I don't think creativity is a skill you switch on in the studio.

I think it's a way of looking at the world.

Wanting something to be the best it can possibly be, doing whatever it takes to get it there, and knowing that nobody, including me, really has the answers.

That way of looking makes you a better artist. It also makes you a better partner, a better friend, a better colleague. It's all the same muscle.

Here's what I've learned about it.

1. We're all creators

Everyone's way of seeing is as valuable as mine.

Not because everyone makes art, but because everyone notices things no one else does.

The artist's only difference is the decision to take that seeing seriously, and to share it.

Creativity isn't a talent you have or don't. It's attention you choose to pay.

2. The thing you do for love

Most of us assume our passion will stay a hobby, and something else will be the real job that pays for it.

For years, advertising was my real job. The personal work lived around it.

But the things we do purely out of love have a way of growing roots when we keep doing them long enough.

You don't always have to chase the shift. Sometimes you just have to keep showing up until it happens.

3. You can't control what connects

This one took me years to accept.

Sometimes you make two pieces you believe are your best. One reaches people. The other disappears.

And the reason might have nothing to do with the work. It came out the same day as something louder. The timing was off. The feed was busy with a bigger story.

There's so much about why work connects that we don't understand.

All you can do is make something good, put it out, and let it go. That's all there is.

4. Talent is only a piece

I've seen a lot of talented people never get anywhere.

Not because they lacked talent, but because they lacked the stubbornness to keep showing up.

Talent gives you a head start. The work ethic decides whether you finish the race.

For some people, the work ethic outruns the talent completely.

5. In a real collaboration, the best idea wins

Fifteen years of agency brainstorms taught me what collaboration isn't.

It isn't everyone in a room trying to get their own idea in.

Real collaboration is when everyone works toward whatever is best for the whole thing. Whether the idea is yours or someone else's doesn't matter.

If you're truly invested, you want the best idea to win. Not your idea.

The best rooms I worked in felt like that. The worst ones felt like a competition nobody won.

6. The personal is what makes it great

What makes work great is the personal. With all its imperfections. With all its strangeness.

How you see the world differently from everyone else is the whole point of sharing your work.

Derivative voices find what other people seem to want and repeat it, because they've seen it succeed.

Sometimes that works for a while. It never lasts. It never changes anything.

The artists who change things are often the ones you don't understand at first, and slowly come to love.

7. Don't make what you think they'll like

“I don't really like this, but I think people will.”

That's a losing way to play the game.

We're not smart enough to predict what someone else will like. Nobody is.

Make what's personal to you. Push it as far as it can go. Push the edges.

The people who are meant to resonate with it will find it.

8. Ideas whose time has come

Have you ever had an idea, didn't act on it, and six months later saw someone else do it?

They didn't steal it. It was simply time for that idea. It was in the air, and someone caught it.

I think ideas move like waves. Anyone can catch one if they're paying attention, they see it coming, and they paddle every time they get the chance.

Sometimes you catch the ride, and it's remarkable. It doesn't come from planning. It comes from the doing.

If you don't make it, maybe someone else will. So make it.

9. The best artists have the best antenna

We all live in the same world. We all see the same things.

The best artists simply have a better antenna for what's coming through.

Part of that comes from not fully believing what the structure around you assumes to be true. Questioning the obvious. Being surprised by things everyone else walks past.

That surprise is where the work starts. It's why something unexpected makes you laugh, and why a strange image stops you in a feed.

An artist isn't someone who invents from nothing. It's someone who notices first.

Stay open

We're always collaborating with the world around us. Taking things in, letting them change us.

A phrase overheard in a café that solves a title. A texture on a wall that becomes a background. A recommendation you'd normally ignore, that turns out to be exactly what the piece needed.

When you're open and looking, these clues show up all the time.

And often, right when you need them.

What clue showed up for you this week, right when you needed it?

YEKTA.

Copy this format. Steal this hook. Post at this hour.

If you're building a name online, you're drowning in advice like that.

I spent around 15 years as an art director, building brands for other people. Now I'm building one around my own work, and I'm learning that almost none of those tricks matter without a foundation underneath.

Here's the foundation, the way I see it as an artist.

1. Pick the destination before you drive

If you get in a car with no destination, you can't choose a route. You can't even tell whether you're getting closer or further away.

A personal brand is the same.

It costs time, energy, privacy, and a lot of nerve. Without a clear reason, you'll quit the first time it gets hard.

So before the next post, ask: what am I actually trying to get from this?

