Copyright is Not the Problem, You Are!

by: Cory Huff

Pinterest is upon us!

For some reason, the Internet decided to throw a giant fit over copyright over the last few weeks. It started (sort’ve) with this interesting blog post by a lawyer who tearfully deleted her Pinterest inspiration boards. Her post spread like wildfire, got picked up by a whole bunch of major blogs, and even garnered a personal response from the founder of Pinterest. Of course, her post isn’t the only one. There have been hundreds of articles written about Pinterest’s copyright issues.

Here’s the thing – this issue is not new. Pinterest is just the latest round of copyright and privacy issues on the Internet. The same thing has happened with Facebook, Myspace, Flickr, various blogs, and other online media. Remember burning CDs? My favorite example, however…

The Music Industry

In 1999, Napster rocked the music world by becoming the first highly successful file sharing site. Millions of people began using Napster to share files, and some of them were using Napster to illegally swap music. The music industry leaders freaked out and spent millions of dollars going after individuals who downloaded music, making examaples out of them. This led to countless ridiculous stories about children and elderly women being imprisoned and slapped with terrifyingly high fines.

This did nothing to curb the decline of the music industry. People continued to download music and share files with each other. The music industry spent millions more lobbying and got the Digital Millenium Copyright Act passed. Suddenly small websites were getting nailed for doing innocuous things like linking to another website that was illegally hosting a copy written song. It’s still going on, and it’s a legal nightmare.

In the mean while, along comes Steve Jobs and Apple. This next part is really important, so pay attention. It’s detailed in Jobs’ biography, and it’s just fascinating. While the music industry was busy arguing about who was at fault for declining revenues, and suing everyone, Apple invented iTunes and stole everyone’s lunch money. They found a way to get people to pay for what they had been doing illegally. While the music labels said it couldn’t be done, Apple went out and did it. They were looking for a solution, not a problem.

Copyright Will Not Make Your Career

Here’s the part where I explain why I’m talking about the music industry. In case you haven’t figured it out by now, the art world is in a very similar place to where the music industry was back in 1999.

People are sharing images online – without your permission. It’s happening, whether you like it or not. Sure, it would be great if you could stop anyone who tries from profiting off of your work – but that’s not my point here.

There are some artists who don’t even worry about copyright. Check out painter Gwenn Seemel’s take on art careers without copyright law.

Sharing is What Makes the Internet Work

The Web gave people the ability to share images easily. That’s why there are thousands of image sharing sites like Flickr and SmugMug. People want to share images that excite and motivate them. Sharing is how the internet works. We link to things that we find interesting. We talk about it on Facebook, Twitter, and other sites. Personally, it’s one of the best things about the Web.

If I can find a piece of art that I like, I don’t just bookmark it. I want to subscribe to their blog, follow them on Twitter, and tell everyone else about their work. If the artist is smart, they’ve added some sharing buttons to each of their individual pieces. This is how people build buzz about what they do. It’s how the Internet has changed things.

Where’s the Disruption?

You can protect your work if it’s that important. Add a watermark to your images. Reduce the resolution to 75 dpi. But don’t disable right clicks. That’s just annoying (and you can just take a screenshot anyway).

There are several companies that are doing very innovative things with art on the Internet. Art.sy is interesting. ArtSumo is surfacing art from obscure places. Artsicle lets you try art in your home before you buy it.

Technology is not the only way to disrupt a market. You can change the way that you sell art. One of the early bands to recognize the change in the way that that the music business was heading is Radiohead. They began offering their music as a pay what you will download from their own website. They did an end run around their music label and it worked.

What will you do? Can you start selling directly to collectors? Will you find an innovative way to offer prints? Build your own social networks built around your art?

I’d love to hear your ideas in the comments.

Cory Huff runs TheAbundantArtist.com, where he teaches artists how to sell art online and dispel the myth of the starving artist.

Image courtesy of Horia Varlan

Here are some other articles you might enjoy:

1. What the #$@% is a Creative Commons License? [Video]
2. Stop stealing my sh*t!
3. Introducing Skinny WordPress!

So what happened?!

Do you remember when you just loved to create?

Do you remember that feeling of being lost inside your imagination while the rest of the world dropped away?

When exactly did you lose that?

When did creating your art become something less than it was supposed to be?

As creative artists, we all go through those inevitable swings of excitement and loathing, expansion and contraction, that feeling of taking it to the next level as well as those moments when we’re simply trying to amuse ourselves as we wander aimlessly on our creative plateaus.

As this new year begins, I know that many of us are trying to reconnect and rededicate ourselves to our art and our creative passion. Those of you who have followed Skinny Artist for awhile are well aware of my previous struggles with keeping New Year’s resolutions.  I think, however, that no matter what time of year it is, there will always be those times when we hit that proverbial wall and we utter those dreaded words of despair that every creative artist has said at some point in their career –“What’s the point?”

So how do we go back?

How do we return to our artistic innocence?  How do we reconnect with that small creative child inside of us that doesn’t constantly judge our worthiness or compare our work to others?  How do we replenish that creative fire that has been smothered by years of doubt, fears, and neglect?

5 Ways to Rekindle your Creative Fire

1.) Feed your creative soul

You need to regularly replenish your creative well by absorbing the work of those artists around you.

Sure maybe you’ll have moments of self-loathing and feelings of inadequacy along the way as you absorb the masterworks of your genre, but these will also serve as a guidepost that can help to steer you in the right direction and may even help to unlock some creative impulse buried deep within you. Maybe you were drawn to these particular works for a reason.  Not to imitate them, but perhaps to simply show you a little farther down your chosen path. 

If you are a writer, you need to read great books.  You need to surround yourself and assimilate their words and ideas.  Resist the urge to judge their work as being superior or inferior to your own, and don’t beat yourself up for not being the first person to come up with that one “perfect idea”.   Remember that it’s all been said before, the importance lies not in the story but in the voice by which it’s told.

If you’re a photographer or visual artist, you need to allow your eyes to take in as much art as you possibly can.  You need to find a way to see things from a new perspective and feed yourself those images that you’ll later play with and reconstruct inside your own imagination.

Finally, try to take some time each day to get outside and experience the lessons of the world’s ultimate creative classroom.

2.) Control your environment and distractions

We live in an age of distraction.

The fact that we are now able to carry a telephone, movie theater, instant messenger, arcade, and a television in our pocket — it should come as no surprise that most of us are more distracted than ever.  Everywhere we go, we are always connected.

Creativity demands, at least to some degree, a certain amount of empty space. We need to find a way to give our imagination that blank creative canvas where it can experiment, reconnect, and play around with all of those images and ideas that we have absorbed from the world around us.

This is something that I have struggled with myself.  Finding that elusive balance between connecting with other artists online while still carving out some personal space to allow my creative imagination to roam free.

