to notes on submissions that I’ve received as a fiction writer, but she found it set an insane expectation. Rather than run herself ragged, she gave up the exercise and found other ways of achieving. Remember the method is supposed to work for you, you don’t contort yourself to work for the method. Same is true of the popular admonishments about getting up before sunrise every day to work on your art, an impossibility for many of us. Some advice just isn’t a fit for you. This is why clichés can’t be applied universally and must be paired with more curated input from a mentor who is paying attention. 

One of the greatest skills I can teach is learning when to agree and when to pass. That means following the suggestions that get you nodding excitedly as soon as you hear them, as well as the ones that make you inwardly weep as they hit upon a worry you’ve harbored about your work, like biting down on a sore tooth. You can always give a suggestion time to settle, then see if it feels right. In the end, it’s your work, your career, and you have to be consistent in your values and goals to maintain a sense of self. The person most affected by your choices in your work is you. 

So, take all advice seriously.  Sift through it like a gold panner. 

Pay attention to what resonates, even if it’s uncomfortable. Sometimes we need to hear hard truths. Other times, someone is being petty or doesn’t understand what you’re trying to achieve. Be honest with yourself; your gut knows the difference.  

At the same time, it is ok to take suggestions that don’t work—that’s part of the process. Keep taking risks. You’re not here just to look pretty, you’re here to make something incredible and that often happens wildly, surprisingly, and half by accident. 

Forget about the people you want to impress. Find the people who get your work. Join collectives, exchange work with friends and other creatives you may meet at events, or in groups online. If you don’t go to such events or belong to such groups, start. We all need feedback to grow and that dynamic is most effective when it comes from an honest, agenda-less place of support.    

Over time, you will fine tune your instinct. Though the work itself may never get easier, processing feedback will. 

Historically, New Year’s resolutions began as a bargain with forces beyond our control, which seems an apt metaphor for dieting in our calorie-rich society. The Babylonians left behind a record of a new year tradition the involved making promises to the gods to ensure prosperity in the coming year. So will the gods favor you in 2020? If the fruits you’ve sown reap no reward, if your business fails to thrive, is it because you’ve displeased the divine and brought ruin upon yourself? Maybe what goes around comes around, but we also live in a world of inequality and natural disasters. In a sense, New Year’s resolutions are rooted in a narrative of self-blame and accountability for what actually amounts to good—or bad—fortune.

Each turning of the wheel is an opportunity for further growth, but it can feel like an obligation to reinvent yourself instead. New Year’s resolutions reflect this pressure and consequently often take the form of sweeping statements promising dramatic transformation. I’m thinking of the classic weight loss and fitness goals and their accompanying “before” and “after” photos, as if a changed body indicates a transformation of the soul. While getting in shape may make you feel better and live longer, it won’t make you a better listener to your friends, or a more organized boss. This is why the pressure and promise of New Year’s resolutions are so dangerous: we want our resolve alone to be enough to change our lives for the better, change us for the better, and eliminate some of the burden of being a modern human. But once you address your underlying motivation for change, you also have to construct a plan to implement that change, one step at a time. 

The Romans continued the tradition of New Year’s promises but moved the date to align with their own civil calendar in 46 B.C.E. Roman NYE included worship of Janus, the two-faced god of beginnings and endings, from whose name the month January derives. A beginning suggests hopefulness, while an ending gives permission to leave something behind that has come to a natural conclusion, or no longer serves you. We can arrive at the new year unencumbered, but with stars in our eyes. So let’s not think of resolutions—a hard resolve—so much as ambitions—a hope and a dream. If you “resolve” to achieve an ambition, then you’ll have to set incremental goals to make it happen. 

Start with a specific achievement like “get a solo show.” Then brainstorm the steps needed to achieve your goal. It may be difficult to estimate how much time each step will take you, which is why breaking it down into more detail can help put it into context and give you a sense of real time. Then make a timeline of the milestones to achieve over the next month, then the next three months, then six. 

For example, if my goal is to get my own solo show, I’m going to think about my current status as an artist.