Recognition? A gallery show? A community around the work? The answer changes everything that follows.

2. Four questions, asked backwards

Start from the end and walk back to today.

One: What outcome do I want?

Two: What would I need to be known for to get there?

Three: What would I need to actually do to be known for that? Because you're known for what you do, not what you say.

Four: What do I need to learn before I can do it?

Now you have a map, and a way to measure every post: does this move me toward the outcome, or away from it?

3. Choose your pond before the ocean

Most people jump straight into the ocean. “Art.” “Design.” “Creativity.”

And there they compete with people who've been doing it for decades.

Start in a pond where your actual experience makes you stand out. For me, that's conceptual digital painting and interactive pieces built around it. Not “art” in general.

As your experience grows, the brand can grow with it: pond, then river, then lake.

But move up because your experience allows it, not because you're bored. Otherwise you're just repeating what the bigger fish already said.

4. You can't fake the receipts

Here's the uncomfortable truth.

Why should anyone listen to you? Because of what you've actually done. Your work, your wins, your failures.

There's no shortcut for that. Skepticism online is at an all time high. The first thing people ask is: is this person real?

So collect your receipts. Finished pieces. Work that took months. Lessons that cost you something.

Each one is a layer of trust.

5. Expert or student? Be honest.

There are two honest positions.

The expert has done the thing and shares how. The student is in the middle of doing it, and shares the experiments and the results as they happen.

Both work. Pretending to be an expert when you're a student is just lying, and people feel it.

I'm both. With 15 years in art direction, I can speak about composition, concept and visual language as an expert.

With interactive art and vibe coding, I'm openly a student, learning in public, piece by piece. That honesty is part of the work.

6. A brand is just a pairing, repeated

Forget logos and color palettes for a second.

A brand is when people automatically connect you with something.

A good brand is an intentional pairing, repeated consistently. Not once. Not on special occasions. Every time.

A red thread on black. Conceptual weight. Hand painted work. The same few ideas, showing up again and again, until people think of them before they see my name.

Decide what you want to be paired with. Then wear it every single day.

7. Know what you won't be paired with

What you avoid builds your brand as much as what you choose.

If you want to be trusted, don't keep showing up next to people and trends that aren't.

Every association becomes a lens your audience sees you through.

Choose carefully, or your brand turns into a cage instead of a home.

8. Contrarian, not controversial

The strongest lever for standing out isn't a hook or a thumbnail.

It's seeing your field differently from most people in it.

Here's a simple exercise. On the left, write what people in your field keep saying or doing that you genuinely disagree with. On the right, write the opposite: what you believe instead.

Mine: in a feed full of generated images, every painting of mine is painted by hand. And while most people use AI to skip their growth, I use it to speed mine up.

Contrarian means it's a belief you can't help sharing. Controversial means you're saying it to get a reaction. Only the first one builds anything.

9. Optimize for trust, not virality

Going viral isn't bad. Chasing it is.

A random clip can explode and bring you thousands of people who don't care about your actual work.

Attention isn't belief. Someone can be famous and still not be trusted to deliver what you need.

Virality is a spike. Trust is a staircase. Only one of them keeps you climbing.

10. Trust is a promise you keep, again and again

Here's the simplest definition I know.

Trust is how much someone believes you'll meet their expectations, based on what you've done before.

So you build it the obvious way: set an expectation, then meet it. Over and over.

For an artist, that means: say what kind of work you make, then keep making it. Show up when you said you would. Deliver the piece the way you described it.

Do that long enough, and people would have to work hard not to trust you.

Expect nothing for three years

This sounds crazy, but it's the most useful expectation I know.

Go in expecting no real result for the first 36 months.

Some people break through in months. Most don't. If you expect a quick win and don't get it, you quit. If you expect a long road and something happens early, it's a gift.

This isn't lowering ambition. It's protecting it.

The only way to win this game is to still be playing. The people who last are the ones who can keep going before anything starts paying back.

A name is built like a painting. Layer by layer. Most of the layers nobody sees.

What do you want people to think of when they hear your name?

YEKTA.

You are here somewhere.

I can't see you. You're too far away. But you're here.

On a strange, wet rock, floating in its assigned spot in an endless dark.

Nobody knows exactly why. You don't. I don't.

I keep coming back to this thought whenever my work starts to feel like the most important thing in the universe. It usually helps.

1. You are tiny

This rock is small. And you are small on it.

Zoom out a little. Smaller.

Zoom out more. Smaller still.

