We rarely encounter creative work on its own. It arrives attached to a person, and with that person comes everything we think we already know about them.

This can become complicated when someone moves between different fields, roles or parts of their identity. Some fit easily into the picture others have formed of us. Others disrupt it. And sometimes we begin anticipating that disruption before anybody has actually responded.

There are artworks I have never published because I already anticipate how they might be read. Not because I doubt the work, but because I know that people do not encounter it independently of what they already associate with me.

As a multi-passionate person working across different fields, I have become increasingly aware of the different versions of me that exist in other people’s minds. I am a fine artist. I am President of IAPMA, an international arts organisation. I am Director of The Xsabo Foundation. I work in consulting. I write The Creative Core. I am preparing Musedra, my own gallery project for fibre, sensual and erotic art. Some of these identities sit comfortably beside each other. Others appear to contradict what people think they already know about me.

There is the structured, disciplined, organisational person associated with leadership and institutions. Then there is my artistic practice, which explores femininity, the body, appearance and sometimes erotic or explicit themes.

What appears to be a contradiction does not particularly trouble me. The perception of it sometimes does.

And that distinction matters.

The audience in our head

In a world where almost anything can be published and judged immediately, opinions can influence us long before anybody actually expresses one. We anticipate reactions. We imagine what colleagues, collectors, friends or strangers might think. We rehearse criticism that has not happened yet.

Then we begin responding to it. A work remains unpublished. An idea is softened. A sentence becomes less direct. Something strange is made more familiar. A part of ourselves becomes quieter because we are uncertain how it will sit beside everything people already know about us. At that point, an imagined opinion has produced a real action.

Psychology gives us some reason to distrust the scale of this imaginary audience. The spotlight effect describes our tendency to overestimate how much other people notice our appearance and behaviour.1

Yet the audience in our head can be remarkably attentive. It remembers everything. It detects every inconsistency. It compares the work we make today with something we said three years ago. It has opinions about our decisions before we have even made them.

The real audience rarely has that level of concentration. Still, anticipated perception can begin shaping the work.

Research on worry suggests how unreliable anticipated outcomes can be. In a 2026 study, almost 90 per cent of feared outcomes did not occur. And when they did, participants coped better than they had expected in more than 84 per cent of cases.2 The study involved people with generalised anxiety disorder, so these figures are not a universal rule, but they offer a useful reminder that what we anticipate can feel far more certain and more threatening than what eventually happens.

What other people actually see

People do not see you as you are. They see you as they are and through what they are capable of perceiving. We all do this unconsciously. We assemble people from fragments: what they show us, what others tell us, what we recognise and the categories already available in our minds.

Like anyone else, I am made up of many dimensions. Someone encountering me through IAPMA sees one part. Someone discovering one of my artworks sees another. Someone reading The Creative Core encounters another again. None is necessarily wrong. Each is incomplete.

For people working across different fields, especially ones that may seem contradictory, it is important to decide how much weight to give other people’s opinions. The problem begins when we treat one person’s view as a judgement of the whole.

This is particularly powerful for creatives because the boundary between the work and the person who made it can become porous. A rejection of the work can feel like a rejection of the self. Praise can work in the opposite direction. It can make us feel that a particular direction must be continued because people responded to it in the desired manner.

Opinions affect us in several ways. They shape how we feel, how we think and eventually how we act. Approval can strengthen confidence, while criticism can unsettle it. Another person can also show us something in the work that we did not see ourselves.

That last stage interests me most. Because once an opinion changes what we make, publish, price, present or pursue, it has acquired material power.

Not every opinion is feedback

One of the mistakes we make is treating opinion, perception and feedback as though they were interchangeable, although they are not.

If someone tells me that they cannot understand what I am trying to communicate, that is information. I can investigate why. If someone tells me that they dislike erotic art, I have learned something about their taste. If someone believes that erotic artwork is incompatible with being the president of an international arts organisation, I have learned something about the categories through which they understand professional identity. Only the first observation necessarily requires anything from me.

This distinction becomes important once creative work enters public space. There will always be opinions about you and your work. The more visible you become, the more opinions become available. Social media has intensified this enormously. We can now receive judgement from people who know almost nothing about the context in which something was made.

An opinion deserves weight when it offers genuine insight, regardless of how easily it was expressed. I have become increasingly interested in asking a different question when I receive feedback: What does this person actually know that I need to know?

How the meal is served matters

Imagine being served an extraordinary meal on a beautiful plate, in a setting that feels considered and inviting. The food itself has not changed, yet the plate and its surroundings can deepen the experience, just as an unattractive or dirty setting can diminish appetite before the first bite.

We experience things through context, and this also shapes how we present and encounter art.

This is how I think about framing: it starts with the frame of an artwork, then extends to its title, photograph, exhibition space, website, artist statement and the language surrounding it. The substance of the work remains the same, while these elements shape the conditions under which it is perceived.

There is an entire ecosystem around every encounter with art and communication is part of that ecosystem. It gives people a way into the work.

Artists have long treated communication as something secondary to the work, even slightly suspicious, as though work of sufficient quality should somehow communicate without context.

There is no context-free encounter with a body of work. A museum creates a frame. A gallery creates one. Social media platforms create one. A studio visit creates one. Silence creates one too. Choosing not to communicate does not remove the frame. It simply gives you less influence over how that frame is formed.

This is why visual, written and spoken communication matters: it provides structure for how the work is encountered.

In an overloaded world, people cannot retain the complete complexity of another person or body of work. They remember certain associations. Particular images. Ideas that recur. Repetition helps meaning survive noise. Clarity gives that meaning precision.

The plate can begin determining what we are willing to cook.

We notice that one kind of work receives more attention, so we make more of it. We discover that a particular version of ourselves is easily understood, so we continue presenting that version. We avoid subjects that complicate the identity people already recognise. This can happen without any deliberate compromise, as perception gradually becomes internalised.

The question is no longer: What do I want to make?

It becomes: What will make sense coming from me?

Those are very different questions.

For a creative, it can become a remarkably small room. There is nothing wrong with responding to an audience. Creative work does not have to exist in isolation from the people who encounter it. An audience can teach us where communication fails, where something resonates and where possibilities exist that we had not considered.

But listening means understanding what a response tells us about the work, its presentation or the person looking at it, because each calls for a different response.

The version that becomes repeatable

Most people will not remember your complexity. They will remember the version of you that was easiest to repeat. We make sense of others by placing them into familiar categories, reducing complexity to something we can recognise and remember.3 This is an inevitable part of how reputation forms.

Over time, certain associations accumulate around a person. A name begins to stand for something. In professional terms, we might call this a brand, although the mechanism is much older than branding.

Reputation is accumulated perception

For creatives, this creates a difficult balance. Being recognisable matters.

If nobody can understand what connects your work, your ideas or your professional activities, it becomes difficult for them to place you, recommend you or remember you. But recognisability can become limiting when people keep seeing who you were instead of who you have become.

A creative career can last decades. The person making the work changes. Interests deepen, disappear and return. New disciplines enter. Old convictions become inadequate. The frame has to be strong enough to create recognition and porous enough to allow evolution.

That is one of the more difficult forms of creative authorship: to become legible without becoming smaller.

Authorship of perception

You do not need to ignore what other people think. Their perspectives can reveal blind spots, misunderstandings and possibilities you may not see yourself.

The more important skill is deciding whose opinions deserve your attention and how much influence you allow them to have.

That becomes easier when you know what you are trying to protect. If the intention of your work is unclear, almost every external opinion has the potential to redirect it. If you know what the work is trying to do, criticism becomes easier to examine without immediately following or dismissing it.

The same applies to identity. You cannot control whether somebody finds your different roles contradictory, but you can decide whether their discomfort requires you to resolve that contradiction for them. You cannot determine what somebody thinks when they encounter one part of your work beside another part of your professional life, but you can decide whether the possibility of that judgement determines what you make visible.

You cannot control perception. What you can retain is authorship over what you allow perception to change.

If you do not define your frame, something else will define it for you, and it will rarely contain the full complexity of who you are. Maybe it does not need to.

A frame only has to hold enough space for the work to remain yours.

~ Fides Linien

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Next on The Creative Core:

How others perceive us and our work matters, but so does what allows us to continue making it. The next essay turns to the economic reality beyond creating: why creatives need to think entrepreneurially. You do not need to be an entrepreneur to be a creative. But if you want to make a living from what you create, you need to think like one.

Sometimes we are already doing the work before we fully believe we are the person doing it. We create, take on responsibility and build experience, yet the identity attached to it can still feel unfamiliar. I know this feeling well.