Sometimes I find it useful to keep a time journal for several days to see exactly how I’m spending all of my time each day.  Having this information then gives me the ability to prioritize and make any changes necessary.  Unfortunately, I tend to be a “look-at-the-shiny-object” kind of guy so personally I’ve had to resort to some rather extreme measures in order to keep myself focused.  Hopefully this won’t be the case for you.

The only other piece of advice I could offer here would be to set a reasonable schedule for yourself and don’t beat yourself up when you don’t achieve everything on your list.  Sure I’d love to be able to sleep four hours and get everything done on my to-do list before 9:00 am, but that’s just not very realistic.  Many of us are juggling family and financial responsibilities so we aren’t always able to experience that ideal creative artist lifestyle.

Above all, be kind and forgive yourself for not always being able to live up to your own high expectations.

3.) Do some small creative act every day

Anyone who has tried to get up in the morning and go to the gym at 6:00 a.m. knows that momentum can be a powerful thing. Newton was right (of course) when he stated that a object at rest will stay at rest, while an object in motion will tend to stay in motion.

This is why it’s so important to find a way to do at least one thing everyday that will exercise your creative muscles.

Maybe you can take fifteen minutes to make a sketch and post it to the #Draw365 group on Twitter.  If you’re a writer, make a point to sit down and just write for twenty minutes every day.  It doesn’t even have to be part of a larger project.  It can simply be about what’s on your mind or maybe a new idea that you would like to explore.  Julia Cameron calls this her “Morning Pages” in her book “The Artist’s Way”  If you’re a photographer you could challenge yourself to take 20 pictures in 20 minutes and then share your favorite one on your Flickr Photostream.  If you’re a musician or poet, take some time to write down that musical fragment or lyrical phrase you’ve been noodling around with and post it to your blog or on SoundCloud

The point here is not to create something magnificent, but to simply create something every day and to leave some type of record of it that you can return to later.  I think eventually you’ll find that it becomes a positive feedback loop as other artists begin to comment and respond to your work.

I know it’s hard to find the time.

As I’ve said before, most of us have less than ideal situations for creating our art. We have full-time jobs, we have kids that need to be fed on a regular basis, we have partners who may want us to crawl out of our den or studio once in awhile. It’s not always easy, but at the same time, we need to find a way to carve 20-30 minutes out of our day to exercise our creative muscles and create that momentum to keep us moving forward.

I know that sometimes during a creative drought you may feel like you’re simply going through the motions.  We’ve all been there and these are the times when we are tempted to give up and stop wasting our time.

You have to remember, however, that no creative effort is ever wasted

Creativity builds upon itself. Even those times when it may seem as if we’re just spinning our wheels, we are quietly building the foundation for future progress.  Since we cannot see very far down our creative path, we sometimes have to move forward on faith and be willing to put in the work necessary to grow creatively.

4.) Find your community

Although we may create in solitude, we also thrive creatively by having the support of those who understand us the best.  This is why it’s important to find those kindred creative spirits to share our hopes, our struggles, our dreams, our fears, as well as our triumphs. We need to find our community  – those who will support and nurture us along the way.

Depending on where you live, you may find your community nearby at a local art school, community center, or even the local Starbucks.  If you cannot find your tribe around your neighborhood, chances are you’ll be able to connect with them online.

Think about joining online social communities such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr groups, DeviantArt forum, and Google+ communities.  If you’re not sure which one is right for you, I would suggest simply hanging around them a bit and see what’s going on.  Each of these online communities has it’s own unique culture.  See where your current friends hang out.  Try them out for awhile and see what feels right to you.

Also don’t be afraid to open up an account and try things out for awhile.  Later if things just don’t feel right, you can always go somewhere else.  Don’t ever feel like you have to keep at it just because you now have 500 followers on Twitter.  If it starts to feel like a chore, take a break. You can always come back to it weeks or even months later.

Wherever you decide to hang out, be sure that you allow yourself to occasionally open up and be vulnerable.  Just like in the real world, people want to connect with real people not some fake super-confident version of yourself.  As I’ve said before, there’s a reason that Superman hangs out with himself at the fortress of solitude.  I mean, who wants to hang with Mr. Perfect?

Just be yourself and remember that you’re not there to sell your yourself as an artist, you’re there for the support and friendship that comes from being around other writers, artists, and musicians who are going through many of the same things you are.

If you’re not sure where to start, you can always get started by connecting with some of the amazing artist and commmunity members in our very own online artist directory

5.) Experiment, expand, and don’t look back

Finally, don’t be afraid to experiment and try something new.

Creativity is all about seeing things from a new perspective.  It may sound like a bit of a cliche but it’s true that no one has ever seen the world the same way that you do. Find a way to share your unique perspective with the rest of us.  Remember that we are all here stumbling our way through trying to find our individual voice.

Also never be afraid to start over. Allow yourself from time to time to return to your artistic innocence and see your art through the eyes of a beginner.  Don’t allow your past to dictate your future path.  It doesn’t matter if you’ve already sunk twenty or thirty years into a particular discipline, if it no longer nourishes your creative soul, you need to let it go and head in a new direction.

Expand and resist defining yourself as an artist.

It seems like these days so many creative artists have managed to bury themselves so deeply into their niche and they can no longer find their way out.

Don’t ever limit yourself by defining who you think you are as an artist.  Resist labels.  Follow your creative path wherever it may lead you even if it means letting go of the comfort of the familiar.

Use every tool in your arsenal to explore your creative soul.  Try to push yourself a little further each day into unfamiliar territory. Embrace the discomfort that comes from setting yourself apart from others.

Expand, explore, and enjoy!

How do you motivate yourself to keep moving forward when things are rough?

What kind of things do you do to get those creative juices flowing again?

How do you feed your creative soul?

Here are some other articles you might enjoy:

1. 5 Ways to Boost your Creative Productivity
2. Turn Off Facebook, Tune Out Twitter, and Rediscover Your Life

You’ve got more #$@% mail!

Those of you who have been online long enough may remember when getting email was an exciting event.

We all loved hearing that bossy little AOL voice telling us that we got mail.  Our pulse would quicken and we would race to our email inbox to see what technological treasures awaited us.  And even though most of us were still paying by the minute, we never wanted to log off our super speedy 56k dial-up modem connection because we didn’t want to risk missing out on our next email message.

Yes, perhaps we were young and a bit naive as we were opening up our forty-third email asking us to help our rich Nigerian friend transfer money to his bank account, but at the same time we were excited to be a part of this new technology.  We were on the cutting edge and we scoffed at our old-fashioned friends who were still licking stamps and using old-fashioned “snail mail”.

Even today, most of us still respond to the email “ding” like some deranged Pavlovian dog hoping that this time we’ll receive some email that actually isn’t an advertisement for diet pills and male enhancement.

Introducing the Email Inbox from hell!

These days, however, it seems that everyone and their brother-in-law wants your email address.  It doesn’t matter whether it’s a website, Taco Bell, or the local gas station — everyone wants you to sign up for their email mailing list (yes, even us).

