Uglytude

A year ago, I lost my job. I left ten years of scientific research behind. It hurt, and at the same time I knew I couldn't keep walking down that road. Burnout, and some feelings I couldn't quite name.

My career and the life I wanted had a fight. So I made a bold decision: try something completely unrelated to everything I'd done before.

I started posting my drawings online, consistently. Drawing is my hobby. It began with journaling, sketching little decorations next to the notes I copied down. So drawing was never really art to me. It was part of keeping a record. How I felt today, written down. One color for the happy days, another for the sad ones. Whether it looked good was never supposed to matter.

Back when I still had the job, I had already given myself a challenge: stop copying, draw from my own references, and let it be ugly. In an ordinary sketchbook. At first I didn't dare to draw eyes, and I only trusted myself with two colors. The goal was one drawing a day, no matter how it turned out. Thirty days later, I could feel that I had learned to draw. My proportions are still off today, but somehow they look right together now.

Posting online meant drawing on livestream. And on livestream, I crash all the time. I draw little girls, no sketch lines, just going wherever the pen goes. Sometimes the eyes go wrong, sometimes the face shape is off, sometimes the colors come out as something I never wanted.

But it was exactly in all that crashing that something clicked. You can't talk yourself into "keep going, the next one will be pretty," because the next one probably won't be. So swap the goal: make ugly ones. When ugly is the goal, ugly becomes normal. You make ninety-nine failures normal, and that's how you reach the hundredth. Nobody makes a good one on the first try.

I gave this idea a name. In Chinese, 耐丑力: the ability to endure the ugly. Then I went looking for an English word and ended up inventing one. Uglytude. An attitude towards your own drawings.

Drawing and posting, drawing and posting, I ended up with eighteen thousand followers. And Uglytude grew. From an idea I used to talk myself into drawing, into a video where people sketched along with me, drawing whatever they saw, not thinking about the result. People loved it. Then into an app: it hands you a random reference, you just draw, and it keeps the time. The focus is how long you drew today, not how it turned out.

And now, it has become a shop. In Zurich, fourteen square meters, a stationery shop where you can draw. Come sit down and make something, or take a journal home and decorate it slowly, your way.

This shop is the drawing I made in the year after I lost my job. It's probably not perfect either. But something ugly beats nothing at all.

It has one goal: come in, make an ugly drawing.