Psychology calls this imposter syndrome.1

Even after years of making and exhibiting art, I sometimes hesitate when I say I am an artist. This is partly because becoming an artist was never a clean transition for me.

As one facet of my path, I trained in visual merchandising at the luxury fashion brand ESCADA after studying fine arts. At one point, I had to decide whether to continue into a relatively more predictable career in fashion as an employee or move further into the unpredictable world of art. The difficulty was that I wanted both.

I have always been devoted to beauty. I love fashion, quality before quantity and aesthetics. I wanted what probably many people want: to work on something I genuinely care about, create something of purpose and value to others and earn enough from it to build a stable life. For a long time, those desires created a subtle internal conflict. Even today, saying I am an artist can carry the faint sensation of saying something slightly forbidden, because the identity was true before it was fully inhabited.

When identity arrives late

Something similar happened when I started this publication, The Creative Core.

I did not know exactly what it would become. I had a sense of it and followed my instinct. Sometimes it still feels like walking through a field in fog. I cannot see the whole landscape, but with every step another part becomes visible.

Before publishing, I had a collection of notes I had gathered over the years and wanted to find out whether the idea of sharing them could exist beyond a private exercise. Underneath that experiment was a quieter question: Would anyone care?

I am not an author. I started writing for myself. Now I write for the version of myself I recognise in others: artists, creatives and entrepreneurs navigating identity, survival and stagnation while trying to build something serious and sustainable.

Critical reflection follows almost every essay. I ask myself: Will this matter? Will it be understood? What if nobody reads it? What if none of my thoughts are new?

Writing does not need to produce unprecedented thoughts. For me, it involves research and it is a way of testing understanding. Yet somewhere between influence and expression, we can start believing that originality is the condition for legitimacy. We confuse origin with ownership. An idea becomes ours through experience, interpretation, application and the connections we make around it.

Still, the uncomfortable question remains: Who am I to say this? That question comes much closer to imposter syndrome.

The identity lag

Imposter syndrome is often reduced to self-doubt.

I think it emerges when our work moves faster than our self-perception. We create something, accept responsibility, enter a new field or become visible in a way our internal narrative has not yet accommodated. The evidence has changed. Our identity is still behind. You are doing the work, yet part of you feels as though you are pretending to be the person who does it. The “fraud” appears in that gap.

I have been making art for years. I studied fine arts, developed my own technique, exhibited and sold work. The evidence is hardly ambiguous. Yet facts and identity do not always update at the same speed.

Looking back at photographs I took of a model as a student, I can already recognise the artist I was becoming. The interests that still shape my work today were already there: sensuality, femininity and the human body.

The same happens with this publication. Publishing essays does not immediately make being a writer feel like an identity I naturally inhabit. I am more comfortable saying that I write. Perhaps one day there will be no meaningful distinction. And what matters more is the content itself and the impact it creates, rather than what I call myself.

Entrepreneurship makes this identity lag particularly visible.

In employment, authority is usually conferred from outside. You apply for a position, somebody assesses your experience and a company hires or promotes you.

Creative entrepreneurship works differently, especially when you are the founder of a brand or when you are the brand yourself.

At some point, the work asks you to take the next step. Responsibility often arrives before the identity feels comfortable. That requires something many creatives find uncomfortable: self-authorisation.

You set the price, approach the gallery, communicate the value of your work and make decisions before external validation is guaranteed. There is no ceremony or certificate marking the transition.

Imposter syndrome changes as you grow

This also explains why professional success does not necessarily eliminate imposter syndrome. Growth keeps producing new identities.2

These stages are not rigid. We may occupy several at once or move backwards and forwards between them. But every transition can produce its own version of the “fraud”.

The Maker wonders whether they can call themselves an artist. The Professional has to charge for the work. The Entrepreneur builds an economic structure around it. The Brand becomes deliberate about reputation and positioning. The Leader becomes responsible for people beyond themselves. The Legacy Builder begins thinking about what should survive beyond their own involvement.

The uncomfortable feeling does not necessarily disappear when you ‘make it’. The frontier moves. Greater competence often gives us access to greater responsibility. A larger room can make us feel small again.

Why achievement does not always create legitimacy

We tend to assume legitimacy accumulates. One exhibition leads to another, clients return, work sells and eventually there should be enough evidence to silence the question of whether we belong.

But achievement changes the standard against which we measure ourselves. The first exhibition may once have seemed like proof. After several exhibitions, it becomes normal. The first sale feels significant until selling becomes something you expect. The evidence remains, but its psychological value depreciates.

Instead of thinking, I have achieved this, therefore I belong here, the threshold moves: Yes, but can I do the next thing?

Our reference point changes too.

As we progress, we enter new rooms and encounter people with more experience, larger businesses or decades of work behind them. We stop comparing ourselves with where we began and start comparing ourselves with where we have just arrived or want to be. Our field of comparison has changed. The useful skill is recognising when an achievement has become so familiar that we have stopped counting it as evidence.

When imposter syndrome becomes expensive

For creatives, this is more than a psychological phenomenon. Identity has economic consequences.

If you do not quite believe you are a professional, you may hesitate to charge professional prices. You may accept poor conditions because you feel grateful for the opportunity, overdeliver because you still have something to prove or work for free because exposure feels safer than asking for money.

You may endlessly refine your portfolio, collect another qualification or wait for another exhibition because some future achievement appears capable of granting the permission you cannot yet give yourself. This is where an internal identity lag begins shaping an external career. Imposter syndrome becomes expensive. It costs money, time, opportunities and negotiating power.

Not every feeling of inadequacy is imposter syndrome.

Sometimes you are inexperienced. If you have never negotiated a licensing agreement, priced a commission or employed somebody, there may genuinely be things you need to learn.

The important question is: What exactly am I doubting?

There is a considerable difference between: I do not know how to do this yet.

and: I am not the kind of person who should be doing this.

The first identifies a knowledge gap. Knowledge gaps can be closed through research, expertise, practice and experience.

The second turns missing knowledge into an identity verdict. A mature creative entrepreneur needs to be able to hold two ideas at once: I belong here and I still have something to learn.

Competence does not require omniscience. There is also uncertainty that belongs neither to competence nor identity. Once an artwork leaves the studio, I cannot determine how somebody will encounter it. Once I publish an essay, I cannot control what a reader takes from it.

That does not mean I am an imposter. It is simply part of putting work into the world. Some uncertainty comes from how we see ourselves, some from what we still need to learn and some from how others respond. Knowing the difference is more useful than trying to get rid of doubt altogether.

The paradox of becoming

Growth often requires us to act before our identity agrees with us. You publish before feeling like a writer. You sell before feeling established. You lead before leader feels natural. You state the price before feeling entirely comfortable asking for it.

Sometimes imposter syndrome simply tells us that our external reality has moved ahead of our internal story. It can be an indicator that something inside us is still updating.

A practical experiment: identify the gap

The next time you feel like an imposter, do not immediately try to silence the feeling. Diagnose it.

Take one situation in which you currently feel underqualified or uncomfortable: setting or increasing your prices, contacting a gallery, publishing, applying for an opportunity, launching something, teaching or taking on responsibility.

Then ask:

What evidence already exists? List what you have actually done: work made, projects completed, clients served, responsibilities carried, problems solved and years practised. Notice where your self-perception no longer matches the evidence.

Is this an identity gap or a knowledge gap? Replace I am terrible at business with the precise thing you do not know. Specific knowledge gaps produce actions. Identity judgements produce paralysis.

Am I waiting for permission? What would you do if somebody you respected told you that you were ready? Sometimes expertise is required. Sometimes permission is not.

What is this uncertainty costing me? Are you undercharging, overpreparing, overdelivering, avoiding opportunities or withholding your work? Look at what the doubt is doing, not only how it feels.

What would create new evidence? Send the proposal. Increase one price. Publish one piece. Approach one person. Have one negotiation.

Do not ask only how to feel more legitimate. Ask what action would give your identity new evidence. You do not have to convince yourself that you are becoming someone new. Keep doing the work until your identity catches up with who you already are.

~ Fides Linien

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In the next essay, I will explore the power of other people’s opinions: how they shape the way we feel, think and act, and how perception, framing and clarity influence the way others see our work.

In the previous essay, we explored confidence as something we develop through experience. Yet even when we have accumulated evidence of what we can do, self-doubt does not disappear.

Why do we doubt ourselves when experience gives us every reason not to?