So small your own brain can't really hold the scale of it.

A tiny you, on a tiny rock, surrounded by a space that could be everything and nothing at once.

2. And your time is short

The rock will give you what you need to live on its surface for a while.

Depending on your mood, that while feels long or like no time at all.

Compared to almost everything else, it's barely a blink.

One frame in a movie that never ends. A frame you could cut out, and the movie wouldn't change.

3. Even the remembered are forgotten

If you're lucky, some people will miss you when you're gone. They'll grieve, and then, because life demands it, they'll slowly move on.

If you're unusually lucky, you'll make something that reaches further. A painting. An idea. A body of work.

More people will remember you, for a little longer.

Most of them never knew you. They'll remember a version of you built from their own ideas.

And then they'll be gone too.

4. The work loses its nametag

This is the part that stings for an artist.

I make work hoping it will be seen. I want my name to travel further than my studio.

But everything we make, good or bad, big or small, eventually loses its nametag.

The painting stays for a while. The name drifts off. The meaning becomes someone else's.

Strangely, that doesn't make me want to stop making. It makes me want to stop making for the wrong reasons.

5. The moment that feels like everything

Think about what you're nervous about right now.

A pitch. A drop. A post. A conversation you've been avoiding. A piece you're afraid to show.

It feels like your whole life hinges on it. Like the fate of reality is resting on your shoulders.

It isn't.

You might get it wrong. You might fail. And everything will still be okay.

6. The absurd, beautiful playground

Because against every possible odd, you're here.

On a rock that makes life. Life that makes more life. Life that thinks, feels, wonders, and paints.

In the middle of all that nothing, you got a playground. A consciousness. A capacity for awe.

The only real mistake is not noticing.

To never relax enough to enjoy the hilarious, overwhelming absurdity of being a someone on a rock, in a galaxy, in a universe, in a who knows what.

It means nothing beyond itself. And that's exactly where the freedom is.

Worst case

So be kind. Be decent. Have fun. Love, laugh, cry. Try, fail, and try again.

Make the strange thing. Post the risky piece. Show up to the blank canvas.

Do it with honesty, effort, and care.

And the worst case?

You did your best, you were yourself, it didn't work out, and you moved on. Like everything else.

That's not a tragedy. That's the whole deal. And it's a pretty good one.

What would you make today if you remembered how small the stakes really are?

YEKTA.

There are about forty seconds every morning that decide the whole day.

The alarm goes off. Before you've had a single conscious thought, some part of you has already done the math. The cold floor. The long day. The canvas you swore you'd finally start.

Your hand reaches out. The alarm goes quiet. You lost a fight you weren't even awake for.

Then the guilt arrives. A new plan, a cleaner list, three good days. Then the same sentence again: What is wrong with me?

Probably nothing. Here's what I've learned about discipline, from years of showing up to a blank canvas.

1. The fight you weren't awake for

Most people will tell you the answer is willpower. Want it more. Stop making excuses. Push through.

I tried that for years.

It worked for three days at a time, and then it didn't.

If force were the answer, the people who tried the hardest would be the most disciplined. They usually aren't. They're the most exhausted.

2. Disciplined people aren't fighting

Here's what changed how I think about it.

The most disciplined people aren't better at forcing themselves. They barely force themselves at all.

Research on self control keeps pointing to the same thing: people with the most of it report fewer cravings, less inner conflict, less resistance.

They aren't winning the fight.

They've arranged their lives so the fight rarely starts.

3. Effort is a feeling, and feelings can be trained

Effort isn't only a decision. It's a sensation.

The weight in your chest before a hard session. The pull toward the exit.

And like a taste or a smell, a sensation can be conditioned.

When effort is repeatedly followed by something good, the feeling of effort itself starts to mean something good is coming.

Liking hard work isn't a personality you're born with. It's an association you learn. Some people learned it by accident. Most of us learned the opposite.

4. You don't have a discipline problem. You have a prediction problem.

The brain's reward signal doesn't wait for the reward. It moves backwards, to whatever reliably predicts it.

That's why reaching for your phone feels like relief before you've even unlocked it. The phone predicts something good.

Now ask the uncomfortable question: what does opening your sketchbook predict? What does the first minute at the desk predict?

For most of us: strain, self criticism, and the discovery of how far behind we are.

So the brain flinches. Not because you're lazy, but because it learned well.

5. Trained to clap at the finish line

Think about what actually got rewarded growing up.

The grade. The trophy. The finished project. Never the three weeks of ugly, boring work behind it.

