Stop Picking a Lane: The Case for Being Artistically Undisciplined

Last month I finished a watercolor series about highway rest stops. The week after that, I wrote three chords of a song I'll probably never finish. Right now, there's a half-built marionette on my desk judging me silently. If you'd asked me five years ago, I would've called this a problem. Now I call it a portfolio.

The Tyranny of the Niche

We live in the golden age of "find your niche." Every creative advice video, every branding webinar, every well-meaning aunt at Thanksgiving asks the same question: "So, what kind of artist are you?" As if the answer is a job title you pick once and laminate.

Here's the thing nobody tells you: the niche is a marketing concept, not an artistic one. Niches sell. They don't make. The making—the actual, messy, joyful business of creation—has never once respected a category label.

Polymaths Weren't Weird, They Were Normal

We put Leonardo da Vinci on a pedestal like he was some genetic lottery winner, a once-per-civilization anomaly. But step back. The Renaissance didn't celebrate specialists; it celebrated people who connected things. Leonardo studied anatomy to paint better. He studied water to engineer better. Everything fed everything.

Or look closer to home. David Bowie reinvented himself so many times that reinvention practically became his genre. Maya Angelou sang, danced, wrote poetry, and directed films. Lin-Manuel Miranda got the idea for Hamilton reading a biography on vacation—history feeding music feeding theater feeding a cultural reset.

The through-line isn't talent. It's permission. These artists gave themselves permission to wander, and the wandering is where the collisions happened.

Cross-Training for Your Brain

I think of creative restlessness like an athlete thinks of cross-training. A marathon runner who also swims isn't distracted—she's building lungs and legs that a runner who only runs never develops.

When I spend a week painting, I'm learning about color and negative space. When I come back to writing, that knowledge shows up uninvited, in the rhythm of a sentence or the restraint of a description. Songwriting taught me more about pacing a blog post than any writing workshop ever did. Every medium is a secret class in every other medium.

The scatterbrained artist isn't behind. They're compounding interest.

But What About Finishing Things?

Look, I can hear the objections from here. "You never finish anything." "You can't build an audience jumping around." Fair concerns. So let me offer a reframe: you don't owe every idea a finished product. Some ideas exist to teach you something and then move on, like a hermit crab borrowing a shell.

That said, if you want to actually ship work—and I recommend it, because finished things have a magic that half-things don't—try this: pick one project as your "home base" and let everything else be practice. My home base is this site. The marionette? Practice. The rest-stop watercolors? Practice that accidentally became a series. The point isn't to abandon commitment. It's to stop treating your curiosity like a character flaw.

The American Problem with Being a Generalist

There's something distinctly American about our discomfort with the generalist. We're a country of elevator pitches and job titles and "so, what do you do?" The polymath doesn't fit on a business card, and somewhere along the way we decided that meant something was wrong with them.

But scratch the surface of any truly interesting creative career and you'll find a tangle of influences and side quests. The novelist who was a chef. The musician who studied architecture. The painter who spent a decade as a truck driver. The tangle is the voice. Your weird combination of obsessions is the one thing no other artist on earth can copy.

Give Yourself the Assignment of Wandering

Here's my challenge for you this month: once a week, make something in a medium you have zero business touching. Bad pottery. A terrible haiku about your neighbor's leaf blower. A song on the accordion you bought at a garage sale in Tucson. Don't post it. Don't monetize it. Don't brand it.

Just let your brain take the scenic route.

Because the truth is, "scatterbrained" is what they call you before anyone realizes you were building a language all your own. Stay restless, friends. It's not a bug. It never was.