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Thinking of Neil Gaiman's commencement speech this morning:

And Fifthly, while you are at it, make your art. Do the stuff that only you can do.

The urge, starting out, is to copy. And that’s not a bad thing. Most of us only find our own voices after we’ve sounded like a lot of other people. But the one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.

The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you’re walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.

The things I’ve done that worked the best were the things I was the least certain about, the stories where I was sure they would either work, or more likely be the kinds of embarrassing failures people would gather together and talk about until the end of time. They always had that in common: looking back at them, people explain why they were inevitable successes. While I was doing them, I had no idea.

That's extra reassuring if you are someone whose interests span multiple disciplines, crafts, and mediums. Heck, if you blog from a code editor, I'd say you're one of those people! Making that which only you can.

After having spent many years squarely fitting into a genre, I have to say that the work is all the more meaningful when it's such a unique combination of skills. When, truly, it's something only you can make. There's a mission there. There are ideas looking to come into the world where only a select number of skills can get them there.

Make genre pieces. Make math rock, haikus, and landscape paintings, sure. But, also, make math rock music videos where the lyrics follow haiku structures with a landscape painting as the album art.