Pull the thread.
Open to collaborations, commissions and conversations.
I paint. I spent 15 years as an art director in advertising. I build interactive art. I vibe-code my own tools. I turn images into sound. For a long time, that list made me feel like a failure. Everyone around me seemed to have one thing, and I had five half-open doors. Here's what I wish someone had told me earlier.
You wake up sure of who you want to be. By noon, something else has caught your eye. By midnight, you're lying in bed with five future versions of yourself and no idea which one to feed. It doesn't feel like you lack potential. It feels like you have too much of it, and nowhere to put it. Most people call this a discipline problem. I don't think it is. It's a curiosity-management problem.
Here's the trap, and I fell into it more than once. Two weeks of one thing. A month of another. Then on to the next shiny door. You end up great at dinner and useless at the desk. Wide, but with nothing underneath you. Breadth without depth is just a long list of first chapters.
Every skill I trust today was built in the part nobody posts about. Advertising taught me composition under brutal deadlines. Painting taught me patience with a surface that refuses you. None of that came from the exciting first week. It came from the dull middle, the stretch where most beginnings quietly die. If you leave before the middle, you never really arrived.
We're told to become an “I”: one deep pillar, one expertise, forever. The world needs those people. There's another shape, though: the M. Two or more deep pillars, joined at the top. The magic isn't inside either pillar. It's in the space between them.
Fifteen years of reading audiences in advertising changed how I compose a painting. Painting changed how I build a website. My site is a single red thread moving through black, closer to a brushstroke than to a layout. I never planned that. It happened because both pillars were deep enough to have something to give.
Then vibe coding entered my studio, and paintings stopped sitting still. They loop. They listen. They crack and answer back. My newest piece, Futility, is a figure pushing a cube at a triangular hole in a wall. The wall cracks and falls. A new one appears behind it, the same as the last. Forever. A painter alone couldn't have made it, and neither could a coder alone. It exists only in the gap between the two.
“What should I do with my life?” freezes everyone. Ask a smaller question: “What will I get genuinely good at in the next six months?” A season is small enough to commit to. You go deep enough to stop googling the basics. Then you decide, on purpose, where the next season goes.
There are two ways out of anything. Quitting because it got hard. Leaving because you learned what you came for. From the outside they look identical. They are opposites. The test is simple: did you build something before you left?
Ideas that don't belong to this season will keep arriving. I used to hold them all in my head, and it left no room to work. Now I write them down and let them wait. Some come back years later, at exactly the moment a new piece needs them. Not every interest has to become an identity. Some exist only to feed the others.
Discipline decides what gets my attention today. Curiosity decides what might deserve it tomorrow. You don't have to choose between them.
Having many interests doesn't mean you're lost. It means you have many doors. You don't open them all today. You open one, walk all the way through, and trust that the rooms connect. Which door are you walking through this season?
YEKTA.
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overthink(paint)ing
Open to collaborations, commissions and conversations.