In advertising it was the same. Everyone applauds the final campaign. Nobody celebrates the forty rejected drafts it took to get there.

So the nervous system learns a reasonable lesson: effort is the toll you pay at the gate. The good part is always somewhere else.

6. Conditioning yourself backwards

Here's the cruel part.

When you finally force yourself through a session, how does it end?

Rarely with satisfaction. It ends with: That was bad. I barely did anything. Tomorrow I need to do twice as much.

The last thing your brain files next to the feeling of effort is punishment.

Every forced, self critical session is a rep that teaches you to hate the work. The harder you push like that, the deeper the aversion. More force is just more reps of the wrong thing.

Fix 1. Pay the effort, not the outcome

Results are slow and mostly out of your control. They make terrible teachers.

So I reward the act instead. The moment a session ends, before I judge anything, I mark it. I showed up.

Not “the painting is good”. Just “I was there”.

My ego hates this. It feels like rewarding mediocrity. But I'm not grading the work here. I'm teaching my nervous system that showing up pays.

Fix 2. Put the reward at the door

If the brain's reward moves to whatever comes first, put something good at the entrance, not the exit.

An album you only play while painting. A coffee you only drink at the desk. A chair you only sit in to work.

The rule: it has to be exclusive. If you get it anyway, it predicts nothing.

Honestly, this effect fades. Treat it as what gets you through the door in the first month, not what carries you for years.

Fix 3. Make the start absurdly small

The brain doesn't resist work. It resists the imagined size of the work.

“Finish the painting” triggers the flinch.
“Open the file and lay down one color” doesn't.

Shrink the entry until saying no feels ridiculous. And if you stop there, it still counts.

Habits form through repetition in a consistent context. And missing one day doesn't reset anything.

The people who fail aren't the ones who slip. They're the ones who quit.

Fix 4. Design the room, not your resolve

Disciplined people don't resist more temptation. They meet less of it.

Every decision you make about your space while you're calm is a fight your tired self at midnight doesn't have to win.

Phone in another room, not face down on the desk. The file already open. The brush already chosen.

Removing temptation isn't weakness. It's exactly what the strongest people already do.

Fix 5. Never end on failure

This is the smallest one, and maybe the most powerful.

The last thirty seconds of a session are what your brain remembers.

So don't close the file mid spiral, staring at the part that isn't working. Finish one small thing you can actually finish: one clean edge, one resolved shadow. Then stop, on purpose, while it still feels good.

Tomorrow your brain checks its records before you sit down. You get to write those records.

The work doesn't get easier. The argument gets quieter.

I'll be honest, because most people in this space aren't.

Hard things stay hard. A painting still resists you. Heavy stays heavy.

What disappears is the negotiation. The forty seconds at the alarm. The courtroom that convenes every time you sit down. The daily vote on whether you're the kind of person who does this.

On the other side, effort stops feeling like punishment. It doesn't become pleasure exactly.

It just feels like yours.

You were never broken. You were trained by a system that only applauded outcomes. And training can be redone.

Which of the five is your missing piece?

YEKTA.

I have this feeling that something is coming.

Not in a prophetic way. I'm not reading tea leaves or building a bunker.

It's quieter than that. A low hum under everything. A sense that we're heading toward something, and nobody can tell you what it looks like.

If you feel it too, you're not alone. I think most of us do. Here's what I've been thinking about it, from my studio.

1. The future stopped loading

There was a time when the future was easy to imagine.

It wasn't necessarily going to be great. But you could picture something.

Now I try to imagine four years from now, which is nothing, and my brain just gives me the spinning wheel.

The future hasn't disappeared. It has just stopped loading.

2. Too many endings to prepare for

It's not that we don't know what to worry about. We have too many options.

AI. The economy. The climate. Whatever was trending this morning.

One headline says AI will erase millions of jobs. The next says it will bring an age of abundance.

Some days I'd almost prefer one clear catastrophe. At least you'd know what to prepare for.

Uncertainty isn't one fear. It's all of them at once, with none of them confirmed.

3. Possibly bad news is worse than bad news

Give me bad news, and eventually I'll figure out what to do with it.

Give me possibly bad news, and I can dwell on it for months.

Uncertainty leaves the door ajar. And your mind keeps wandering back in, adding new furniture every time.

Modern life is very good at handing you more furniture.

4. The seduction of certainty

Uncertainty doesn't always make us wiser. Sometimes it just makes us desperate for anything solid.

