How Your Personality Affects Your Art Career
Episode #322
How does your personality influence your career? Jake Parker, Lee White, and Anthony Wheeler discuss how your traits impact your life as an illustrator and how you can optimize for the best version of life with your personality.
SHOW LINKS
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Pay attention to what you pay attention to.
There’s no “better” or “worse” in personality traits; only different sets of pros and cons. Learn to play in your strengths and add support in your weak areas.
You, as a whole person, can’t be fully expressed through a social media profile, so don’t try. Save parts of your life just for you.
You control the narrative. You can choose whether or not to take people’s responses to your art personally.
Changing the goal changes your approach. Stop treating Instagram as a popularity contest and start using it to document your experience as a human making art.
SUMMARY
Have you ever considered how your personality impacts your career? From productivity to networking, your natural tendencies play a big role in determining where you excel.
If you’ve never taken one, tests like 64 Personality or Myers-Briggs Type Indicator measure traits such as extraversion and introversion, thinking and feeling, judging and perceiving, and sensing and intuition. Your results place you on a spectrum for each trait pairing, providing insights about what energizes you and how you approach problems and make decisions. There are no “good” or “bad” traits; it’s not inherently better, for example, to be extraverted over introverted. The point is to understand yourself so you can work within your strengths and scaffold your weaknesses.
Extraversion and introversion are two of the most commonly compared traits in society. We find extraverts do well with networking and in co-working environments. If they are struggling to focus and be productive, having someone to work beside often grounds them. Introverts, on the other hand, may feel more depleted after social hour, even if they enjoyed the company. They work best alone and are often able to hole up for hours at a time, chipping away at their projects. They may struggle more with marketing and networking.
Extraverts shouldn’t try to force themselves into more solitude like introverts; instead, by acknowledging they work better around others and implementing systems to do so, they can boost productivity. Likewise, introverts don’t need to match an extravert’s energy; instead, they can focus on deep work and more selective relationship building.
As you study each set of personality traits, you’ll find there are natural strengths and weaknesses to all of them. By identifying where you lie on the spectrum, you’ll be able to optimize your life to get the most out of your natural tendencies.
It’s important to know, however, that you’re not a victim of your personality. For example, being more of a dreamer than a producer is context, not an excuse for leaving projects unfinished. Rather than assuming you’ll never be able to see an idea through, ask what you need to make it happen. Would an accountability partner or a body double keep you on track? Would time alone in nature recharge your battery so you could return to the studio? Do you work better with authority or autonomy? Taking responsibility for your character and the results you want will be one of the biggest game-changers in your career.