We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Thomas Taylor a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Thomas, we’re so appreciative of you taking the time to share your nuggets of wisdom with our community. One of the topics we think is most important for folks looking to level up their lives is building up their self-confidence and self-esteem. Can you share how you developed your confidence?
When I started elementary school, I was diagnosed with amblyopia (more commonly called lazy eye) and I had to wear a patch over my good eye to try and get my bad eye to work better. I was also deficient in math and reading at school and my parents made me do workbooks over the summers to help me catch up and/or to keep me on track. Imagine trying to read letters, words, numbers and mathematical symbols with an eye that isn’t transmitting images to your brain properly, and then having to work with those letters, words, numbers and symbols successfully or risk getting failing grades in school.
One might reflect at this point in my narrative that it is quite ironic that I should have grown up to be a manager in a bookkeeping department and also a author and painter.
It is true that as a child, I suppose I could easily have given up, but I assumed that pushing through was what everyone did to overcome their difficulties, so I pushed through.
As it was, when the patch finally came off my good eye, my vision wasn’t much better in my bad eye, but I had by this time caught up in math and reading abilities, and I discovered that having the one good eye to work with meant I could do everything faster. Much faster than many of the other kids, in fact.
From this experience I learned that achievement in some areas can be the result of drive and willpower to see things through. If I made a mistake that would come back to bite me later on, it was not realizing that when some people have difficulties, they don’t try very hard to overcome them, or they don’t try at all, and then they blame you when you succeeded where they did not succeed.
On the other hand, I believe it is a lie that we can get better at some things if we keep practicing. I have never been and never will be great at sports, for example. I’ve never demonstrated skill, talent, or stamina in any sporting activity, and no amount of coaching or practice or persistence has increased my achievement levels in that area.
With all of this said, how does all of this relate to self-esteem?
Well, I don’t link confidence directly to self-esteem. While it is true I am partly the sum of my achievements, I believe that having good self-esteem means accepting that I have limitations that cannot be overcome, and embracing the parts of myself that will never change.
It also means accepting criticism when it is founded, and rejecting criticism where it is unfounded.
If I have fallen short of accomplishing something because I didn’t try hard enough, or if I have failed to do something because of laziness, or neglect, I deserve the criticism I receive.
But sometimes when someone tells me, “Step into my shoes and walk around in them, and then you’ll understand why something cannot be done,” I’ve often found that I have already stepped in their shoes and walked around in them… and overcame the problems that stymie them. Or when they say “That’s impossible,” it may be that I have already done what they are saying cannot be done. And so I may be inclined to dismiss what they say or think of me.
Applying this to my creative life, I have to say that when you are in the creative field, there are always people who are not going to like what you write or what you paint, and that’s fine. Not everyone likes what I like. But then there are others who actively hate what I say in my writing or they hate what I create in my paintings. Whenever this happens, I assume that it’s because the people being hateful or the people who are nay-saying can’t identify with me or cannot identify with what I am thinking, or cannot identify with what I am presenting to them. The irony is that what a creative person like me is trying to do is reach other people through my creative works. Interaction is a two way street, and people are not going to receive my attempts to relate to them if they are not receptive to my overtures.
Thus when someone is unnecessarily critical of me, it doesn’t affect my self-esteem, because I know I tried to reach them, communicate with them, listen to them, hear them, and tell them what I have to say. I’ve done my best. Life goes on, and so must I.
Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?
I am an author, artist, poet, and photographer. So far I have published and/or self-published sixteen books, three poems, ten essays, and over sixty short stories under my name and many pseudonyms. I have also co-written three songs which made it onto an album.
My artwork (acrylic on canvas) hangs in the US, Canada, and Hungary. I call my style “precise impressionism.” I like to capture the essence of things in bright colors, but in precise form. You will not find too many shades or nuances in my artwork.
I have also done commercial art, having painted two album covers, and for a period of four years, co-painted commercial art with my wife (Elyse Bruce) that was used nationwide to advertise a literary festival in the area where we live.
I will have three stories coming up in an anthology my wife and I will be publishing later this year. The anthology is entitled “Ghosts in the Machine” and has stories with a supernatural bent throughout. I also have quite a few paintings in the works. One that I just finished will be used as the cover for an upcoming book I am working on.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
I attribute the success of my creative endeavors to three things: Honed powers of observation, the ability to hyperfocus, and the ability to multitask.
If a creative person is going to write about someone or something accurately, he has to observe that thing or that person in as much detail as possible.
Earlier in my life, I had a friend who was an actuary who was able to show me that by cataloging the way people have behaved in the past and by watching how those same people behave now, you can almost always predict how they will behave in the future, especially if you compare their behaviors with those of thousands of other similar people on whom data has been gathered and quantified.
This is why two people owning two homes side by side, and having identical jobs and family situations can have the same insurance carrier but be charged different rates. Their credit ratings, and other data that has been collected on them, can be used as a predictor of whether or not they are more or less of a risk to insure.
Working in the banking industry later on allowed me to see financial analysts and actuarial statistics in operation with regard to who would and who wouldn’t receive loans and why.
I also had the benefit of working for a consulting firm for non-profits. One of my many responsibilities was to input survey responses into a database and tabulate data. This was in addition to transcribing the notes of interviews with major donors during feasibility studies. It did not take me -or the databases- long to draw associations between types of people and their willingness to give to an organization or support an organization’s efforts.