For me, understanding this began with a belief I had carried for years: I thought I was not a real artist unless I could make a living from art alone. At one point, I even interpreted the rejection of my application to the Künstlersozialkasse (KSK), Germany’s social insurance for artists and writers, as formal evidence that perhaps I was not one.

This belief felt less like an opinion than a fact.

It was only in my thirties, while reading bestselling authors such as Mel Robbins and Susan Jeffers, that I began questioning where such convictions come from and asking myself: Who taught me to believe this? That question led me back to childhood, family, school and the environment in which I grew up.

The beliefs we inherit

My artistic ability was recognised and encouraged from an early age, and I eventually studied Fine Art. My parents supported my artistic education wholeheartedly. At the same time, I could sense from what they said that they considered making a living as an artist nearly impossible.

With distance, their perspective makes much more sense to me. My parents had lived through political and economic circumstances in which security carried enormous value, and their reservations about an artistic career reflected their own experience and concern about the possibility of financial insecurity.

Understanding this replaced much of the frustration I once felt with compassion. More importantly, I recognised that I had unconsciously absorbed part of their understanding of what an artistic career could realistically be and mistaken it for my own.

Our identities are shaped through our childhood, through thousands of conversations, expectations, encouragements, warnings and observations. Philosophers sometimes describe identity as dialogical: we become ourselves through our relationships with others long before we consciously decide who we want to be.1 Some of those perspectives remain with us for decades and eventually become so familiar that they resemble our own thoughts. This is one reason self-doubt can be so convincing.

When self-doubt starts shaping behaviour

The difficulty with self-doubt is that it does not remain inside our thoughts. It can begin to influence our decisions and, eventually, the opportunities we create for ourselves.

If we believe we are not ready, we may not apply. If we assume our work is not good enough, we may keep it private. If we think permission has to come from someone else, we may wait instead of creating an opportunity ourselves. We might hesitate to approach a gallery, communicate what we do, negotiate a fee, raise a price or propose a collaboration.

This is where self-doubt becomes entrepreneurial behaviour.

Over time, the absence of results can appear to confirm the original belief. We doubt ourselves, behave according to that doubt and then interpret the consequences as evidence that the doubt was justified. Self-doubt can affect our relationships and how we network, our applications, visibility, opportunities, pricing, communication and ultimately the direction of a career as a creative.

Recognising this pattern gives us an opportunity to interrupt it. Before accepting a doubtful thought as fact, we can ask whether it describes reality or is quietly helping to create it.

Self-observation helps to distinguish self-doubt from related ideas.

What exactly are we doubting?

Self-esteem concerns how we value ourselves.

Confidence concerns what we believe we can do, learn or handle.

Self-doubt questions our judgement, abilities or sometimes even our legitimacy to proceed.

These can coexist. A creative may be confident in their technique while doubting whether anyone will take the work seriously or buy it. We can know that we are capable and still hesitate in unfamiliar territory.

Doubt itself can be useful. It can sharpen judgement, encourage revision and make us reconsider an assumption. The problem begins when we treat every doubt as truth.

Some doubts arise from genuine observation. Others come from inherited criticism, social conditioning, comparison, past experiences or opinions whose authority we never consciously chose. The challenge is learning to distinguish between them.

For a long time, another assumption shaped my decisions: the feeling that permission had to come from somewhere outside me. Creative careers make this particularly easy because many established structures depend on selection. Galleries, curators, institutions, juries and publishers decide who or what receives an opportunity.

External recognition matters.

It can create income, visibility, relationships and possibilities. The problem begins when recognition becomes a condition for giving ourselves permission to act.

The same applies to people pleasing. Trying to satisfy everyone around us, or imagining what they want us to be, gradually moves decisions away from our own judgement. Sometimes we have to do what we believe is right for us before anyone else approves it.

The career I thought I should have

When I entered art university in the early 2000s, I had absorbed a fairly linear idea of professional progress. Because my own path did not resemble that line, later I often felt that my career had somehow failed.

For a long time, I barely used the word career to describe it. In my mind, a career was something you were allowed to call a career once you had accomplished enough and could prove that you had made it.

After my studies of Fine Art, I worked in luxury fashion while continuing to make art and exhibit, then moved through social entrepreneurship, management and leadership. It took me time to recognize these apparently separate experiences as parts of one professional development.

Today I think differently about career. I see jobs, projects and changes of direction as experiments. Some develop into something substantial. Others do not. Each leaves valuable knowledge behind.

This is part of both a growth mindset and an entrepreneurial mindset.2

For creatives, that entrepreneurial dimension matters. We may create through intuition, then need different faculties to communicate, market and sell the work. Learning to move between these modes is part of building a sustainable life as a creative.

One believer or one doubter

Our environment continues to matter.

The absence of feedback can shape how we perceive our work just as strongly as criticism can. Silence is easily interpreted as evidence, even though it can mean almost anything.

I have come to think that many creatives are profoundly influenced by at least one believer or one doubter.

Some are sustained by someone who sees their potential before they fully see it themselves. Others develop determination from wanting to prove someone wrong. Both can become powerful forces.

I belong to the first group. I am deeply grateful to, and for, one person in my life who has never stopped believing in me. I have learned through this relationship that sometimes one genuine supporter is enough: someone who cheers you on, but also clears your head when doubt or confusion takes over. One person can influence an entire trajectory.

There is power in allowing another person’s perspective to matter, but we also decide how much authority we give it. Support should strengthen our own judgement rather than replace it. Someone else’s belief cannot remove self-doubt, but it can give us another perspective to return to when our own becomes temporarily narrow.

This is why our inner circle matters. We never become immune to influence, so it is worth paying attention to whose opinions we repeatedly allow into our minds.

Preparation changes how we enter the world

There is also a more practical form of self-doubt that deserves attention.

Sometimes uncertainty is not rooted in childhood, psychology or inherited beliefs. Sometimes we simply do not feel prepared.

When someone buys an artwork, they do not only buy the object. They invest in the artist behind it, the story, the body of work and their confidence in where that artist might go. How we present ourselves therefore matters, although I think this is often overlooked. Our image often works for us before we have had the opportunity to explain who we are or what we do.

Professional photography is one part of this.

Every two or three years, I have a photoshoot for my website, portfolio, press and social media. These photographs have a purpose, and that purpose influences how they should look because they are part of visual communication and personal branding.

As a multipassionate creative working across several fields, this became particularly interesting during my 2025 photoshoot with Uwe Hauth and phc.studio in Berlin. We had to consider which facets of the same person the photographs needed to communicate.

I had been excited about the shoot, yet when we began, I felt unexpectedly uncertain. Being photographed requires surrendering some control over how another person captures you, and that requires trust. By the end of the session, before seeing a single photograph, I felt more confident than before.

That experience interested me because the photographer had given me something that would never appear on an invoice. The photographs were the visible product. The experience of seeing and presenting myself was part of their invisible value.

Photography is only one example of how preparation can have this effect. Having an up-to-date biography, artist statement, documentation and professional photographs means that when an opportunity appears, we can respond rather than begin from zero or scramble to prepare everything at the last minute.

Preparation cannot remove self-doubt, but it can remove some of the uncertainty that feeds it.

Which voice is yours?

Great art often grows from an extraordinary degree of fascination, commitment and even obsession. To sustain that relationship with your own work, you need confidence and belief in what you are doing. Yet self-doubt will still appear. The task is not to eliminate it. The more interesting task is to examine it:

Where did this thought come from?

Is it based on something I can observe, or something I have assumed?

Whose judgement am I hearing?

Does this doubt contain information I can use?

Do I actually need permission?

The challenge is remembering to ask these questions in the moment when self-doubt actually appears. With practice, you can become more familiar with the difference between your own judgement and the perspectives you have absorbed from elsewhere.

You may still carry traces of beliefs that formed much earlier in your life. Knowing where they came from does not automatically erase them. It changes the authority you give them and, with it, how you decide and act.

Perhaps that is part of becoming an artist too: learning which voices deserve your attention without allowing every voice to determine your direction.

Most of your thoughts may not have begun with you. What matters is which ones you decide to keep.

~ Fides Linien

Further Reading:

Mel Robbins, The Let Them Theory (2024)

Susan Jeffers, Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway (1987)

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Next week, I will move from self-doubt to imposter syndrome and explore why achievement does not always make us feel more legitimate.

The previous essay ended with a question: if potential and talent alone do not determine where a creative ends up, what does?

There is a point in every creative career where talent stops being the deciding factor. What remains is something less elegant and more difficult to fake:

Confidence.

I see confidence as an asset, even a form of currency that we need to develop if we want to become creatives whose work is seen, discussed, exhibited, sold and collected. This begins with how willing we are to build in public, communicate our work and make ourselves visible.