So when did all this happen?  When did everyone suddenly need your email address before they can ring up your hand towels at Bed, Bath, & Beyond — And why do they all give you that look as if you are some kind of Luddite Hobbit when you tell them that you’d rather not share it with them?

Enough!

I say it’s time that we rise up and revolt against stupid email ads and useless 5% off coupons.  I say enough of your pointless surveys, enough of your colorful coupons that cost $15 in ink for my printer to print out, and don’t even get me started on the dozens of #@$! loyalty cards that are currently jammed into my wallet.

It’s gotten so bad that I’ve actually set up additional email addresses just for this sort of thing, hoping to somehow separate some of this gratuitous marketing crap from all of the other useless email crap that I was already receiving — but this turned out to be pointless as well. In the end, it didn’t actually cut down on the number of messages I received, it just sorted them into various smaller containers that I still had to deal with.  Even after all that, I would still find myself sorting them out, creating pointless folders, and deleting email messages for what sometimes seemed like hours on end.

So now what?

I’ve already talked about in an earlier article about how I’ve had to schedule a Twitter and Facebook-Free sabbatical from time to time just to maintain what little sanity I have left.  So what about taking email free days on a regular basis? What if we could actually take a break from email and then come back to it later?

Egads, was this even possible?!?

I have to admit that I felt a little uneasy even talking about it at first.

Taming the Email Beast!

All of this actually evolved from one of the problems that I ran into early on with my Twitter and Facebook-free days experiment.  It was the fact that even when I wasn’t actually visiting these sites, I was still checking my email on those days and whenever I received an email about someone mentioning us on Twitter or our Facebook page I felt compelled to respond to it.  After all, what kind of thoughtless bastard doesn’t respond to being tagged on Facebook?!

So of course I would tell myself that I would just log on for a moment to respond or to follow back a new follower.  The problem of course, is that once you open the time sucking Pandora box that is Twitter and Facebook, you are hooked.

This clearly wasn’t working so I figured if I was really going to do this, I had two options.  I could either turn off the email notifications for all of these social networking sites, or I could simply not check my email at all during these “off” days.  Well being the control freak perfectionist that I am, I knew that turning off the email notifications wasn’t really an option so I finally came to the sad conclusion that the only way this was actually going to work, was for me to turn off my internet connection all together when I was writing.

There is no such thing as an Emergency Email!

What I’ve discovered is that it actually is possible once you accept the fact that there is no such thing as an emergency email (at least not in my world) — Let’s face it, if there’s ever a real emergency, you better get me on the phone because I’m never going to find your desperate emailed plea for help buried between the Barnes & Noble newsletters and the countless Chipotle coupons that litter my inbox.

Now I realize that the thought of email free days are perhaps a little hardcore for some and to each their own but even on the days that I do check my email now, I do it completely different.

Quick quiz: What’s the first thing you do in the morning when you turn on your computer?

You check your email right?

Me to…. or at least I used to

What would happen is that I would open my email first thing in the morning, try to sort through all of the flotsam and jetsam floating around in my inbox, and look for things that really mattered. I would skim, and open, and delete, and skim, and open, and then delete some more

Before I knew it, it was often lunchtime and all I had accomplished so far that day was to tidy up my email inbox.

That’s when it dawned on me.  It doesn’t have to be tidied up.  I don’t have to meticulously go through each and every message and either put it into it’s little folder or delete it to keep those messages from piling up in hopes of someday getting down to that mythical “inbox zero”

Screw it!

I decided that my day of email liberation had come!

Since I’ve been experimenting with this over the last six months, I’ve discovered that I can now sort through my email inbox in less than 5 minutes a day because all I’m doing is scanning for those few messages that actually need a response.  I’m not wasting any more of my life sorting, organizing, or even deleting the rest of them. They can just sit there with their glowing little “unread” icons until I’m ready to deal with them.

Now I have to warn you that this isn’t for the faint of heart.  This is hardcore my friend.  This is only a last resort for those of you who are sick and tired of spending countless hours of your day sorting through piles of spam and useless crap in order to get to the one or two messages that might mean something to you.

So for what it’s worth, here it is. . .

7 Steps to Freeing Yourself from the Email Inbox Beast:

1.) Create one place for email beast to live

Just like any other wild beast if you don’t properly cage it, you can expect it to eventually attack you

The first step is to get your email off your cell phone and only access it from your computer.  Don’t worry, if there’s ever an actual emergency, your family and friends can text you, or believe it or not, make a phone call and speak with you directly.

2.) Stop giving out your email address to stores or anyone else you don’t really care to hear from

This includes both Radio Shack, Olive Garden, and crazy Uncle Charlie who insists on forwarding every joke and piece of internet humor that crosses his desk. (Note: this does not include any websites that starts with “Skinny” and ends in “Artist”)

3.) Only open your email program once a day (preferably in the evening)

This is one of the few idea from those time management gurus called “time batching” that I actually find useful.  Instead of starting your day off trying to sort through your daily pile of spam or pecking at it periodically throughout the day like some neurotic chicken,  you simply check it once per day (usually in the evening or after lunch when you would usually be checking your Facebook page anyway).

4.) Quickly scan your messages and only open the ones that you need (or want) to respond to

Just scan, click, and respond.  Do not go back to open or delete the rest of your messages because that will just suck up more of your precious time

5.) Let the unopened messages pile up and wear them like a badge of honor

You have to realize going into this that the unread emails will keep piling up in your inbox so brace yourself!

Looking at this actual screenshot of my email inbox at the moment you can see that I currently have 11,732 unopened emails.

Holy crap! Did he just say that he had 11,732 unread messages? . . . why yes, yes he did.

Now before you pass out or pass judgment on me for being a bad person, you have to realize that I have already sorted out and responded to the .005% of these messages that actually required my attention — the rest I allow to live peacefully on the Google servers completely unaware that their day of reckoning and mass extinction will soon come.

In fact you can even proclaim your email independence with the Twitter hashtag #InboxInfinity and let the rest of us know how many unread email messages you are up to!

6.) Mass extinction day

Once every six months (or even once a year if you’re really hardcore) spend an evening killing useless email

This can be a joyful celebration (usually includes a drink or two)  It turns out that sorting through spam and useless 5% off store coupons is great for resolving any built-up technological anger issues.

Go through each email box one by one, starting with the one with the most unread messages and then just start deleting.  I’ll usually scan through them quickly just to see if I missed anything important (without opening them of course) and then it’s just delete, delete, delete — Bwahahahahaha!

This might also be a good time to unsubscribe to anything that has invaded your email inbox or outlived its welcome

7.) Rinse, Repeat, and Revel in your email independence (viva la revolution!)

Take a moment to bask in your rebel glory.

How do you keep your email inbox from taking over your life?

• How do you manage to keep up with all of your email?
• How many email addresses do you have?
• How many times a day do you check your email?

