If you have an idea you’re excited about and you don’t bring it to life, it’s not uncommon for the idea to find its voice through another maker. This isn’t because the other artist stole your idea, but because the idea’s time has come.
Living life as an artist is a practice. You are either engaging in the practice or you’re not. It makes no sense to say you’re not good at it. It’s like saying, “I’m not good at being a monk.” You are either living as a monk or you’re not. We tend to think of the artist’s work as the output. The real work of the artist is a way of being in the world.
Awareness needs constant refreshing. If it becomes a habit, even a good habit, it will need to be reinvented again and again. Until one day, you notice that you are always in the practice of awareness, at all times, in all places, living your life in a state of constant openness to receiving.
You can’t step into the same stream twice because it’s always flowing. Everything is.
One person’s connected place may be another’s distraction. And different environments may be right at different points in your artistic process. Andy Warhol was said to create with a television, radio, and record player all on simultaneously. For Eminem, the noise of a single TV set is his preferred backdrop for writing. Marcel Proust lined his walls with sound-absorbing cork, closed the drapes, and wore earplugs. Kafka too took his need for silence to an extreme—“ not like a hermit,” he once said, but “like a dead man.” There is no wrong way. There is only your way.
Some successful artists are deeply insecure, self-sabotaging, struggling with addiction, or facing other obstacles to making and sharing their work. An unhealthy self-image or a hardship in life can fuel great art, creating a deep well of insight and emotion for an artist to draw from. They can also get in the way of the artist being able to make many things over a long period of time. People who are particularly challenged in this sense generally can’t produce creative work over and over again. This isn’t because they’re not artistically capable, but because they were only able to break through their own issues one or two times and share great work. One of the reasons so many great artists die of overdoses early in their lives is because they’re using drugs to numb a very painful existence. The reason it’s painful is the reason they became artists in the first place: their incredible sensitivity.
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i felt the same way about dude. he comes across like a hippie grifter that finesses artists but i kept seeing the book pop up everywhere so i said fukk it
