For anyone who can commit to the long haul, I highly recommend having a goal in your life that spans its entirety. There are a few better words for it, even: a practice, a purpose, a horizon.

A common beginner question online for many creative crafts is "How long will it take to get good?" There are some benchmarks that are helpful: Becoming industry hireable can take a number of years. Being able to play your favorite song on guitar could take a year, drawing cartoons could take a few months if you're studious.

We all have plenty of experience with time-bound landmarks in plenty of domains: Exams, graduation, job hunting, feature launches, etc. The energy behind it is electric. Those short-term goals early in a practice can feel like the honeymoon phase of a new relationship. Seeking every waking moment to be together. Learning all the nuanced details of that special other. But, in the same way that marriage is really the starting line, our initial aims in a practice are preludes to a real wealth of discovery and exploration all unto itself.

That feeling is different, and more enjoyable, thankfully, if at least not more sustainable. No individual piece needs to be amazing. Even a year of wandering with seemingly little to show for it can be pointed to further down the road as having been fertile soil for ripe fruits. There's a trust in the process as a whole that carries the ship through choppy waters.

Rilke in Letters to a Young Poet on this:

To be an artist means: not to calculate and count; to grow and ripen like a tree which does not hurry the flow of its sap and stands at ease in the spring gales without fearing that no summer may follow. It will come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are simply there in their vast, quiet tranquility, as if eternity lay before them. It is a lesson I learn every day amid hardships I am thankful for: patience is all!