Here are some other articles you might enjoy:

1. Turn Off Facebook, Tune Out Twitter, and Rediscover Your Life
2. The Goal of Nothing & the Art of Letting Go

“When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.” ~Lao Tzu

Let’s face it, having goals kind of sucks!

What do you want to do, be, or have in ten years?  Where do you see yourself in twenty years?  What are your three major goals for this year?  What are you going to accomplish this month? What about this week? And if you’ve got a list of goals as long as your arm, why are you sitting around reading stupid articles like this?! (wait…forget that last one)

I’m sorry but when did accomplishing anything become so damn complicated?

These days it seems that if we haven’t created our yearly, monthly, and weekly goals and shared them with the universe — then we might as well be spending our day living in a mud hut digging in the dirt with a pointy stick because our life is obviously being wasted.

It doesn’t stop there, however, because it’s not enough to simply have these goals, we also need to write them down, set firm deadlines, visualize our goals, and then say them out loud every morning as some kind of karmic affirmation to the universe.

At some point along the way, it seems that we’ve all been brainwashed into believing that if you want to make anything out of your life, you need to come up with this grocery list of goals for yourself and then slavishly “work the plan” everyday.  If we don’t, we’re told that we will simply float aimlessly around the universe and end up living with our mother when we are forty-five.

Goals are good.

After all, without a goal how could you possibly expect to get to where you want to be?

So what’s the problem with having goals?

There have always been a few things that have bothered me about this idea of creating these long elaborate lists of goals for ourselves.

Goals are mostly about the illusion of control.

We live in an age that praises self-reliance. We’re taught that we are the masters of our fate and we are the captain of our soul.  Those who rely upon others to help them are either slackers or children.  In our society, we are not only expected to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, but we are taught to revere the “self-made” man or else be seen as some kind of liberal commie socialist bastard

But are we really in control?

It seems to me that we continue to create these goals for ourselves because we’re under the impression that we are completely in control of what happens to us.

Now hold on, before you go running off to your goal-setting anonymous meeting to tell them about the crazy Skinny dude spouting heresies online — I’m ceretainly not implying that we are somehow being controlled by some mysterious unforeseen force, or that we are mere puppets in fate’s fickle hand. It turns out that I don’t believe in resigning myself to fate any more than I believe in the magical power of setting goals.

It’s not that goals are bad, it’s just that shit happens and plans change. . .

Unforeseen events (both good and bad) happen all the time in our life  that will inevitably alter our course. I’m talking about things that we could have never seen coming even with all of our charts, maps, and life plans laid carefully out in front of us. 

The real problem is that if we become so focused on keeping our head down and making our initial goals happen no matter what, we’ll often miss a new opportunity that may be sitting there directly in front of us.

So the way I see it, we have two choices — We can either keep pounding away insisting that we always know what’s best, or we can consider opening ourselves up to these new opportunities as they present themselves. There are hundreds of different ways to get from point A to point B and if you spend all of this time and energy drawing up a nice looking map, chances are that you will be far more reluctant to change course when things go awry.

Goals set you up to fail

Everyone knows that whenever you set up a goal for yourself, you are required to create monthly, weekly, and daily action steps to achieve this goal. That’s basic goal-setting 101

However there’s always that one step that you really don’t want to do, or you don’t know how to do, so you just keep putting it off.  Soon your weekly goals fall behind schedule which means that your monthly goals are continually being pushed back and sooner or later you realize that you have created this endless treadmill of failure for yourself.

Sooner or later we begin to realize that all of these daily to-do lists that are constantly being consolidated day after day are really only effective as a tool of self-hatred.  They breed an environment of constant stress and a sense of failure which is the enemy of creative productivity 

Now of course all of the goal setting gurus tell us that failure is not an option.  Actually it turns out that failure is an option.  If nothing else, failure give you the chance to stop, look around, and possibly reassess your current goals.

What you may realize is that maybe you were really close to achieving your goal, or maybes you were completely off base.  Either way you can see it as a learning opportunity, but only if you are willing to reconsider the goal you were chasing in the first place.

Some people believe that failure is simply the universe’s way of nudging you in a slightly different direction.  It doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to give up, but perhaps you might consider slightly altering your course.  But here’s the thing, when it comes down to it, very few of us really know what it is that we really want let alone how exactly we are going to get it.

Who’s goals are these anyway?

It’s also not unusual that the goals we chase after the hardest aren’t really even our goals to begin with.

Remember that most of these goals that we are beating ourselves up over, are often the expectations of others.  We have these goals because they are the things that our parents, our friends, our spouse, or our society expects us to do. When you sit down and really think about it, how many of your past and current goals are simply unconscious echoes of other people’s expectations?

For example , I remember wanting to be a writer for as long as I can remember. However, as everyone knows or at least told me growing up, no responsible adult can make a living as a writer (which so far is apparently true) so it was decided that I should get my teaching degree so that I could be an upstanding citizen and still have my little writing hobby on the side.

Sometimes the best goal is not having one

When was the last time that “success” arrived for you or anyone else you know exactly the way you imagined that it would?

Even if you do want to achieve something specific.  It rarely if ever happens exactly as you think it would.  In other words, even if the end result is the same, the method of getting there is often light-years apart from the well-thought out step-by-step monthly plan that you meticulously came up with five years ago.

Setting goals can limit our future possibilities

In other words, setting all of these goals for yourself only ends up limiting you because you are essentially closing yourself off from “what is” in this frantic attempt to create what you think you want.

What you’ll often discover is that you don’t really need to set all of these elaborate goals and you don’t necessarily need to come up with this perfect roadmap.  It turns out that all you really have to do is to find out what you need to do next.

Avoiding goals is not the same thing as avoiding hard work

Now just because a person is willing to open themselves up and not try to control the process with their endless list of goals and to-do lists, that doesn’t necessarily mean they sit around on the couch all day doing nothing as they wait for lady fortune to take them gently by the hand.

Having no goal isn’t about waiting or wanting, it’s about being willing to work your ass off today for an unknown result tomorrow

It takes far more courage to keep working not knowing where any of it will lead, than it does to set up endless yearly goals towards an imagined outcome.  One offers comfort while the other offers only vague possibilities.

It’s not easy and there are many days where I long for the comfort of knowing exactly where (I think) I’m going.

But at the same time, I now have this sense of flexibility that I never felt I had before.  Instead of simply pushing stubbornly ahead no matter what the outcome, I now make it a point to  listen a little closer to what the universe may be trying to tell me.

Most days the universe still whispers to me in shadowy indecipherable tones, but once in awhile, something will manage to get through this thick head of mine and an unexpected opportunity will show up on my doorstep.  I’ll admit that I’m still not always smart enough to open the door, but  at least now I usually know what I’m missing.

To this day, I still have a to-do list of daily tasks that I need to remember.  However these are not so-called “action steps” to achieve some large overarching goal, these are mostly simple reminders to myself so the cats do not starve or the kids are not accidently left at the bus stop.  Instead of spending my day trying to map out my future and figure out where exactly I’m going to be in ten years, I try to focus my energy on what I can do today to create something meaningful.

