Keep Going

Art is supposed to make our lives better. This is as true for the making of the art as it is for the art itself. If making your art is ruining anyone's life, including your own, it is not worth making.

Your attention is one of the most valuable things you possess, which is why everyone wants to steal it from you. First you must protect it, and then you must point it in the right direction. [...] What you choose to pay attention to is the stuff your life and work will be made of.

Creativity is about connection — you must be connected to others in order to be inspired and share your own work — but it is also about disconnection. You must retreat from the world long enough to think, practice your art, and bring forth something worth sharing with others. You must play a little hide-and-seek in order to produce something worth being found.

Let go of the thing that you're trying to be (the noun), and focus on the actual work you need to be doing (the verb). Doing the verb will take you someplace further and far more interesting.

Everyone who's turned their passion into their breadwinning knows this is dangerous territory. One of the easiest ways to hate something you love is to turn it into your job: taking the thing that keeps you alive spiritually and turning it into the thing that keeps you alive literally.

We all go through cycles of disenchantment and re-enchantment with our work. When you feel as though you've lost or you're losing your gift, the quickest way to recover is to step outside the marketplace and make gifts. There's nothing as pure as making something specifically for someone special.

The only thing we can really control is what we spend our days on. What we work on and how hard we work on it. It might seem like a stretch, but I really think the best thing you can do if you want to make art is to pretend you're starring in your own remake of Groundhog Day: Yesterday's over, tomorrow may never come, there's just today and what you can do with it.

It's always a mistake to equate productivity and creativity. They are not the same. In fact, they're frequently at odds with each other: You're often most creative when you're the least productive.

Art is not only made from things that "spark joy." Art is also made out of what is ugly or repulsive to us. Part of the artist's job is to help tidy up the place, to make order out of chaos, to turn trash into treasure, to show us beauty where we can't see it.

Our culture mostly celebrates early successes, the people who bloom fast. But those people often wither as quickly as they bloom. [...] I don't want to know how a thirty-year-old became rich and famous; I want to hear how an eighty-year-old spent her life in obscurity, kept making art, and lived a happy life.