The answer lies in the relationship between talent and confidence. In that sense, confidence can become more structurally important than talent in determining what actually becomes real.

Talent defines potential. Confidence determines trajectory.

Talent may influence what comes naturally to us. Confidence influences what we are willing to attempt, how we respond when things do not go as planned and whether we continue long enough for our abilities to mature. It allows experimentation, risk-taking and originality because it reduces the need to protect ourselves from failure.

Confidence as practice

My experience has gradually led me to understand that confidence is built through practice, perseverance and the repeated discovery that we can continue without certainty. It influences whether we begin a project whose outcome we cannot predict, apply for an open call before we feel entirely ready or continue after disappointment or rejection.

I did not arrive at this understanding through theory. It emerged through situations I did not know how to solve, challenges I had to work through and responsibilities I had never imagined taking on. Readiness rarely came first. It developed through doing.

Only part of the path ahead is ever illuminated. Moving forward requires us to trust that we can discover the next steps as we go. Confidence carries a certain optimism: the willingness to believe in possibility strongly enough to act towards it while the outcome remains unknown.

Learning through responsibility

There was no single moment when I suddenly became confident. My confidence is sometimes higher, sometimes lower, but I would describe it as stable. Countless experiences have gradually changed my understanding of confidence and, through it, my relationship with myself.

Most of it has little to do with the creative act of making art.

Since 2022, I have served as President of the International Association of Hand Papermakers and Paper Artists, an international organisation with almost 700 members across more than fifty countries. A year earlier, together with a group of volunteers, I helped register the association in Germany, its first legal registration since its founding in 1986.

When I was elected President, leadership and management still felt like abstract ideas to me.

I effectively took on three roles at once: President, coordinator of the association’s international congresses and convenor of the 2023 Congress in Dresden, which brought together 120 participants. I learned organisational development through the work itself: building structures and procedures, clarifying governance and establishing systems that require continuous maintenance.

Following the Dresden Congress, I continued in my roles as President and congress coordinator for the 2025 Congress in China. I am now coordinating preparations for the next congress in India in 2027 with a highly dedicated convenor in Denmark and an international team of volunteers.

Alongside this, I have served as Director of The Xsabo Foundation in Uganda and there founded the Fancy Pads Initiative, developing biodegradable sanitary pads made from plant fibres to improve menstrual health while creating opportunities for local employment and economic empowerment for women.

I learned leadership by carrying responsibilities I had never held before, and confidence developed through the work. I had never imagined myself leading an international organisation or serving as Director of an Ugandan foundation, nor had I ever strived for either role.

This kind of doing, making and thinking is not separate from artistic thinking. It operates at a different scale.

Most of what I know today was learned while doing the work rather than knowing it before I started. I often describe my role as President or Director as a postgraduate study with the opportunity cost of time. Yet much of what it has taught me could never have been learned from a book or tutorial alone. My ability to build a life around my artistic work has benefited enormously from it. It required decisions before I knew whether they would succeed.

Every project presented challenges that I could only understand by working through them.

The development of my artistic practice followed a similar pattern.

Confidence develops through making and learning

I did not wake up one morning and decide, “Today I will invent a new working technique I would call CartaStaminea.” The technique emerged through years of experimentation with handmade paper, materials and structures without knowing exactly where the process would lead.

Every experiment answered one question while immediately raising another.

Even now, I see each artwork as an opportunity to understand something I did not know before rather than a demonstration of certainty. The buyer of an artwork may never know this, but in a sense, they become the owner of a piece of that unique human process. I will explore the relationship between the maker, the artist and the buyer, the collector, in a future essay.

I understand confidence as our relationship with uncertainty.

Every time we enter unfamiliar territory, solve a problem, recover from a mistake or complete something we once believed exceeded our abilities, we gather evidence. We can also learn from the successes and failures of others, expanding our understanding without having to experience everything ourselves.1

Confidence, in this sense, grows through trusting our capacity to keep learning.

Confidence develops through failure and observation

One of the misconceptions surrounding confidence is that it grows mainly through achievement and overcoming challenges.

Some of the experiences that strengthened my confidence most did not unfold as I had hoped. Projects changed direction, ideas failed, applications were rejected and plans had to be abandoned. People contributed to this learning too: those with whom I built strong relationships as well as those with whom I experienced conflict. All of these encounters taught me something about my work, myself and my ability to adapt, but also about other people.

Confidence can grow through discovering that failure is rarely final.

A mistake can become information. A challenge we survive can show us what we are capable of withstanding. An experiment that fails can reveal something we could not have learned otherwise. What we do with the experience matters.

The same applies to creating. Every artwork begins with uncertainty. During almost every creative process, there are moments when I genuinely do not know whether the work will become what I imagine. Most of the time it does. Sometimes it takes an entirely different direction. Occasionally, it fails.

These moments are part of the creative process itself.

Every uncertain decision, experiment and unfamiliar situation gives us another opportunity to develop it. Experience gradually shows us that we can respond when something does not work out as expected.

Our relationship with the work changes too.

An artwork does not need to prove our worth as artists. It is one moment within a much longer practice. If a piece does not succeed, it can still contribute to what follows. Sometimes we even return to it years later with different knowledge and see possibilities we could not see before.

Confidence grows alongside us through making, experimenting, leading, failing, learning, communicating and repeatedly entering situations whose outcomes we cannot control.

Perhaps this is what makes confidence a discipline rather than an achievement. There is no final point at which we possess enough of it.

Practising confidence

If confidence develops through experience rather than appearing before it, you can deliberately create situations that allow it to grow. The purpose is not to convince yourself that you are confident, but to accumulate evidence that you can act, learn, adapt and continue.

Notice your progress. Occasionally, take stock of your path. Return to earlier work, projects, decisions and challenges and notice what has changed in your skills, thinking and the responsibilities you can carry. Development is difficult to recognise while we are inside it. Journalling can make it visible.

Keep evidence. Save meaningful feedback, exhibition acceptances, press or messages from your gallerist, art buyers or collectors. I have an email folder called Good Vibes for kind and constructive feedback, which I return to when something has gone wrong. It reminds me that one disappointing experience is only one piece of evidence among many.

Become a beginner again. From time to time, I participate in workshops or courses to work with an unfamiliar material or subject. Removing expertise from the equation gives you an opportunity to experience uncertainty without attaching your professional identity to the outcome. Curiosity can take the place of expectation.

Stretch the scale of uncertainty. Deliberately move slightly beyond what currently feels familiar. Submit the proposal or show an idea before you have resolved everything. Confidence develops when you gradually expand what you are willing to attempt.

Learn through observation. Observe yourself and observe others. Study the trajectories of people whose work you respect, including what happened between their visible achievements. Their rejected ideas, changes of direction and failed experiments allow us to learn without experiencing every lesson ourselves. Do the same with your own experiences. After something succeeds or fails, ask: What did I learn that I did not know before? An unsuccessful outcome can still leave behind knowledge, skills, relationships or a different direction. Success is only one possible return on an experiment.

Frame new projects as experiments. When you enter a new project without knowing what will come of it, try framing it in two ways: as an opportunity and as an experiment. An opportunity contains possibility. An experiment allows the outcome to remain open. Together, they reduce the pressure to succeed and make failure less definitive.

Confidence cannot guarantee that something will work. It gives you enough trust in your ability to respond, learn and continue. This way, uncertainty no longer has to make the decision for you.

~ Fides Linien

Further Reading:

Roxie Nafousi, Confidence: 8 Steps to Knowing Your Worth (2025)

Louise Hay, You Can Heal Your Life (1984)

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We will look more closely at self-doubt and the voices that feed it in the essay next week. Some of the thoughts that make us question our work, direction or right to continue may not have originated within us at all.

“You have so much potential and talent.”
“You should do something with your art.”
“You could go far with what you do.”

At the time, these words meant very little to me because I did not know how to translate them into action.

Despite these encouraging comments, I, therefore, spent many years avoiding the idea of making a living through my art, even though people were already buying my work. The fact that others saw value in what I created was an early indication that my work had the potential to become something meaningful.

I was a student when I sold one of my first CartaStaminea artworks to the father of a friend. After purchasing the work, we sat together and talked about my art. I was comfortable being part of the conversation, but my feelings changed when the discussion shifted from talking with me to talking about me.

The father turned to his daughter and said:

“No, she cannot become a graphic designer. That would be a waste of her potential and talent. She has to become an artist.”