Which explains the appeal of people who claim to know exactly what's coming. Who caused it. What happens next.

They have the charts. They have the proof. They usually have a three hour podcast.

“Nobody really knows” is one of the hardest sentences to live with.

But a straight line drawn through fog is still a guess.

5. Living on the threshold

There's a word for this feeling: liminal.

It's the in between. You've left one state, but you haven't entered the next one yet.

I don't think many of us still believe in the old version of the future. Work hard, things improve, retire, rest.

But nobody has drawn the new map yet either.

The old map no longer works, and the new one hasn't been printed. That's where we're standing.

6. Don't burn the house. But I have notes.

Here's the contradiction I can't shake.

I don't want things to collapse. I like electricity. I like hot water.

And still, when I look at how modern life is organized, part of me thinks: this can't be the final draft.

It's like saying, please don't burn the house down. But if we're rebuilding anyway, I've sketched a few ideas.

We're not only afraid of the future. Some of us are waiting for it to settle an argument the present can't.

7. The arrival that never arrives

We do a smaller version of this in our own lives.

Once I finish this series. Once the work sells. Once things calm down. Then I'll finally enjoy it.

Every time I got close to a destination, another one was standing right behind it.

My piece Futility lives right here: a wall cracks and falls, and an identical wall appears behind it. Forever. The effort never ends, and the destination never comes.

There's a name for this too: the arrival fallacy. The belief that happiness is waiting at the next destination.

8. On hold with your own life

It's like being on hold with your own life.

Every few years a recorded voice reminds you your call is very important.

The music loops. You keep waiting. Life keeps refusing to clear its schedule for you.

And now we're doing the same thing on a bigger scale. Waiting for AI, the climate, the economy to finally make sense before we start living properly.

How long do you stay on hold before you realize nobody is coming back to the line?

9. A slot machine for history

Part of this feeling might come from the device in our pocket.

Everything, everywhere, all the time, delivered straight into our nervous system. In bed. On the train. In the bathroom.

You check: something happened. You check again: something else happened.

It starts to feel like history itself is accelerating toward a cliff.

Maybe it is. Or maybe it's what humans have always felt, just at a volume no human was built for.

Big changes are real. But the phone turns the volume all the way up.

10. Build the small version now

There's an idea I keep returning to.

Instead of waiting for the whole world to change, build a small version of the world you want to live in, right now.

For me, that's my studio.

I can't fix the future. But I can make a room where things are made slowly and with care. Where a painting can move, listen and loop. Where the work means something to the person standing in front of it.

The future probably won't arrive in one big reset. It arrives in pieces. And some of those pieces we get to make ourselves.

Meanwhile, I'm still here

Maybe something huge is coming. Maybe we're living through the start of a real transition.

If so, we'll find out soon enough. The phone will make sure of that.

But it's easy to spend years believing the important part of your life is somewhere up ahead.

I don't want to do the same thing with history.

While we keep checking, life keeps happening.

So I'm going back to the studio.

What are you building now, instead of waiting?

YEKTA.

Everything is slop now.

Content slop. Music slop. Art slop. Movie slop. Even food gets called slop.

The word showed up a while ago and quickly ate the whole internet. Now it's the default reply to anything someone doesn't like.

I've spent 15 years as an art director, and now I make art with my hands and with vibe coding. So I care about this word more than most. When a word means everything, it stops meaning anything.

Here's what I think slop actually is, and what it isn't.

1. What slop really means

Before it was a meme, slop had a clear meaning.

Something made with minimal effort, mass produced, built to profit from the people consuming it, without caring whether they actually get anything from it.

Think of the food that keeps you alive but nobody expects you to enjoy.

Bare minimum. Endlessly repeated. Indifferent to the person on the other end.

That's slop.

2. Bad is not slop

A film with a huge budget and a broken story is bad.
It isn't slop.

An ambitious painting that doesn't quite land is a failure.
It isn't slop.

Failure means someone reached for something and missed.
Slop means nobody reached at all.

I'll take an honest failure over a perfectly safe nothing every time.

3. “Slop” has become a lazy review

Scroll through any comment section. Something new, something different, something you just didn't vibe with: slop.

Different shapes, one stamp.

And here's the irony: calling everything slop is itself the lowest effort take you can give.

It skips the thinking. It skips the looking. It's a one word verdict on work you didn't actually look at.

If you don't like something, say why. That's the difference between criticism and noise.

4. Copying vs. adding

Taking something that already exists isn't automatically slop. Every artist builds on what came before.