It doesn’t always work, of course, but tomorrow I know that I’ll wake up and try again.

Then again, maybe I’m just a slacker…..

What do you think?

• Do you make yearly, monthly, weekly goals for yourself?
• What system (if any) do you have to keep yourself focused on your goals?
• Have you ever actually finished your daily to-do list?  If so, what did it feel like (I wouldn’t know)
• What are you thoughts about having or not having goals?

Image courtesy of lululemon athletica

“Seeking means to have a goal; but finding means to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal.” ~Hermann Hesse

Here are some other articles you might enjoy:

1. Beating the Green-Eyed Bastard!
2. What are you willing to give up?
3. A (brief) Moment of Gratitude

I really believe that any of the books in this series would be relevant for any type of artist including writers, musicians, visual artists, photographers, or anyone else who’s work is creatively inspired.

I hope that you will enjoy them as much as I have . . .

“The Artist’s Way”  by Julia Cameron

237 pages Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam

Available at your local bookstore and at Amazon.com ~$10

Follow Julia Cameron on Twitter @J_CameronLive S or visit her on her website The Artist’s Way
There is also a thriving Artist’s Way community on Twitter that you can follow daily at #artistsway

If the book “Art & Fear” is intended to get your head on straight about creating your art, and “The Creative Habit” is intended to give you the work habits and self-discipline that you’ll need to succeed, Julia Cameron’s “The Artist’s Way” will offer to give you the courage and confidence to live your art in our often overly materialistic society.

This was the book.

This was the book that first validated for me the inherent value of the individual artist/writer in a culture that seemed to value safety, security, and conformity above all. This was the book that allowed me to diverge from the expectations that had been handed down to me, and gave me the courage to pursue my own path.

Like many struggling writers, I was first drawn to Julia Cameron’s book almost 15 years ago looking for answers to the most basic questions about  the nature creativity and how to harness its power consistently.  At the time, I was desperately looking for reasons not to abandon my writing completely as I began a new teaching career, a new marriage, and the prospect of starting a new family.

As I faced the grim prospect of college graduation, I was led to believe that it was time to let go of my foolish childhood dreams and “grow up” as I begin my career as a responsible adult. While no one actually said any of this out loud, the expectations were clear — It was time to move on. . .

This is not necessarily a book for those who are already on the creative path.  This is a book for those who are on the edge of giving up, for those who may be consumed with fears and doubts of their creative ability, or for those who have already let go of their artistic dreams long ago.  This is not a book about the creative process, but a book about “creativity recovery”.  It was written for those of us who have temporarily lost our way, or those who have somehow buried that creative spark that lives deep within us.

It’s not surprising then that the content of this book was modeled after a traditional 12-step recovery program. 

Critics often complain that this book is sometimes a bit “hokey” and filled with vague feel-good exercises, quotes, and sentiments that really don’t teach you anything about how-to be a creative artist.  I have no doubt that this book might seem simplistic and perhaps a bit naïve to someone who has been on their creative journey for some time. Then again, maybe they’ve simply forgotten what it was like for them in the beginning.

Somehow they have forgotten all of the fears and doubts that haunt every new creative soul starting off on this path. And although I believe that this book has something to offer every creative writer or visual artist no matter what their current level of experience may be, this book is primarily intended for those of us who may be either starting from the beginning or simply starting over.

In other words, these are the first tentative steps of a journey that never ends. . .

Here are just a few of the themes and excerpts from this amazing book:

What went wrong. . .

“Many of us wish we were more creative. Many of us sense we are more creative, but unable to effectively tap that creativity. Our dreams elude us. Our lives feel somehow flat. Often, we have great ideas, wonderful dreams, but are unable to actualize them for ourselves. Sometimes we have specific creative longings we would love to be able to fulfill — learning to play the piano, painting, taking an acting class, or writing. Sometimes our goal is more diffuse. We hunger for what might be called creative living — an expanded sense of creativity in our business lives, in sharing with our children, our spouse, our friends.”

“Many of us find that we have squandered our own creative energies by investing disproportionately in the lives, hopes, dreams, and plans of others.  Their lives have obscured and detoured our own.”

“We begin to excavate our buried dreams. . . We mourn the self we abandoned.  We greet this self as we might greet a lover at the end of a long and costly war.”

“Do you tell yourself that if only you took your creative potential seriously, you might:

• Stop telling yourself, “It’s too late.”
• Stop waiting until you make enough money to do something you’d really love.
• Stop telling yoursel, “It’s just my ego” whenever you yearn for a more creative life.
• Stop telling yourself that dreams don’t matter, that they are oinly dreams and that you should be more sensible
• Stop fearing that your family and friends would think you crazy
• Stop telling yourself that creativity is a luxury and that you should be grateful for what you’ve got.”

Artistic growing pains. . .

“As you learn to recognize, nurture, and protect your inner artist, you will be able to move beyond pain and creative constriction.  You will learn ways to recognize and resolve fear, remove emotional scar tissue, and strengthen your confidence.”

“Making a piece of art may feel a lot like telling a family secret. Secret telling, by its very nature, involves shame and fear. It asks the question, “What will they think of me once they know this?”

“Working with this process, I see a certain amount of defiance and giddiness in the first few weeks. This entry stage is followed closely by explosive anger in the course’s midsection. The anger is followed by grief, then alternating waves of resistance and hope. This peaks-and-valleys phase of growth becomes a series of expansions and contractions, a birthing process in which students experience intense elation and defensive skepticism.

“It is my experience both as an artist and as a teacher that when we move out on faith into the act of creation, the universe is able to advance. It is a little like opening the gate at the top of a field irrigation system. Once we remove the blocks, the flow moves in.”

The importance of restocking the creative well . . .

“Art is an image-using system.  In order to create, we draw from our inner well.  This inner well, an artistic reservoir, is ideally like a well-stocked trout pond.  We’ve got big fish, fat fish, skinny fish–an abundance of artistic fish to fry.  As artists, we much realize that we have to maintain this artistic ecosystem.  If we don’t give some attention to upkeep, our well is apt to become depleted, stagnant, or blocked. . . As artists, we must learn to be self-nourishing.  We must become alert enough to consciously replenishing our creative resources as we draw on them. . . Filling the well involves the active pursuit of images to refresh our artistic reservoirs.  Art is born in attention.  Its mid-wife is detail.”

“In order to function in the language of art, we must learn to live in it comfortably.  The language of art is image and symbol.  It is a wordless language even when our very art is to chase it with words.  The artist’s language is a sensual one, a language of felt experience.  We we work at our art, we dip into the well of our experience and scoop out images.  Because we do this, we need to learn how to put images back.”

“The artist brain is the sensory brain: sight and sound, smell and taste, touch.  These are the elements of magic, and magic is the elemental stuff of art.  In filling the well, think magic.  Think delight.  Think fun.  Do not think duty.  Do not do what you should do–spiritual sit-ups like reading a dull but recommended critical text.  Do what intrigues you, explore what interests you; think mystery, not mastery.”