Ironically, while studying Fine Art, I still had no vision of building a career around my creativity, even though I was already moving towards it. I continued developing my artistic skills, but I had not yet learned how to build a life around my work. I simply kept creating because making art gave me a sense of freedom and fulfilment. It was familiar and made me feel at home with myself. The idea that my creativity could become my profession came much later.

Potential has become one of the most misunderstood words in the creative world. I have heard people speak about it as though it were already an achievement, when in reality it is only a possibility.

That is where the misunderstanding begins.

What is the difference between talent and potential?

The difference between talent and potential is subtle, especially in the context of creative work, where the two are often used interchangeably.

Potential describes the possibility that something may develop beyond its current state. It exists in relation to what could become rather than what already is.

Talent is a natural inclination, sensitivity or ability that someone already possesses. It is the raw material: a particular way of seeing, thinking, feeling or making. An artist may have a talent for colour, composition, storytelling or observing nature. Talent alone does not determine what they become. It creates the possibility for development when it is deliberately cultivated.

Talent asks, “What comes naturally to me?”

Potential asks, “What could I become if I consciously develop what is already within me?”

Like a plant, talent is the seed. Potential is the tree that the seed could become. Practice is the cultivation and achievement is the fruit. A seed contains the possibility of a tree, but no one mistakes a seed for a forest. The tree depends on cultivation, weather, nourishment and time. Creative work develops in the same way.

The distinction matters. Being talented becomes part of an identity. Potential becomes a reassuring story. Neither produces the work.

Why we are fascinated by potential

People rarely say: “You have excellent habits.”

Instead, they say: “You have so much potential.”

People love hearing it because potential is comforting. It requires nothing today. An unfinished project cannot disappoint. An unrealised body of work cannot be criticised. Remaining promising often feels safer than becoming accountable.

This is different from imposter syndrome, the feeling of being a fraud. It is not driven by self-doubt, but by identity. Potential describes who we believe we could become, while our work reveals who we are becoming.

The creative world celebrates emerging talent. It pays far less attention to the thousands of days and nights required to develop that talent into something visible.

This is where creative paths begin to separate.

From potential to reality

As a child, I spent countless hours drawing. I was fortunate that my parents encouraged my curiosity and supported my creative path from an early age. After my art teacher invited my parents to a meeting at school to discuss my abilities and explain that she saw particular artistic talent in me, my parents enrolled me in an after-school art programme. They later supported my education at an arts secondary school and my studies in Fine Art (Freie Kunst, Free Arts in Germany), before I completed my Meisterschüler degree, a postgraduate qualification awarded to selected students.

I am deeply grateful for the support and trust my parents gave me because their support created the conditions in which my potential could develop.

Art saved me as a teenager.

I would probably not have passed my Abitur (German university entrance certificate) examinations without the opportunity to take practical art as my specialised subject and complete my final examination in it with an excellent result. Not because I lacked ability, but because I was lazy, stubborn and disliked learning things that were imposed on me rather than driven by my own interests.

My potential was recognised, encouraged and developed from an early age. Without those conditions, my story might have looked very different. I also know my path would have changed had I understood earlier what it means to build a life around creative work.

Potential is a possibility and never a guarantee. It is shaped by our circumstances, decisions and actions. Without support, knowledge, awareness and the right conditions, it remains unrealised. It develops through repetition, deliberate practice, feedback and patience that sustain growth.1 Small decisions that seem insignificant in isolation become defining when repeated over years.

Being recognised as someone with artistic potential was only the first step. Potential itself did not create my body of work. Years of learning, practising, experimenting and continuing through uncertainty gradually transformed ability into something visible.

Potential may open the first door, but walking through it requires commitment and the courage to keep developing. Talent may create the opportunity, but character, discipline and persistence determine how far the journey continues.

Possibility should never be confused with progress

Along the way, there was always a quiet voice in my mind asking whether I should continue on the path I had chosen. Yet I trusted my instinct and believed that the further I climbed, the further I would be able to see. I am still climbing.

Just like potential, talent is never a guarantee of success.

History, and the present day, are full of gifted people whose work remained unfinished, while others with fewer advantages built remarkable bodies of work through discipline, commitment and persistence. Progress depends on consistency, priorities, courage, resilience and the willingness to keep showing up long after the excitement of being promising has faded.

Perhaps the more uncomfortable question is this:

“If I already possess the potential and talent I believe I have, what exactly stands between the person I am today and the person I could become?”

The answer lies in our beliefs, what we prioritise, the environments we grow up in and later choose.

It took me years to understand the conditions I needed in order to create in a way that allowed me to evolve. Gradually, I built a life model that enabled me to remain independent and free enough to develop as both an artist and a consultant.

Your mindset matters

Recognising my potential and believing in it was only the first step. The real decision was to nurture it deliberately until it became something tangible and could sustain a life around it.

Becoming and being an artist is as much about mindset as it is about making art.

At some point, you have to choose this path consciously and take responsibility for your own development.

The way you think shapes the decisions you make, the opportunities you recognise and the persistence you bring to your work. Belief in your own ability and the confidence to keep moving forward are essential. Confidence deserves an essay of its own, and I will return to it in the next edition because it has shaped, and continues to shape, my own journey.

Alongside the obligations of making a living, I gradually developed internal and external systems that gave me the knowledge, time and mental space to create. These systems evolved through years of experimentation, learning and adapting, but also through failures and hardships.

Peers and role models

This is why I believe peers and role models are essential for artists. They provide orientation, expand our understanding of what is possible and show us how creative work can grow into something larger than ourselves.

We can see this across many fields: entrepreneurs who build companies around their ideas, as well as social media influencers and creators who build entire successful businesses around their work. They all started somewhere. Most had to discover their own path or invent their own job without a clear map. Their journeys remind us that we can create value for others while building a sustainable foundation for ourselves.

Transformation is shaped by your decisions, strengthened by your environment and sustained by the systems you build. Otherwise, potential becomes a story other people tell about you instead of something you actively shape. Potential is what others imagine. Practice is what you become.

There is a saying that captures this idea:

“You are what you do, not what you say you will do.”

You become through what you complete. Your actions create evidence of who you are and that evidence shapes your identity.

In the end, the distance between who you are today and who you could become is built one decision at a time. Potential begins the story. Behaviour determines how it unfolds, one decision at a time.

~ Fides Linien

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In the coming essay, we will explore what actually determines whether possibility is fulfilled, taking a closer look at the relationship between talent and self-confidence and how the two shape what we are able to become.

We often believe that the difference between those who succeed and those who do not lies in discipline. I used to believe that too.

Now I think discipline is only part of the story. While it is the engine that keeps us moving, every engine needs a destination. Looking back, I would say discipline explains only about half of my own progress.

Motivation gets us started. Discipline keeps us going.

As a child growing up in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), diligence was rewarded everywhere: at kindergarten, at school and later throughout my life. Productivity was considered a virtue. I drew constantly. My pictures piled up on the kitchen table. My parents and my kindergarten collected them for me and I keep them in a folder today.

I never struggled with discipline itself and kept drawing regardless of my age. The question was never whether I could work hard.

I had spent years developing my art, refining my paper art technique and organised international projects and managed organisations. The discipline to keep going had always been there. I never wanted to fail in front of myself. My discipline appeared wherever I had clarity. Where I lacked clarity, direction or a sense of purpose, progress slowed or stopped altogether. That made me question whether discipline is something we permanently possess.

Is discipline willpower or a personality trait?

Neuroscience shows that our ability to follow through depends on much more than simply forcing ourselves to act. Our brains are constantly evaluating effort, reward and meaning.

A creative who understands why a project exists, who it serves and what it contributes, experiences effort differently from someone working without a clear direction. This creates a stronger motivational signal because the action is no longer experienced as an isolated task. It becomes part of a larger story.

Research on self-regulation also shows that our capacity for discipline can change depending on our environment, energy levels, habits and the support systems we create around ourselves and our work.1 Decisions, especially on our actions, become easier when they are connected to routines and identity (habits). In other words, discipline becomes less dependent on constantly fighting oneself.

And the clearer the map, the easier it becomes to keep walking.

Three findings from neuroscience helped me understand why discipline sometimes comes easily and sometimes feels almost impossible.

1. Dopamine is involved in anticipation

A meaningful goal gives the brain a clearer sense of what to anticipate than a vague ambition. “I want to become successful” gives the brain very little to work with. “I want to build a body of work that supports me financially and is of value to society” creates a concrete target. The clearer the destination, the easier it becomes to recognise progress and sustain effort.2

2. Discipline depends on executive function

The prefrontal cortex, which plays an important role in planning and decision-making, helps us resist immediate impulses and work toward long-term goals. But its performance changes depending on sleep, stress, cognitive overload and emotional state.3 This explains why creatives sometimes experience periods when discipline feels effortless and other times when even simple tasks feel difficult. The capacity changes because the conditions have changed.