The question is simple: what did you add?

Repost it with a new caption and you've added nothing.
Retrace it in a different color and you've added nothing.

Bring your eye, your story, your obsession, a new way of seeing, and now it's yours.

It's like copying homework and changing a few words. You're still not adding anything to what already exists.

5. Everything has an audience

Not everything that isn't for you is slop.

Good work is usually made for someone specific. Cast a real net and you catch twenty people out of a hundred, and those twenty truly get it.

Try to please all hundred and you have to sand off every edge until there's no personality left.

Made for everyone usually means made for no one.

If a piece doesn't speak to you, maybe it wasn't talking to you.

6. The art director's eye

Here's where I'll be honest.

I walk into a café and see a menu, a poster, a flyer, and I can tell in a second it was generated and shipped without a single human decision.

The same faces. The same fonts. The same perfect, empty balance.

Nothing is wrong with it. And nothing is right with it either. It's a layout with no one behind it.

That's the real AI slop. Not the tool, but the absence of a person making choices.

7. Yes, I use AI. Just not the way most people do.

I'd be lying if I pretended otherwise. AI is in my studio every day. But most people use it to skip the work: type a prompt, get a finished image, post it, move on. I use it to do more of the work, not less.

For me, AI is a teacher. When I wanted my paintings to move, loop and respond, I didn't know how to build that. So I vibe coded, broke things, asked why they broke, and tried again. Every interactive piece taught me something I couldn't do the week before.

It's also a sparring partner. I test ideas against it, argue with it, ask it why something works and why something doesn't. I come out of those conversations knowing more, not depending more.

What it never gets is the source. The idea is mine. The painting is mine. The meaning, the struggle, the reason a wall keeps falling in an endless loop, all of that comes from a human who cares about it.

Most people use AI to replace their growth. I use it to speed mine up.
A thread can pass through a machine and still be the same thread.

The moment the tool starts making the decisions instead of you, you've stopped making art and started making output.

8. The real test

So what is slop, really?

It's not the format.
It's not the tool.
It's not the budget.
It's not whether you personally like it.

It's one question: did the maker care how this would land on the other side?

If the answer is no, if it was made only to extract a click, a sale, or a minute of your attention, that's slop. However polished it looks.

If the answer is yes, it might be rough, strange, or not for you. But it isn't slop.

9. They'll call it slop anyway

Here's what I've learned from putting work online:

Someone will call it slop. No matter how careful, how personal, or how slow it was.

Some people just like disliking things.

You can't control the word they choose.
You can only control whether it's true.

Make sure it isn't. Then let them say whatever they want.

Make what you'd want to receive

The opposite of slop isn't perfection.

It's attention.

A crooked line someone actually meant beats a flawless one nobody chose.

So before you post, before you ship, before you call someone else's work slop, ask yourself one thing:

Would I want to receive this?

If yes, make it. If no, make it better.

What's something people call slop that you think isn't? Or the other way around?

YEKTA.

I post a piece I spent weeks on.

Then I watch a number.

Ten likes. Someone else posts something that looks half finished and gets five hundred.

Nothing about my work changed in that minute.
Only a number on a screen changed.
And somehow it had the power to change how I felt about myself.

If you make anything and put it into the world, you know this feeling. Here's what I've learned about getting out of it.

1. The question you live inside

Without noticing, you start organizing your life around one question:

What do other people think of me?

You watch how they look at you. Whether they reply. Whether they invite you. Whether they share your work.

Most of the time, nobody actually said anything bad.
The whole trial is happening inside your own head.

But it still changes how you act. You speak more carefully. You compare more. You start shaping yourself into the version you think will be accepted.

And you forget to ask the question that matters more:
What kind of person, and what kind of artist, do I actually want to be?

2. A number is not a verdict

Ten likes is not a review of your work.
Five hundred likes is not a review of theirs.

Timing, algorithms, who was online, who was in a bad mood. A hundred things move that number, and almost none of them are you.

Yet we hand that number the right to tell us who we are.

The work is the same work before and after you look at the screen.

3. Approval is a string someone else holds

Fifteen years in advertising taught me this the hard way. Every idea I made was judged by a client, a boss, a room full of people.

Then I started posting my own art, and realized the room had just become the whole internet.

Somewhere in between, I had to accept a simple truth:

No matter how good you are, some people will not like you.
That's not a failure. That's arithmetic.

If your happiness depends on being liked, it depends on something that doesn't belong to you.

