So recently the Nagasaki International University (NIU) foreign student gang was taken out to try our hand in arts and crafts. As an aspiring game creator and future character designer, arts of any kind get me excited. Of course college doesn’t teach us everything we need to know for our craft, at least not directly. After all it’s important to expand your horizons and take from everything you can - that’s what makes your art unique to you.
At least that’s the mindset I had while I was there. But recently, I’ve been thinking about what I came to Japan for and what I got here. The feelings and memories I’ve received so far mean more to me than anything I could’ve bought or an knowledge I could attain. The way NIU students study and work at their craft and toward their goals so diligently and elegantly, what would normally be viewed as a struggle, they seem to treat as just a natural everyday occurrence.
This made me realize something, and that was that I wasn’t looking clearly at the reality of things around me. Saying you want to be something and do something is all well and good, and it wasn’t like steps hadn’t been taken to achieve my goals, but you can’t compete with the best unless you’re giving everything you have. Before I came here I didn’t my have the motivation to throw everything away to achieve my goals. To spend 12 hours a day (maybe even more) just drawing and coding. But the difference between me and the people I admire isn’t simply the time they put in. It was because they created not because they wanted to, but because they have to. Because the day you decide you want to do something for a living, in order to make a living, you simply have to be the best at delivering yourself in your work in a way no one else can and to do that you have to master the basics. The same way all the masters have. The same way all the work we see in every museum ever created was created. The way I feel now isn’t really motivation or anything of the sort. But as if the reason was always simple and I always had it in me and didn’t know how to direct the emotion.