Meanwhile, I’m also thinking about what connections I have.

I keep scribbling notes on a to-do list, or making circles on a mind map, then I start putting them into chronological order. I notice each step, like building up my website, has sub-steps. Already, I’m beginning to see that I have months of work ahead before I’m even going to be ready to start cold-calling galleries or getting friends to reach out on my behalf. Perhaps this will take longer than a year, as not all of this is within my control. But I know from my timeline that I have at least six months of tasks planned out and that I can start working towards them today. That is my New Year’s ambition.

The process of brainstorming each step towards achieving my goal, then placing it on a real timeline can be revelatory. And painful. A lot of us give up because our goals seem way too far out of reach or it’s taking too long to get where we’re going. We live in a culture that loves stories of overnight success, especially when it happens to someone who’s under 30. As Lizzo has openly discussed, there is no such thing as overnight success. Patience is a virtue for a reason: it’s really f’ing hard to achieve something. That’s why building a creative career is usually a lifelong pursuit. You’re playing the long game here. So give yourself credit for how far you’ve come and space to get where you’re going. Remember, “Beyoncé wasn’t built in a day.”

It’s become chic to have a nemesis, or nemeses. Well-known writer Roxane Gay’s frequent—but tantalizingly anonymous—tweets about her nemeses have fans and Twitter allies following her rivalries like it’s “Downton Abbey.” (Monica Lewinsky went as far as to dress up as one of Gay’s nemeses for Halloween). This has sparked a trend of nemesis-related commentary and confessions on social media.

This is a pretty different kind of nemesis than the one I’m familiar with, which is rooted not just in rivalry, but payback. The word “nemesis” comes from 16th century Greek, meaning literally “retribution,” from nemein—“give what is due.” Yet Gay’s nemeses don’t even know they are objects of her ire and, in fact, just might not even know who she is.

The currently popular version of a nemesis isn’t the Potter vs Voldemort kind of relationship where both sides are aware of each other and believe retribution is owed. It’s more like Ahab vs the whale, where one party is investing a lot of energy and the other is, uh, a whale: unattainable, untouchable, coasting through the depths, oblivious to the enemy floundering in a little boat on the surface.

In my practice as a creative coach, I teach clients that envy is destructive. Rather than pushing you to work harder, as The Atlantic posits, being envious of a creative who has something you want suggests that their having of it deprives you, as if success is a non-renewable resource. It’s more productive to be encouraged by others’ success—if they did it, so can you!—than to put pressure on yourself to compete against another artist. We should foster a community of support and collaboration in the arts. Goddess knows, it’s hard enough to be a creative as it is.

Secondly, it’s a misuse of your passion. The flush of rage and want you feel when you look at someone else proclaiming their success on social media diverts energy from your craft and sends it towards the screen, where it bounces back, like feng shui gone wrong, and disappears. This experience encourages you to focus only on the outcome of work you produce, rather than the value of producing it. Remember the act of creation is different from the business of selling art.

Of course, social media is designed to fuel destructive envy. So maybe avoid or limit your exposure to social media if you find yourself feeling that sick-to-your-stomach sensation of toxic envy every time you scroll through your Insta feed. Mute your rivals and focus on pictures of adorable owls in hats instead. It might be fun and productive to even create a piece inspired by or in honor of your nemesis, allowing a chance for deeper reflection about the nuance of expectation and competition that goes into the feeling of envy in the first place.

And that’s just it, envy is only a feeling, or a composite of them: desire, frustration, disappointment, anger, jealousy. It’s natural and sometimes unavoidable and no one is beyond it, including public figures we admire, which is perhaps the most positive aspect of someone as well-renowned and respected as Roxane Gay openly discussing her envy.

It’s trendy to have a rival, but it’s healthier and more productive to have a role model or a collaborator. If gazing at someone else’s trophies and great skin makes you feel like crap, turn the gaze inward. Don’t waste the drive fueling that envy on someone else who doesn’t even know you’re watching.