What a good artist understands is that nothing comes from nowhere.
If you’re out of ideas, wash the dishes. Take a really long walk. Stare at a spot on the wall for as long as you can. As the artist Maira Kalman says, “Avoiding work is the way to focus my mind.
The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life.
Don’t throw any of yourself away. Don’t worry about a grand scheme or unified vision for your work. Don’t worry about unity – what unifies your work is the fact that you made it. One day you’ll look back and it will all make sense.
The great thing about remote or dead masters is that they can’t refuse you as an apprentice. You can learn whatever you want from them. They left their lesson plans in their work.
What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.” – William Ralph Inge.
The world is changing at such a rapid rate that it’s turning us all into amateurs. Even for professionals, the best way to flourish is to retain an amateur’s spirit and embrace uncertainty and the unknown.
If you ask yourself ‘What’s the best thing that happened today?’ It actually forces a certain kind of cheerful retrospection that pulls up from the recent past things to write about that you wouldn’t otherwise think about.
The only way to find your voice is to use it. It’s hardwired, built into you. Talk about the things you love. Your voice will follow.
You can’t be content with mastery; you have to push yourself to become a student again.
Don’t worry about doing research. Just search.
Not everybody will get it. People will misinterpret you and what you do. They might even call you names. So get comfortable with being misunderstood, disparaged, or ignored – the trick is to be too busy doing your work to care.
Be curious about the world in which you live. Look things up. Chase down every reference. Go deeper than anybody else – that’s how you’ll get ahead.
Don’t wait until you know who you are to get started.
There’s a balance between what you want to give the world and what it needs. If you’re lucky, your work is in the middle.
Usually, when we talk about creativity, it’s about self-expression, which is great, but for work to be art or design, there has to be someone on the other end. The audience makes the work come alive.
The more good ideas you collect, the more you can choose from to be influenced by.
You’re only going to be as good as the stuff you surround yourself with.
The artist is a collector. Not a hoarder, mind you, there’s a difference: Hoarders collect indiscriminately, artists collect selectively. They only collect things that they really love.
Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, play the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read, build the products you want to use – do the work you want to see done.