Avoiding toxic playmates . . .

“One of our chief needs as creative beings is support.  Unfortunately, this can be hard to come by.  Ideally, we would be nurtured and encourages first by our nuclear family and then by ever-widening circles of friends, teachers, well-wishers.  As young artists, we need and want to be acknowledged for our attempts and efforts as well as for our achievements and triumphs.  Unfortunately, many artists never receive this critical early encouragement.  As a result, they may not know they are artists at all.”

“A rare family, faced with the myth of the starving artist, tell its children to go right ahead and try for a career in the arts.  Instead, if encouraged at all, the children are urged into thinking of the arts as hobbies, creative fluff around the edges of real life.”

“Artists love other artists.  Shadow artists are gravitating to their rightful tribe but cannot yet claim their birthright.  Very often audacity, not talent, makes one person an artist and another a shadow artist–hiding in the shadows, afraid to step out and expose the dream to the light, fearful that it will disintegrate to the touch.”

“Judging your early artistic efforts is artist abuse. . .  Remember that in order to recover as an artist, you must be willing to be a bad artist.  Give yourself permission to be a beginner.  By being willing to be a bad artist, you have a chance to be an artist, and perhaps, over time, a very good one”

“Creativity flourishes when we have a sense of safety and self-acceptance. . . we must learn to place our [inner] artist with safe companions.  Toxic playmates can capsize our artist’s growth.  Not surprisingly, the most poisonous playmates for us as recovering creatives are people whose creativity is still blocked.  Our recovery threatens them.”

“Anger is fuel.  We feel it and we want to do something.  Hit someone, break something, throw a fit, smash a fist into the wall, tell those bastards.  But we are nice people , and what we do with our anger is stuff it, deny it, bury it, block it, hide it, lie about it, medicate it, muffle it, and ignore it.  We do everything but listen to it.  Anger is meant to be listened to. . . Because anger is a map. Anger shows us what our boundaries are.  Anger shows us where we want to go. . . Anger is not the action itself. It is action’s invitation.”

Money is not a reason to create, or not to create, your art . . .

“We cling to our financial concerns as a way to avoid not only our art but also our spiritual growth.  Our faith is in the dollar.  ’I have to keep a roof over my head,’ we say.  ’Nobody’s going to pay me to be more creative.’  We are awfully sure about that.  Most of us harbor a secret belief that work has to be work and not play, and that anything we really want to do—like write, act, dance—must be considered frivolous and be placed a distant second.  This is not true.”

“What we really want to do is what we are really meant to do.  When we do what we are meant to do, money comes to us, doors open for us, we feel useful, and the work we do feels like play to us.”

Perfectionism is a creativity killer. . .

“Perfectionism has nothing to do with getting it right.  It has nothing to do with fixing things.  It has nothing to do with standards.  Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move forward.  It is a loop—an obsessive, debilitating closed system that causes you to get stuck in the details of what you are writing or painting or making and to lose sight of the whole.”

“The perfectionist writes, paints, creates with one eye on her audience.  Instead of enjoying the process, the perfectionist is constantly grading the results.

“To the perfectionist, there is always room for improvement.  The perfectionist calls this humility.  In reality, it is egotism.  It is pride that makes us want to write a perfect script, paint a perfect painting, perform a perfect audience monologue.”

” ‘A painting is never finished.  It simply stops in interesting places,’ said Paul Gardner.  A book is never finished, but at a certain point you stop writing it and go on to the next thing.  A film is never cut perfectly, but at a certain point you let go and call it done.  That is a normal part of creativity—letting go.”

Finding the time (and courage) to create. . .

“Blocked creatives like to think they are looking at changing their whole life in one fell swoop.  This form of grandiosity is very often its own undoing.  By setting the jumps too high and making the price tag too great, the recovering artist sets defeat in motion. . . Creative people are dramatic, and we use negative drama to scare ourselves out of our creativity with this notion of wholesale and often destructive change.  Fantasizing about pursuing our art full-time, we fail to pursue it part-time—or at all.”

“Creativity requires activity, and this is not good news for most of us.  It makes us responsible, and we tend to hate that. . . And most of us hate to do something when we can obsess about something else instead.”

“The need to be a great artist makes it hard to be an artist.  The need to produce a great work of art makes it hard to produce any art at all. . .  Fear is what blocks an artist.  The fear of not being good enough.  The fear of not finishing.  The fear of failure and of success.  The fear of beginning at all.”

“Think of your talent as a young and skittish horse that you are bringing along.  This horse is very talented but it is also young, nervous, and inexperienced.  It will make mistakes, be frightened by obstacles it hasn’t seen before.  It may even bolt, try to throw you off, feign lameness.  Your job, as the creative jockey, is to keep your horse moving forward and to coax it into finishing the course.”

Fame is not the same as success. . .

“Fame is addictive and it always leaves us hungry.  Fame is a spiritual drug.  It is often a by-product of our artistic work, but like nuclear wast, it can be very dangerous by-product.  Fame, the desire to attain it, the desire to hold on to it, can produce the ‘How am I doing?’ syndrome.  This question is not ‘Is the work going well?’ This question is ‘How does it look to them?’  The point of the work is the work.  Fame interferes with that perception”

“Focusing on fame–on whether we are getting enough–creates a continual felling of lack.  There is never enough of the fame drug.  Wanting more will always snap at our heels, discredit our accomplishments, erode our joy at another’s accomplishment. . . The only cure for the fame drug is creative endeavor.  Only when we are being joyfully creative can we release this obsession with others and how they are doing.”

“Creativity is a spiritual practice.  It is not something that can be perfected, finished, and set aside. . . This unfinished quality, this restless appetite for further exploration, tests us.  We are asked to expand in order that we not contract. . . As artists we are spiritual sharks.  The ruthless truth is that if we don’t keep moving, we sink to the bottom and die.  . . The stringent requirement of a sustained creative life is the humility to start again, to being anew.”

What do you think about “The Artist’s Way”?

Even if you haven’t read this book yet, based on what you’ve read here. . .

• Do you think Julia Cameron is right when she says that the biggest obstacle in our path as artists is fear and not lack of creative talent?
• Do you agree with the idea that what we really want to do is what we are really meant to do?
• Have you managed to clear out all of the “toxic playmates” in your creative life?  Where are you able to find the support you need to continue on the creative path?
• Do you agree that perfectionism is not about fixing or getting it right, but is an excuse to keep you from moving forward?
• How do you restock your “creative well”?

Tell us about your own creative journey!

Here are some other articles you might enjoy:

1. An Artist’s Bookshelf – “The Creative Habit” by Twyla Tharp
2. An Artist’s Bookshelf – “Art & Fear” by David Bayles and Ted Orland
3. 21 Artists to Watch in 2010

Why Skinny WordPress?