You can be kind, and still be disliked.
You can work hard, and still be criticized.
You can make your best piece, and still not be anyone's favorite.

The more you need their approval, the less of your life is yours.

4. Your past doesn't decide. Your meaning does.

This idea is uncomfortable, because it hands the pen back to you.

What happened to you matters. It shapes you.
But you are not only a product of it. You also decide what it means.

A rejected submission can be proof that you're not good enough.
Or it can be just a thing that happened on a Tuesday.

Same event. Two meanings. Two completely different lives.

5. The fear that protects you

This one is hard to hear.

Sometimes the anxiety isn't stopping us. It's serving us.

If I never submit the piece, nobody can reject it.
If I never post the risky work, nobody can tell me it's bad.
If I never show up, I never find out I wasn't enough.

The fear feels like a wall.
Sometimes it's a door we've decided not to open.

Ask yourself honestly: what is this fear protecting me from?

6. People are not contracts

I supported you, so you should support me.
I shared your work, so you should share mine.
I showed up for you, so where were you?

That's where resentment begins.

When kindness has a hidden invoice, it was never kindness. It was a transaction.

Relationships get exhausting the moment you start keeping score. Give because you want to give. Then let it go.

7. Their win is not your loss

Someone your age gets the big collector.
Someone gets the gallery show.
Someone's piece goes everywhere.

If your worth depends on being ahead, their success feels like your failure.

It isn't.

Their rise doesn't make your work smaller. Their followers don't make your voice quieter.

Life isn't a race with one winner. Most of us are climbing different hills.

8. Contribution over recognition

So what replaces the need for approval?

The answer I keep coming back to: contribution.

Not fame. Not a million followers. Just the honest sense that your existence is useful to someone.

Teaching someone what you know. Making one person feel understood by a painting. Doing your work honestly.

When you genuinely feel useful, you stop needing a stranger to tell you that you're valuable.
You already know.

9. Don't postpone your happiness

I'll be happy when the piece sells.
I'll be happy when people finally see what I'm doing.
I'll be happy when I'm respected.

You can spend your whole life in that waiting room.

Keep the ambition. Keep working. Keep wanting more.

But find the meaning in the making itself.

Life isn't waiting at the finish line. It's happening at the easel.

10. Ask a better question

Next time you catch yourself asking “Do they like me?”
ask: “Do I like who I'm becoming?”

Next time you compare, ask:
“Am I unhappy with my life, or only with how theirs looks?”

Next time fear of judgment stops you, ask:
“If I knew some people would dislike me anyway, what would I choose?”

Where freedom begins

I don't think anyone solves this once and for all.

I still care too much some days. I still compare. I still refresh.

Maybe the goal isn't to stop caring.
Maybe it's to notice when you've handed someone else's opinion too much power, and take it back.

Being willing to be disliked doesn't mean caring less about people.

It means caring about people without being controlled by them.

That's where the real work starts. And the real freedom.

What would you make this week if you knew some people would dislike it anyway?

YEKTA.

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.

1. The graveyard of beginnings

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.

2. Wide is not enough

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.

3. Depth lives in the boring middle

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.

4. Be an M, not an I

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.

5. What happens in that space

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.

6. When code met the canvas

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.

7. Choose a season, not a life

“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.

8. Quitting vs. leaving

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?

9. “Not now” is not “never”

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.

10. Discipline and curiosity are not enemies

Discipline decides what gets my attention today.
Curiosity decides what might deserve it tomorrow.

You don't have to choose between them.

Many doors

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.

A man kneels in a bare room with his hand on a small block. In front of him is a wall, and at its base a narrow triangular hole. He pushes. The block strikes the wall. A crack opens. He pushes again. On the fifth blow the wall comes down, and behind it stands the same wall, whole, with the same small hole at its foot. He looks up. Then he lowers his head and puts his hand back on the block.

The painting

Futility began as a painting, made by hand in thick, restless strokes. The palette is dust and skin: grey plaster, raw umber, the pink of a body that has worked too long. The only saturated colour is a thin red cord running across the floor toward the hole. I wanted the man to look heavy and exhausted, and the room to look like it was built to outlast him.

Eighteen layers

To make the painting move, I took it apart. The figure was repainted as separate pieces: head, torso, back, hip, each thigh and shin, each arm in two parts, the block, the wall and the shadows, eighteen layers in all. Every hidden surface was painted through, so that when a limb moves you never see a hole behind it. When the layers are stacked, the original painting is there exactly as it was.

