How can we measure the value of hobbies and personal development?

 At some point I found a Reddit AMA with Bo Burnham in which someone asked something along the lines of, “What advice do you have for an aspiring poet?” Burnham’s response was something along the lines of, “No need to aspire; if you’re writing poetry, you’re a poet!” Burnham then went on to address the thought that most of us probably have when we see such a response, which is something along the lines of, “Yes, sure, but how do I measure and prove to people that I am, indeed, a poet?” Applying this question to myself, I sometimes wonder: Can I call myself an artist when I draw one doodle on my notepad because I promised myself that I’d draw something every day, but then I don’t draw anything for the next eight days? There’s gotta be a threshold somewhere, right?

I think this topic branches off into a lot of different things. There is a reality in Burnham’s half-serious sentiment that if you are actively doing something, then you are technically a doer of that thing. We can all agree to that, right? And yet it seems that that is simply not enough for most of us. In order for most of us to consider ourselves a “real” doer of something, we have to somehow be successful at that thing, and we need people to recognize our success. I’m not going to ask the question of why this is because I’m not trying to get into some crazy philosophical discussion. I think I am more interested in the technical side of the question, which is: How can we measure personal growth and development so that even if we are not commercially or socially successful at something, we can still feel accomplished in our personal endeavors?

This is a question I often struggle with. I don’t know why, but I can have a hard time doing something if I can’t ultimately put a number on it or generate some sort of visual indication that whatever I’ve done has somehow been productive or useful. In September I finished graduate school and found myself with a fresh calendar full of free time and I couldn't stop asking: What should I do? It was only a few weeks ago that I started feeling OK with the idea of doing something without keeping score, like painting or not painting or looking out the window or just plain sitting on the couch and doing nothing without feeling a little guilty, or without wishing that someone would come along and give me some praise or some criticism on what I had accomplished. 

Even while writing this I can't get the idea out of my head that whatever comes out of this writing session needs to be good or somehow recognized by other people. So I'm going to just leave it with the ending that I originally wrote when I started writing this back in November, before I planned on sharing it with anyone and before I decided to revisit it today and probably edit it a bit too much: Congratulations, Briana. You just wrote something with two completely different themes happening and none of it makes sense. Go to bed.