Thanks again and I hope that you enjoy the new site!

Visit Skinny WordPress at: http://SkinnyWP.com

Here are some other articles you might enjoy:

1. Parting with your Art
2. The Muppets Guide to World Domination
3. Stop stealing my sh*t!

Turn Off, Tune Out, and Rediscover Your Life

It’s probably no surprise to you that these days we are under a constant barrage of media input.

If it’s not television, music, moves, or video games consuming your time these days — it’s probably email, blogs, apps, YouTube, websites, Twitter, and Facebook. I mean it’s gotten to the point that I can’t even eat my Lucky Charms in the morning without  Lucky the Leprechaun nagging me to log on and visit him on his #%@! website.

Back it off Leprechaun!

Anyone who has spent any length of time online knows that checking email, watching YouTube videos, and posting updates to Twitter, Google+, and Facebook can consume your entire day if you’re not careful.  Honestly, if it wasn’t for all the coffee I drink and my children needing to eat on a regular basis, I probably wouldn’t be able to pull myself away from the computer at all.

As if that’s not bad enough, we have annoying websites like this one calling you a slacker if you’re not involved in all of these social networking sites as a way to connect with your customers and fellow artists.  Now we’ve got Google+ pounding on the door wanting us to spend the rest of our day sorting our friends into elaborate social circles.

So WTF?!

Is it really better to burn out than to fade away?

This is not about whether or not it’s worth your time and effort to be on Facebook and Twitter.  This is about being finding a way to use these social networking sites without having them take over your entire life.

What seems to be happening is that we keep signing up for more of these accounts, which of course requires more of our time to constantly update and maintain them. In other words, we keep adding all of these new things to our plate while the number of hours we have to deal with them never changes.  Sooner or later something has got to give.

I know that I’m not the only one thinking about this issue these days because several of my friends have recently either shut down their social media accounts or forced themselves on a social media sabbatical because they realized that it was consuming way too much of their day.

In other words, they simply gave up and walked away.

After seeing this happen again and again, I started to wonder . . . Is there such a thing as finding a healthy balance when it comes to using these kind of social media sites? And if so, was it possible for someone like myself who generally has the willpower and self-discipline of a fruit fly?

I was curious if there was a way to be involved with these sites without having them take over your life. Was the only solution really to shut down and walk away?  So one day, in between posting status updates, I sat down and tried to come up with a list of different options that I could possibly use to limit myself from frittering away my entire day on these useful but also time-sucking websites:

1. I could go cold turkey and close down all of my social media accounts down permanently
2. I could come up with some kind of elaborate schedule blocking out the time I could spend each day on these sites
3. I could hire someone to do all of this social networking for me
4. I could assign certain days to certain sites and only visit those sites on those days
5. I could take a 6-week social media sabbatical
6. I could just keep doing what I’ve been doing and justify that it’s part of being a creative artist in the 21st century
7. I could whine and complain about it in a long-winded article on this site and see how everyone else is handling it

An experiment in social media sanity

After looking over these options, I quickly realized that giving up completely and going cold turkey probably wasn’t a real option, nor was hiring someone else to do all of this for me (although I’m sure that might appeal to many of you). So I was left with four remaining options:

• Create a daily time schedule
• Assign certain days to certain sites
• Take a 6-week social media free sabbatical and then reassess my options
• Or I could simply keep doing what I’ve been doing and hope that my feeble little brain doesn’t descend (even deeper) into madness

The last option about writing the whiny long-winded article on this site was obviously a given

So over the past month or so, I’ve been experimenting a bit with a few of these different strategies

What I quickly discovered was that timers and time limits for the most part don’t really work on me.  I apparently have some type of starch blocker in my brain that filters out any ringing or buzzing sound that indicates that I should logging off from Facebook, Twitter, or anything else for that matter.  I have a feeling that this is sadly the result of ignoring my alarm clock for all these years.  Please learn from my example kids.  The snooze button is not your friend!

So timers and schedules were quickly ruled out.

Next I decided that I would just take a break for awhile.  Just as if you were deprogramming yourself from a cult or recovering from a bad case of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream addiction.  You just take a step back, do without, and then see what happens. . .

I think this lasted about three or four days before I started going through status update withdrawal and getting the Twitter version of the hippie-shakes.  People were trying to contact me!  What kind of Twitter friend would I be if I just left them hanging out there in cyberspace?  Who else was going to share my idiotic observations of the world if it wasn’t me?  I was weak I know, but in the process I also discovered that taking an extended leave of absence probably wasn’t going to happen.

So in the end, it was either continue to do what I had been doing, or start rationing out my social media days like some type of bizarro Weight-Watchers program.  I had a feeling that this might be my last chance for social media sanity, so I was determined to make it work.

Scheduling a Facebook fast

Sometimes it’s all about momentum and habit, we find ourselves doing something (both good and bad) for no other reason then we’ve been doing it.  We need to find a way to break the cycle and stop the momentum in order to change our habits.

So lately I’ve been scheduling days where I won’t get on Twitter or Facebook at all (gasp!) — Now I know this may sound a bit extreme to some of you, but I also knew that it was the only way that I was going to make this work.  Schedules didn’t work.  Time limits didn’t work.  So now I was down to “Facebook Free” days as my final option.

A plan is only as strong as the idiot following it…

My original plan was that instead of having a fixed day of the week to “turn off and tune out”, I would simply schedule my Twitter-free days a week or two in advance so that I could plan my writing schedule accordingly.  The idea was to start with one day a week and then possibly work my way up to 2-3 days a week later on.

At first I found myself  scheduling these days on easy-to-avoid the computer days such as when family activities would pull me away from home or we would be out of town.  The problem with this system, of course, is that I wasn’t actually getting any writing done either on these day because I had conveniently scheduled all my Facebook-free days to coincide with the time that I wouldn’t have been sitting at the computer working otherwise.

On paper it looked like the plan was working perfectly and I was suddenly exhibiting a lot of willpower, but in reality I knew that I was simply taking the easy way out.  Eventually it came to the point that I had to start banning myself from checking Twitter, Facebook, the website, and even opening my email  during “creative working” hours/days.  I finally realized that even the smallest peek into my email inbox would quickly begin my descent into social media madness.

Creativity requires time (and sometimes silence)

Creativity, at least for me, has always required a period of quiet stillness time that is uninterrupted.

Many of us need that downtime where there is nothing to distract us and nothing for us to do.  We need those moments of creative solitude in order to listen to those soft creative voices within.  We also need that time to recharge and process all of the input that we already have received. 

I remember reading about how Mahatma Gandhi would take one day a week and not speak to anyone.  He didn’t do this to rest his vocal chords, he did this because he realized the value of taking the time to reconnect with his inner voice even in the midst of overthrowing a colonial empire.  Now I obviously don’t have a smidgen of the willpower and self-discipline that Mr. Gandhi exhibited in his daily life but I realize now that he was on to something.