3. Identity strengthens habits

Research in behavioural psychology shows that people are more likely to maintain behaviours when those behaviours become connected to identity.4

“I have to make art every day” requires constant negotiation.

“I am an artist and I make art” changes the relationship with the action.

For artists, this is especially relevant because creative careers are built through repeated practice over years. As artists, we often spend years learning how to create. Much less time is spent learning how to build a life around our work.

Out of the blue, into the blue

I never approached my artistic work like an entrepreneur. Nobody taught me about this in school, university or anywhere else. I mainly focused on creating the artwork itself. The framework around it never caught my attention. I worked out of the blue, into the blue, hoping that the next opportunity would somehow appear. I moved from opportunity to opportunity, from exhibition to exhibition. That meant working a lot.

Something in me changed in 2024 when I sat down and wrote clearly defined goals for my professional journey for the first time. I expected the exercise to give me a list of tasks. Instead, it revealed the structure underneath my work. Only then did I see the connections between projects, interests and ambitions that had previously felt unrelated. I realised that my path was not one-dimensional.

I was not building a single body of work. I was building an ecosystem.

That simple exercise completely changed the way I looked at my work. Instead of seeing my many interests as distractions, I started seeing them as opportunities.

I decided to give myself a map.

Put it into words

There is a profound connection between language and the map we create for ourselves.

Many experiences and great ideas begin as intuition. We sense them long before we understand them. The moment we try to put them into words, something changes. Language forces us to select, organise and connect ideas. Patterns that were previously hidden begin to emerge.

This is why writing or journaling can feel surprisingly clarifying. After a thoughtful conversation, whether with someone else or with yourself, you often feel lighter. Giving complexity the structure of language allows us to recognise what was already there.

A simple framework is enough to turn intuition into conscious clarity and direction. You can apply it to every area of your life or business:

*SMART Goals:5

S – Specific: Clearly define what you want to achieve.
M – Measurable: Make sure you can track your progress or success.
A – Achievable: Set a goal that is realistic and possible to accomplish.
R – Realistic: Ensure the goal is important and aligns with your overall objectives.
T – Time-related: Set a deadline or timeframe for completing the goal.

A map of your goals is not something you draw once and forget.

It is like steering a ship: you regularly check your course, adapt to changing conditions and sometimes choose a new destination. That is why I keep asking: “Where do we go from here?”

Writing your goals down is only the beginning. Their real value comes from returning to them, because every review shows you where you are, helps you decide where to go next and points out to the opportunities that support that direction. The bonus is that looking back also shows you how much you have already accomplished and that is the fuel your engine needs to keep moving forward.

There are three other dimensions to this:

Recently, I looked at my goals again. Writing this publication was not on my list, but many of my goals shared the same purpose: supporting creatives in the ways I once needed it for myself.

Once we start following our map, we do not need to know every detail. Many of the details only become clear as we move forward.

Sometimes the plan changes because we have changed. I see that as a sign of growth. Sometimes new opportunities appear that were not part of the original plan but still align with our direction. The goal is not to follow the map rigidly, but to use it as a guide while adjusting our course.

Clarity is the foundation

Perhaps clarity has become so valuable because we live in a time that offers more possibilities than any generation before us.

The abundance of choice creates opportunities, but without clarity, it can quickly become overwhelming, leading us to spend our resources, such as time and energy, exploring paths that do not bring us closer to our goals.

The temptations to do so are everywhere.

I have learned that following every opportunity, or choosing the easiest path instead of the harder one, rarely leads to a coherent body of work. The challenge is not finding opportunities, but knowing which ones belong to your direction.

That requires clarity. Without it, opportunities begin to shape you instead of you shaping your work. Clarity allows us to invest our resources where it matters, stay focused and continue moving even when we do not know exactly what will happen.

Our minds seek coherence. We naturally try to organise our experiences and our environment into meaningful patterns because uncertainty demands cognitive energy and can make us feel insecure. We naturally try to organise our experiences and also our environment into meaningful patterns because uncertainty demands cognitive energy and can indirectly make us feel insecure.

From my own experience as an artist and from observing others, I know that we could produce hundreds of ideas!

The challenge for us is to identify the most relevant and most feasible ones in addition to building an internal and external framework that allows those ideas to become reality and remain sustainable.

Everything I have written so far applies to the architecture, the framework around the creative act. The creative act itself follows different rules. There, uncertainty, experimentation and openness are essential.

We need to know how to navigate both worlds at once: creating structure around the creative act without trying to control the creative act itself.

~ Fides Linien

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Giving yourself a map is only the beginning. Next week, we will explore why having potential is not the same as fulfilling it and why talent alone has never been a guarantee of success …

If you want to make a living from your work, begin by making time to plan – above all, to define your destination and the time you are ready to invest for it.

Only when you know how many artworks need to be sold, at what price, through which channels and what kind of infrastructure is required, are you able to create a path towards that outcome. These questions are not a concession to commerce.

I will elaborate this more in one of my coming essays. Suffice for now to dwell on the building stone for it.

A sustainable creative career is built backwards. The desired outcome determines the decisions and the requisite time.

This essay begins where my first essay on procrastination ended. The deeper challenge is not delaying the work. It is sustaining several serious roles without allowing attention, identity and intention to fragment.

The question, then, is how to build a life in which every decision moves towards the same horizon. Every meaningful decision about creative practice is ultimately a decision about how to spend your time.

Time is precious. Like everyone else, I have only twenty-four hours in a day, and my lifetime is limited. Time is finite and measurable. The mind is neither.

The challenge of a multi-passionate life as a creative is not simply time management. It is the management of attention, identity and clarity.

You cannot fully assign a value to an artwork, even though you can count the hours you spent creating it. Think of everything required for a single piece: the research, the making, revising, logistics, framing and all the invisible decisions and thinking processes inside you that happen along the way. At a certain point, the more time invested, the less payable the work becomes in a conventional economic sense.

Yet an artwork contains multiple dimensions of time.

For my art, for example, there is the time needed to produce the handmade paper, then the time required to create the artwork from it. There is also the time nature needed to grow the plants whose fibres I use.

Perhaps this is why it can be so difficult to answer the simple question: What do you do?

When roles collide

It is already challenging to describe my art. But the work I do beyond it also refuses to fit into one category. Consulting, management, corporate design and fine art coexist within the same person. To an outsider, these may appear to be separate careers. To me, they are different expressions of the same creative mind.

The difficulty lies in moving between the different roles.

Most productivity advice assumes a single direction of travel: one goal, one project, one identity. Many creatives operate differently. Their work resembles a city more than a train line: multiple systems running simultaneously, different districts with different purposes and constant movement between them.

On some days, I am an artist. On others, a consultant, manager or the person who writes these essays. Each role requires a different skill set, language, perspective and decisions.

The work itself is rarely the hardest part. The transition is.

A multi-passionate life can feel like living several lives at once. The skill lies in recognising when your roles can inform one another and when each requires its own space. Internally, everything should enrich everything else. Externally, everything must remain understandable.

Sometimes, different worlds or fields appear unrelated or contradictory. It is up to the creative person to discover whether and where they can fertilise one another.

I experienced how ideas developed through artistic thinking can challenge business assumptions. Management can create structures that support creativity.

The challenge begins when they all demand attention and responsibility at the same time or cause fragmentation: when too many roles compete for the same attention and prevent any of them from receiving the depth of attention they require.

I felt this strongly during my work for the International Association of Hand Papermakers and Paper Artists (IAPMA). For several years, I helped transform the association into a legally registered organisation under German law. After 35 years as an unregistered community, this involved rewriting its statutes together with fellow members, completing the formal registration process and leading several years of transition and organisational development. I was elected President in March 2022. During this period, I established principles of good corporate governance within the association for the first time.

Like a for-profit company, a registered non-profit association requires structures: regulations, manuals, guidelines and clear processes. Since 2021, much of my energy has gone into this kind of work.

I mention this because artists, too, benefit from thinking entrepreneurially. A sustainable creative career requires many of the same functions as any organisation: artistic development, production, marketing, finance, sales and administration.

For many artists, these functions coexist within one person. This does not necessarily require formal departments or separate people, especially at the beginning. However, recognising these different functions creates clarity.