Keeping all of this in mind, I draw on these experiences to observe people in the present day, in order to deepen characterization in my stories, and to focus my attention on some things more than others in my paintings. It would probably be a rare occurrence for a character in one of my stories to act “out of character” and it would be equally rare for me to put something in my paintings that would come across as a non-sequitur, since I am primarily concerned with painting something people can relate to, and not so much anything abstract.
If you’re a writer or an artist, but especially if you are both, you need to have the ability to hyperfocus. This means concentrating on what you are doing to the exclusion of all else for a long period of time. “A long period of time” could mean hours. I’ve often spent hours writing just a few paragraphs, or trying to get one square inch of a painting just right. In both instances, a lot of mental energy can be expended when I am trying to get something finished. In the second instance -when I paint in other words- a lot of physical exactitude is necessary. One errant brush stroke can result in a lot of lost time to correct the error.
But hardest of all is multitasking. The properties of the acrylic paint I use dictate just about everything I do. If I don’t allow enough drying time on a part of a painting, I might smudge it if I try painting something next to the wet part too soon. And so I have to set the painting aside and go do something else, which might be working on another painting, or working on a story, or doing the dishes. At any given time, I have three or four stories in process and just as many paintings in the works, and all the while that I am focused on one of those creative works, I am keeping everything associated with the composition of the rest of the works in the back of my mind.
So on the one hand, I might be hyperfocusing on one thing for hours, but on the other hand, I might be jumping from task to task every few minutes.
The advice I have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these attributes is to do what is required or don’t do it at all. Both mediums, writing and painting, require that you use your powers of observation, and that you hyperfocus or multitask as the need arises. If you cannot do these things, or if you can only do them for so long, you will never fully immerse yourself in what you’re doing. The risk that follows is that your audience, be they readers or art patrons, will see the flaws in your work.
We’ve all got limited resources, time, energy, focus etc – so if you had to choose between going all in on your strengths or working on areas where you aren’t as strong, what would you choose?
Some things I witnessed as a banker taught me a crucial lesson about how the mind works. When someone comes in for a loan and is turned down, it is not uncommon for that person to say “I’m going to keep going to every bank I can find, and I am going to keep applying for loans until I succeed in getting one!” While we can admire that person’s persistence, that attitude will likely result in a loan with a higher interest rate than expected, which in turn might result in a default and foreclosure years later.
A better way to approach the same situation is to ask the loan officer why you were turned down and what you can do to improve your likelihood of getting a loan in the future. In the United States, lenders are required to tell you why you’ve been turned down for a loan if credit played a role in their decision. So whatever they tell you, be it lowering your debt, raising your income, finding a better job, or what have you… do it. And while you do it, remember that when you get turned down for a loan, the lender was doing you a favor. The lender may have spared you a higher interest rate, or saved you from being foreclosed on at some point had you gotten the loan.
No one likes being told “This is why you have been rejected.” Those words sometimes get mistranslated in our minds to “You are a reject.” But we should hear the words as they were spoken. The intended meaning was not “You are a reject.” The intended meaning was “You are not qualified at present.” The operative words in that phase are “at present.” If we are not qualified for something we want, then what we need to do is make ourselves qualified.
Another way of saying the same thing is this: Sometimes hearing that we are wrong, deficient, not qualified, unacceptable, etc., is what we need to hear. If we do not correct our faults, eliminate our shortcomings, and turn our weaknesses into strengths, there is always someone else who can do things better than we can. These more suitable people will step in and grab the opportunities we could have had had we pushed ourselves harder.
This is why I push myself hard no matter what.
There are downsides to having my attitude. People don’t like someone who knows a little bit about everything and who is competent in a lot of different areas. If you think about that statement for a minute, you will begin to see how true it is. Just about everyone can change a light bulb, and no one will give you a second glance if you do it. Some people can switch out a socket or a switch and gain other people’s admiration. Fewer still can extend a circuit, and doing so might make people a little bit envious, and maybe a little bit jealous. Only qualified electricians ought to be wiring something into a fuse box, and hardly anyone wants to pay the rates the electrician charges for doing it. I daresay the best electricians are the ones people hate the most because they do the job right and get paid well for it.
I’m the kind of guy who can safely extend an electrical circuit without drawing too much voltage through the line, and I have a similar level of competence in a lot of different areas. And as people reading this might expect, I excel at writing, painting, and photography.
People might explain all of this away by saying “He’s a polymath. He was born with the ability to do many things extremely well.” But that would not be the truth. The truth is, I worked hard to learn what I know, and I’ve worked hard to accomplish what I have. Don’t think for a minute that I am putting myself upon a pedestal either. While I have earned most of my successes, my faults are entirely mine as well… and I have a lot of faults.
At the same time, as I have indicated elsewhere in this interview, I know my limits and will not push myself beyond them if there is no advantage in doing so. I am poor at sports, and no amount of practice or coaching has changed that. So, I am not going to expend much energy trying to improve in that area, despite the potential benefits to my physical health.
If I had to leave everyone with one idea, it would be that every person needs to decide what is right for them. We are all on our own individual journeys. What works best for me is pushing myself, even in areas where I am weak. Most of the time, I have not been disappointed in the outcome from those efforts.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://thomasdtaylor.wordpress.com/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Author-Thomas-D-Taylor-Fan-Page-Official-271277696233883
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/ttaylor_author/
- Other: https://www.amazon.com/Thomas-Taylor/e/B005LLGQU6
Image Credits
Photos of Thomas D. Taylor by Elyse Bruce. All other photos by Thomas D. Taylor.