The rig

No bone in this piece cuts the paint. Thirty six control points sit inside the body, and the paint is stretched between them on a fine mesh, the way skin moves over muscle. The feet and the back knee are pinned to the floor. The hips lead the push, the back follows, the shoulder drops and the arm drives the block forward. The head does not wobble. It is carried by the neck and bows slightly into the effort.

Five blows

The wall keeps count. The first blow opens two cracks at the tip of the triangular hole. The second carries them a little further. By the third they reach a third of the way up the wall, and by the fourth, halfway. The cracks run in short straight lines and sudden turns, the way plaster actually breaks.

The collapse

On the fifth blow the wall gives way. It breaks along the lines the cracks have drawn, and the pieces fall as real slabs, with thickness, weight and spin. The lowest ones go first. They hit the floor, tip over, slide and settle in their own dust. Behind them is the same wall.

Your touch

The piece only moves when you touch it. Touch the man or the block and he pushes. Touch again and he pushes again. Nothing you do changes the outcome: five blows, a collapse, the same wall. The work is complete only when someone keeps touching it, knowing exactly what will happen.

Futility · interactive painting by YEKTA. Edition 1/1 · Minting Monday, 19 October 2026 on OBJKT · Tezos.

YEKTA

An Image, Listened To is an interactive work that takes any image and turns it into sound and film. You touch a sphere of nine thousand particles, give it a picture, and the work listens to it: not by scanning it line by line, but by looking at it the way a person does. Every sound you hear has an address in the image, and the same image will always become the same piece.

Looking, not scanning

Most image to sound methods read a picture like a score, left to right at a constant speed. This work builds a model of attention instead. A saliency map estimates where the eye is drawn; between ten and twenty four fixations, depending on how much detail the image holds, are chosen in the order a viewer would find them, and the eye travels between them in saccades. How long it rests on each point depends on how strongly that point holds attention. That path is the time structure of the piece.

From pixel to sound

Everything in the image has a voice. Height becomes pitch, in a scale and root chosen by the image's dominant colour and light. Brightness becomes loudness, and darkness becomes silence. Edges shape the roughness and the articulation of each sound; the direction of lines turns into rising or falling melody; repeating textures pulse and grainy ones crackle. Sharp, focused areas sound close and dry, blurred ones distant and echoed. Even symmetry and proportions are heard, as mirroring and as the width of the stereo field.

Eight digital voices

Colour chooses how each sound is made. Every hue belongs to one of eight digital synthesis families: FM, wavefolding, pulse width, phase distortion, granular, additive sweep, bit reduction, and one built from the pixel's own 24 bits, turned into an on/off rhythm. Saturation decides how much of that voice you hear; grey stays a pure tone. Nothing imitates an acoustic instrument: every sound is made by a machine, from the picture.

Four ways of listening

The image also chooses how it is heard, by how much of it is calm. Continuous texture becomes micropolyphonic clusters of sustained, slightly detuned voices. Dense, tangled forms become stochastic clouds of short gliding grains. Distinct subjects on a quiet ground become pointillist points of tone. And a mostly empty image lets chance operations in. The gaze always sets the timing; only the way each moment sounds changes.

The space between

Between two fixations the eye moves, and the piece listens to what it crosses. Smooth areas become filtered noise, like air; edges become transient clicks; abrupt changes of light become a quantised digital grit. There are no pitched glides here, and the movement always sits beneath the fixations, measured against them in every piece.

The film

The second result is a film of the image being heard. A soft inverting lens travels the exact gaze path, turning the colours beneath it into their negative, while points of light mark each sound where it came from. Below, a particle equaliser of three braided strands follows the music, low frequencies on the left and high on the right.

No words. Just the sphere.

There is no text anywhere in the work. Touch the sphere, choose an image, and a thin ring follows the real progress. When the work is done, the sphere divides into two smaller spheres: one plays the sound, and as it plays, its particles open and close with the music; the other opens the film. A small point between them brings everything back together.

Same image. Same piece.

The work is deterministic. Every sample of the sound is computed with basic arithmetic that every computer performs identically, and its seed comes from the image's pixels themselves, not from the file. I tested it in two different JavaScript engines, and the audio matched to the last bit. Give it the same image tomorrow, or in ten years, and you will hear the same piece.

The edition

The edition on Networked is the play edition: the sound and the film play inside the work, in your browser, with nothing uploaded anywhere. It is a single self contained HTML file with no outside dependencies, made to last. A download edition will follow on my website. Bring it an image you love, and listen to what was already there.

YEKTA