During the past years many invitations came to me through my role as IAPMA President. At times, I wondered whether my identity as an artist had become less visible. Whether this reflected reality or simply my own concern, it raised a practical question: how can different roles coexist without dividing attention beyond usefulness?

The older I get, the less interested I am in managing time itself. What matters more to me is managing attention, energy, identity and intention.

It took me time and reflection to arrive at this conclusion. The first step was understanding what I actually do. Before that, I needed to recognise myself as a multi-passionate person and accept that this was part of my structure rather than something that needed to be simplified.

Building systems that protect creativity

A non-linear career is structurally complex.

This complexity deserves recognition rather than being treated as a personal deficiency. It requires a structure that gives different roles a shared direction and allows them to develop without competing for every hour of the day.

What appears to be a time-management problem is often an attention-switching problem.1 The challenge is not only how much time we have, but also how much of our attention remains available for work that is meaningful for us.

A focused mind is one of the most valuable resources in life as a creative.

Protect the hours of the day or night, when your mind is clearest and your creativity most active.

Deal with smaller tasks promptly, but give demanding creative work uninterrupted space.

Separate administration from the time of creation and communicate from the role you are inhabiting.

None of these practices are revolutionary. Their value lies elsewhere: they reduce unnecessary mental transitions and protect attention from constant dispersal.

Many creatives associate control with quality. Sometimes that connection is valid. Yet when every decision must pass through one person, every kind of work can become a source of exhaustion.

I used to do far more myself than I do today.

Delegation is one way of protecting attention. If you have the means, outsource or delegate what does not require your unique contribution. Delegation protects your attention for the work that needs your particular skill, judgement and presence. It is not a sign of reduced involvement. It is a conscious choice about where your energy creates the greatest value.

Stay organised, but do not confuse organisation with filling every available hour.

Protect periods of focused work from interruption and leave room for play, rest and apparent unproductivity. These are often the spaces where ideas recover their depth and unexpected connections emerge.

Set priorities. Allow the role most needed in a particular season to lead while keeping the others alive.

Set boundaries and say no where necessary. A clear direction requires discernment. Sometimes saying no, or accepting a no, protects the time and focus required for the work that matters most. And not every interesting opportunity deserves your attention.

If you are a multi-passionate creative, return regularly to one question:

What am I trying to build through all this?

Let the answer guide what you accept, postpone, delegate and protect.

~ Fides Linien

Further reading:

Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (2021)

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Even though I was constantly working, after finishing projects or tasks, another application was waiting, another text left unwritten, another social media post I knew I should publish, many artworks I should finish or wanted to start creating. I often prioritized work for other people over my own, even though I knew, at least at some level, that my own work mattered more to me.

If discipline was the problem, then discipline could also be the solution. Work harder. Plan better. Try again tomorrow.

That explanation was comforting.

I eventually realised I was not avoiding the work. I was avoiding the person the work required me to become.

None of this looked like procrastination. It looked like responsibility.

One idea, in particular, caught my attention: procrastination follows different patterns.

Psychologist Dr. Linda Sapadin, together with Jack Maguire, identified and popularised six classic procrastination archetypes in their 1997 book It’s About Time! The Six Styles of Procrastination and How to Overcome Them.1 Their work frames procrastination not as a simple time-management problem, but as an emotional defence mechanism rooted in different personality patterns.

Perfectionists get stuck refining because nothing ever feels good enough, so they need to learn to ship work that is good enough. Dreamers stay in ideas and avoid execution, so they benefit from structured steps and clear daily action. Worriers become paralysed by worst-case thinking, so they need to replace “What if?” with “I can handle this” and start small. Defiers resist external pressure, so they need to reframe tasks as self-chosen. Crisis-makers rely on last-minute adrenaline, so they benefit from artificial deadlines and accountability. Overdoers overcommit, lose sight of their own priorities and need firm boundaries with protected time for focused or creative work.

This highlights something simple but important: procrastination does not look the same for everyone, and several of these archetypes live within all of us.

The German translation for freelancing is Selbstständig, a word that can literally be read as self and constantly. It carries the idea that work as a freelancer has no natural stopping point.

For me, this perspective creates a quiet sense that I am never doing enough for my career, even when most projects are finished and there is little left outstanding.

No matter how much I worked, I often felt that the results arrived too late, not least because I was juggling several projects at once.

Eventually, I realised I was not avoiding the work. I was avoiding the right work, the work that required me to change and made uncomfortable change inevitable.

Psychologist Tim Pychyl, one of the leading researchers on procrastination, argues that procrastination is fundamentally an issue of emotional regulation.2 We postpone tasks not because we are lazy, but because beginning forces us to experience emotions we would rather avoid.

His research described something I had experienced for years but had never been able to name.

Creative work redefines you

Creative work asks something different of us than most professions.

Every artwork, essay, composition or photograph is more than something we produce. It becomes evidence of identity and reveals what kind of person is willing to do the work. You gradually become the person your ideas require.

What surprised me most was not how quickly The Creative Core took shape, but how slowly I accepted what it meant. I could publish the essays before I could call myself a writer.

I had been thinking about something like this for a long time. Notes and fragments of essays existed on my notes app in my phone, but I had no name for it and no platform through which to share it.

Then, over the past months, I noticed a pattern. In conversations with friends and fellow creatives, we kept returning to the same thoughts, questions and struggles. Somehow, these conversations came together and made me realise that I wanted to explore these subjects more deeply and share my reflections with others for motivation, inspiration, clarity or hope.

The most authentic way felt like creating a living text, one that develops as life itself does, and bringing it to readers in the form you are now experiencing. Today, technology makes this possible. About three weeks ago, I felt a strong urge to finally start something which became The Creative Core.

So instead of spending a long time planning, I moved directly into research and execution. Curiosity carries me forward more than planning ever could.

I still would not call myself an author. To me, writing is a tool, a way to communicate ideas, observations and knowledge. Yet this publication is evidence that I became someone willing to write before I fully felt like a writer. Others may already see me as the author of The Creative Core, while I am still catching up with this new identity. Writing can be experienced as a calling, an identity, a craft, or a way of expressing and communicating ideas. Each relationship with writing is valid and meaningful.

Why creative careers feel different

You are not only executing ideas created by others. You are bringing your own ideas, perspectives and beliefs into the world through your work and your portfolio. You are gradually letting go of one version of yourself while constructing another.

No wonder resistance appears. No wonder we hesitate.

The greatest resistance appears when the work begins to inevitably redefine us.

I did not get that insight all at once. It began in early 2023 when I sat down to create my first vision board. It was an exercise I had never done before. The first thing I realised was that it had been a long time since I had truly asked myself what I wanted for my own life.

What did I want to do? Who did I want to be? Who did I want to become?

To answer these questions, I first had to understand where I had been. I found myself feeling sad and disappointed. For years, I had worked for other people. I had helped for-profit and non-profit organisations grow and succeed. I had fulfilled expectations, solved problems and created value. Yet, somewhere along the way, it felt as if I had quietly postponed my own artistic career.

While I enjoyed working for others, my artistic work became something I allowed myself to do only after everything else was finished and everyone else was satisfied.

Looking back, I realised I had not simply postponed projects. I had postponed becoming the person I wanted to be.

I do not see it as a mistake to have worked for others. Those experiences shaped me and gave me a lot of valuable knowledge. But I had given them more time than was ultimately good for my artistic career. That discovery made me curious rather than ashamed. If I had managed to help other people build meaningful careers, why was I not building my own artistic career? I realized I had to change course.

Change is inevitable as you create

I started researching. Psychology. Philosophy. Neuroscience. Entrepreneurship. Marketing.

Not only because I wanted another productivity system, but also because I wanted to understand myself better.

The research pointed in an unexpected, deeper direction. Research suggests that we tend to discount future effort, making tomorrow’s work appear easier than today’s.3 Delaying can feel rational in the moment, even when we quietly know that something is being avoided.

I believe that, especially as creatives, we often protect our current identity because it represents comfort, certainty and safety.

Psychologist Glynis M. Breakwell introduced the idea that people rely on several principles to construct and protect their identity: continuity (stability over time), distinctiveness (being unique), self-esteem and self-efficacy (feeling capable and in control). When our physical, social or emotional environment challenges these principles, our identity can feel threatened. As a result, we often defend the familiar version of ourselves.4 Creative work challenges this natural tendency.

Creating changes how we see ourselves and how others see us.

Once you show up every day, you can no longer say you are someone who could create. You become someone who does.

Once you publish, you become an author. Once you exhibit, you become an artist. Once you send the proposal or application, you become someone willing to risk rejection.

