Nobody is born with a style or a voice. We don’t out of the womb knowing who we are. In the beginning, we learn by pretending to be our heroes. We learn by copying.
By letting go of our egos and sharing our process, we allow for the possibility of people having an ongoing connection with us and our work, which helps us move more of our product.
When I’m working on my art, I don’t feel like Odysseus. I feel more like Sisyphus rolling his boulder up the hill. When I’m working, I don’t feel like Luke Skywalker. I feel more like Phil Connors in the movie Groundhog Day.
You can’t control what sort of criticism you receive, but you can control how you react to it.
Don’t be jealous when the people you like do well – celebrate their victory as if it’s your own.
1. Pretend to be something you’re not until you are – fake it until you’re successful, until everybody sees you the way you want them to; or 2. Pretend to be making something until you actually make something. I love both readings – you have to dress for the job you want, not the job you have, and you have to start doing the work you want to be doing.
The songwriter Nick Lowe says, “You start out by rewriting your hero’s catalog.” And you don’t just steal from one of your heroes, you steal from all of them. The writer Wilson Mizner said if you copy from one author, it’s plagiarism, but if you copy from many, it’s research. I once heard the cartoonist Gary Panter say, “If you have one person you’re influenced by, everyone will say you’re the next whoever. But if you rip off a hundred people, everyone will say you’re so original!
The months leading up to World War II were some of the most terrible months in the life of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, as they “helplessly and hopelessly” watched events unfold. Leonard said one of the most horrible things was listening to Hitler’s rants on the radio – “the savage and insane ravings of a vindictive underdog who suddenly saw himself to be all-powerful.
Learn to speak. Learn to write. Use spell-check. You’re never “keeping it real” with your lack of proofreading and punctuation, you’re keeping it unintelligible.
You need to find a way to bring your body into your work.
When people realize they’re being listened to, they tell you things.” – Richard Ford.
I’m not going to sit here and wait for things to happen, I’m going to make them happen, and if people think I’m an idiot I don’t care.
There are a lot of destructive myths about creativity, but one of the most dangerous is the “lone genius” myth.
Share something small every day.
In this age of information abundance and overload, those who get ahead will be the folks who figure out what to leave out so they can concentrate on what’s really important to them. Nothing is more paralyzing than the idea of limitless possibilities. The idea that you can do anything is absolutely terrifying.
It’s often what an artist chooses to leave out that makes the art interesting.
Teach what you know.
If you try to devour the history of your discipline all at once, you’ll choke. Instead, chew on one thinker, writer, artist, activist, role model you really love. Study everything there is to know about that thinker, then find three people that thinker loved and find out everything about them. Repeat this as many times as you can. Climb up the tree as far as you can go. Once you climb your own tree, it’s time to grow your own branch.
If you’ve never changed your mind about something, pinch yourself; you may be dead.
When you don’t have much time, a routine helps you make the little time you have count. When you have all the time in the world, a routine helps you make sure you don’t waste it.
It is better to take what does not belong to you than to let it lie around neglected.” – Mark Twain.