The work changes the person doing it and changes how that person is perceived.

That is why procrastination feels so personal. It is resistance to transformation.

The real work is not forcing yourself to become more productive. It is closing the gap between the person you believe yourself to be and the person your actions are quietly proving you can become.

Now, when I notice myself procrastinating, I no longer see it as lack of discipline. I see it as information. A signal that some part of me is still negotiating the identity hidden inside the task.

Drops in the ocean

So, the next time you catch yourself procrastinating, do not ask: “How can I become more disciplined?”

Ask instead: “Do I stay the same if I do not begin?”

I have realised that I often produce my highest quality work when I stop overthinking outcomes and the opinions of others. When I simply begin, create evidence and focus on what I want to contribute and see in the world.

To thrive as an artist, or any other creative for that matter, it helps to develop self-awareness by asking yourself questions that close the gap between how your mind works, how creativity behaves psychologically and how your practice is structured.

Beyond recognising patterns in your own behaviour, it also helps to understand how the brain responds to creative work and how the wider system around it actually functions.

Becoming always begins long before you feel ready.

~ Fides Linien

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Like I once asked myself as an artist, you might also ask yourself:

Does my work matter?

How do I sustain a consistent practice?

How do I build a life around my work?

How do I make a living from my work?

How do I keep going when doubt is constant?

What do others think about my work?

What am I willing to sacrifice, or not sacrifice, for this work?

…

I witnessed the same struggles repeating across creatives in different forms.

The medium changes, but the questions do not. They are part of life as a creative.

For a long time, I felt the need to create something more precise and more profound for myself and for others. Not another publication about creativity in general or quick tips, but an outlet to share my knowledge and experience. An attempt to articulate and explore patterns I kept observing in my own life as an artist and consultant and across creative disciplines and cultures.

What I do know is that living life as a creative is often misunderstood. Especially in relation to artists, I have experienced that it is still framed by others through outdated ideas of talent, inspiration or luck.

I grew up hearing things like:

Your art only pays when you become famous.

You need to become famous before you can be a real artist.

You will only become famous after you are dead.

Art does not pay.

I do not agree with that framing.

The world around the work

What matters most to me is not only the creative work itself, but everything around it.

Especially as an artist, you are gradually building a body of work, a reputation and a world in which your artworks can exist and sell.

After studying fine art and completing my Master Class (Meisterschüler) degree, I spent over a decade in the high-end luxury fashion industry while developing my own artistic practice and visual language. Across these different roles, one question kept returning: how does my creative work become sustainable over time?

That question gradually led me beyond the artwork itself towards resilience, clarity, structure and strategy, and eventually to the understanding that management, in this sense, becomes a creative act, translating vision into form and action.

Today, whether I work as a fine artist, an entrepreneur, president of an international art association or director of a foundation, I am still exploring the same question.

Once an artwork is finished, most people move immediately to the next artwork. I did that myself. But since 2024, I have deliberately stepped away from intensive periods of practical artistic work and from creating larger artworks because I am currently building my own gallery, Musedra. This involves a great deal of (creative) digital work, and I currently spend most of my working time on the computer. This is a self-imposed path I have chosen.

I postponed further practical artistic work to “prepare the crop” for what comes next.

Building a gallery or this publication is not my final purpose as an artist. I am building my own unique world. Musedra is part of it. The Creative Core is part of it.

That is how I came to understand that the space between creative acts deserves attention.

And this publication lives in that space.

Structures and gaps

Creativity continues beyond the visible work, expanding into the structures of our life and the gap between output and identity.

That is how I think about creativity in a broader sense:

When we zoom out, it becomes a continuous negotiation between what you create and what your work slowly makes of you, between who you are and who you are becoming.

This includes, among other things:

Resilience and decision-making under uncertainty,

Long-term identity formation and transformation,

Strategic thinking about visibility and survival,

Repetition and discipline without external enforcement.

These are the invisible structures of the life as a creative. They are rarely visible, but they shape everything: foundation, mindset, strategy, execution and impact. Living as a creative is not a romantic condition. Beyond talent, it requires passion, courage, discipline, planning, strategy, repetition, entrepreneurship and long-term thinking.

And most of all, creative work unfolds over long stretches of solitude.

At a certain point, I began to understand that creative progress rarely follows straight lines. As an artist, you sometimes need to take shortcuts, walk triangular paths or venture onto paths that nobody has walked before. You need to discover hidden paths and, ultimately, find your own and make your own map.

It is one of the most uncertain, disciplined and demanding ways of living. Being a freelancer is already a difficult path, and being a freelance artist is an even more demanding one.

I will explore in this publication becoming and overcoming: how creative people move through uncertainty, develop strength and build meaning through their work over time.

The Creative Core is made for people who have chosen that path. It is where imagination, reality and action converge.

Creativity becomes visible when this system is in motion:

Ideas become artworks.

Artworks become memories.

Memories become identities.

Identities shape culture.

Culture produces new ideas.

Creativity continues long after the work is complete.

With every essay, we will uncover another part of what it takes not only to create meaningful work, but to build a life that can sustain it.

~ Fides Linien

I am launching The Creative Core today as something still forming.

The publication explores the architecture and systems of the life as a creative through the lens of psychology, philosophy and entrepreneurship.

The focus is on conditions that shape creative work before an artwork exists, while it is being made and long after it has been completed.

Questions about identity, discipline, strategy, visibility and making a living. None of these exist in isolation. Together they form the conditions that allow creative work to flourish and to endure.

Most conversations about creativity begin with what can be seen or experienced: the artwork, the song, the book, the collection, the exhibition. We talk about outcomes because outcomes are visible, presentable, explainable. But an artwork is only the visible trace of life as a creative.

The work that makes it possible is largely invisible. It unfolds before the first mark is made, during the uncertainty of the process and long after a work is finished, in the space between two works. It is in this gap where the real work takes place.

Making a creative work and building your life as a creative are not the same. Over time, they become inseparable, each shaping the other.

Creative work is the ongoing formation of identity under uncertainty, shaped by the distance between what you are capable of and what you are able or willing to enact at any given moment.

Identity. Discipline. Action. Visibility.

These conditions determine whether ideas remain possibilities or become reality.

The essays of The Creative Core are written from that perspective by an artist whose work has moved between artistic practice, luxury fashion, graphic design, consulting, management, leadership and entrepreneurship.

The careers of creatives are almost always explained in retrospect, once coherence has emerged and uncertainty has been turned into narrative. But little is written from inside the process itself: about the moments when identity is still shifting, confidence is inconsistent, direction remains unclear and the next step is not yet visible.

Why does this matter to you?

In the first essay series, I will, among others, explore procrastination, discipline, impostor syndrome, confidence, talent and success.

Reflections on these topics are for those building not only creative work, but also a sustained life and career as a creative. The Creative Core is a weekly essay series which will grow over time into a multi-dimensional resource for practitioners.

Because a creative work begins long before it is visible.

The architecture that makes it possible is not.

That is why The Creative Core exists.

~ Fides Linien

Who this is for

The Creative Core is for artists, designers, writers, photographers, musicians, architects, creative entrepreneurs, students, makers, doers, thinkers and anyone committed to building creative work that lasts.

If you recognise that a sustainable creative career requires more than talent, inspiration or information alone, you are in the right place.

What you will find here

Talent and knowledge alone rarely translate into meaningful creative careers.

The Creative Core explores the foundations that shape your identity, influence your choices and determine your direction. It offers perspectives and systems that help you build a sustainable life as a creative.

As a creative, you are the medium through which your work comes into the world. Understanding yourself is therefore an essential part of developing your practice and career.

The right structures create the conditions in which creativity can flourish and a meaningful creative practice can endure.

Through psychology, philosophy and entrepreneurship, these essays develop a coherent thinking system rather than offering isolated tips or quick fixes. They are designed to help you understand not only what to do, but why you do what you do.

Over time, The Creative Core will grow into a resource of essays, practical frameworks and tools that you can return to throughout your creative career.

I hope this becomes a place where you can pause, think more deeply and build your creative life with greater clarity, intention and confidence.

Where to begin

If you are new, I recommend reading the Founding Essay first, followed by Essay #1, then simply continue in order. Together, they form the foundation of The Creative Core.

Every Sunday, one new essay will be ready for your inbox to help solve one more piece of the puzzle.

This publication is not meant to be a monologue. It grows through conversation. I would be interested to get to know about the questions you are carrying. Simply reply to any post or email.

See you soon

I am genuinely glad you are here and looking forward to building The Creative Core together with you.

Warm regards