I needed to find the time to be alone with myself

So I started turning off the wi-fi on my laptop and kicking it old school every few days. No web browsers, no Pandora, no TweetDeck, no email, just me and that scary blank page.

From now on, there will probably be some days where you won’t hear from me at all on Twitter or Facebook and if you send me an email message I might not respond right away.  It hasn’t be easy, but I’ve had to swallow my pride let go of the idea that I could do it all.

I am slowly learning how to adapt and survive in this brave new digital world.  Like so many others, I am still fumbling around trying to find that elusive balance between being constantly connected and still having those precious moments of solittude where creativity can take root and blossom.  I can only ask you to be patient with me as I learn to be more patient with myself.

This is not goodbye, it is only a new beginning…

How do you manage to do it?!

• Do you usually get on your Facebook or Twitter account every day, once a week, or once a month?
• How do you limit the amount of time you spend on these types of social media websites?
• Do you have an actual  system in place (timer, schedule, etc..) or do you just use common sense?
• Do you find yourself spending more or less time on these sites as you get more comfortable using them?
• Have you closed down, or ever considered closing down any of your social media accounts due to the amount of time you were spending on them?

Image courtesy of Marshall Astor

Here are some other articles you might enjoy:

1. Dear Facebook, what’s the point?!
2. 21 Artists to Watch in 2011
3. 9 Warning Signs of an Amateur Artist

“O, beware, my lord, of jealousy!
It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock
The meat it feeds on.”
~William Shakespeare

.

Jealous much?

Let’s face it, now that almost every artist and their creative brother are online showing off their handiwork,  it’s easier than ever to become jealous of …

• their artwork/writing/music
• their sales
• their really cool website
• the hundreds of comments on their blog
• hearing about all of their recent exhibitions and gushing publicity
• not to mention their legions of fawning friends and followers on Twitter and Facebook

I mean, sometimes it’s enough to make you want to crawl back into your creative little hole and hibernate until the coming zombie apocalypse.

Let’s not kid ourselves here. Ten years ago, we all knew that these over-achieving creative folks were out there, but at the same time, we didn’t have to sit there and stare at their virtual trophy shelf every single day.

Not that I’m blaming any of these artists for their success.  After all, kudos to them for working their tails off and achieving some level of success in their creative field.  I certainly don’t begrudge them that, but that doesn’t necessarily change the fact that sometimes I’m jealous as hell of them.

I can’t even read books anymore…

It’s been said that one of the requirements of being an artist or writer is to fully immerse yourself in your art.  Not just diving into your own work, but also the works of others.  For writers this means reading the great works of literature, for musicians listening to the classics in your chosen genre, and for visual artists this means studying the masterworks of those who came before you.

That’s fine.  I have no problem with that.  After all, everyone needs someone to look up to and model themselves after.  I don’t have a problem with studying the old masters.  What I seem to have a problem with, is studying the work of my contemporaries.

You see when it comes to the old dead masters of our craft,  I can usually rationalize their success.  After all, maybe they received a better education, perhaps they had more time to practice their craft, or maybe they had some wise old mentor who shared some ancient secrets with them.  Whatever may have been going on there, they all ended up doing very well for themselves and that’s great.  And if nothing else, at least I can take comfort in the fact that since they’re dead, they are not very likely to steal my really great idea for that book that I’ve been meaning to write.

It’s not the old masters who makes me jealous… it’s you!

I’m talking about the regular old artist/writer/musician that you just met on Twitter who seemingly has it all together.  You know the one I’m talking about here.  That artist who just booked that big show, that writer who just published their first book, or that photographer who just published a coffee table book the size of Texas [Editor: for our international readers, that's pretty darn big]

Please don’t get the wrong idea here. It’s not that I dislike these creative contemporaries for their success.  In fact some of them are the nicest people you will ever meet, but I still can’t help but feel a little jealous of their success.

Now is this just some kind of flaw in my character — probably.  Look, logically I know that we’re not out here competing with one another and I realize that another artist’s success in no way diminishes my own chances of achieving my goals.

I get that.

Now having said that,  I still find myself getting jealous every time I read a really good book.  I still feel a bit envious whenever I see a younger writer being featured in some magazine article.  And I still get upset when someone else comes up with a really good idea that may have been sitting right there in front of me the entire time.

It all comes back to the evil twins of Fear & Doubt

In the end, of course, it’s not about any of them — it’s about me.  It’s about me not living up to my own expectations.  It’s about me having a vision that seems to be constantly just beyond my reach and ability.  It’s about me not always feeling worthy of the path I have chosen for myself.  And it’s about me feeling as if I have wasted so much of my time by not starting sooner and getting distracted by endless shiny objects along the way.

Jealousy injures us with the dagger of self-doubt. ~Terri Guillemets

The author Julia Cameron put it this way in her extraordinary book “The Artist’s Way“:

“Jealousy is always a mask for fear: fear that we aren’t able to get what we want; frustration that somebody else seems to be getting what is rightfully ours even if we are too frightened to reach for it.  At its root, jealousy is a stingy emotion.  It doesn’t allow for the abundance and multiplicity of the universe.  Jealousy tells us there is room for only one — one poet, on painter, one whatever you dream of being. . . The biggest lie that jealousy tells us is that we have no choice but to be jealous.  Perversely, jealousy strips us of our will to act when action is the key to our freedom.”

This constant sense of fear, inadequacy, and jealousy is certainly not something I’m proud of, and the only reason I’m sharing any of this with you is because I suspect that I’m not entirely alone.

So I guess my question to you is….

• How do you not get discouraged by all of this?
• How do you get past that nagging feeling that somehow it has all been done before?
• How do you celebrate in the success of others without getting down on yourself?
• How do you not beat yourself up for losing focus and wasting so much time along the way?

Please tell me that I’m not the only one who feels these things!

Here are some other articles you might enjoy:

1. 5 Fears that can Destroy an Artist
2. 9 Warning Signs of an Amateur Artist
3. The Delusional Freedom of an Artist

Every year about this time I have this absurd tradition of sitting down and coming up with a small list of New Year’s resolutions for myself.  Fortunately this is a fairly easy exercise because I find myself making the same exact resolutions each and every year.  Not only that, but I somehow still manage to surprise myself when all of these good intentions begin to fall apart a few weeks later.

A failed experiment (again)

Each year I convince myself that this will be the year that I finally stop using the treadmill for an over-priced clothes rack and actually start running on it again.  This will be the year that I’ll practice my guitar often enough that my calluses won’t disappear and my fingers won’t bleed for a week every time I get “inspired”.  And this will be the year that I’ll finally get myself organized so I won’t have to spend so many nights lying awake wondering what the hell I did all day.

If history is any guide, this will also be the year that none of these things actually happen.

Let’s face it, it’s possible to really want to do something but still not be willing to do what it takes to make it happen. After all, if I wasn’t willing to do make any of these things happen a month ago, what makes me think that January is going to be any different? For whatever reason, I seem to be unwilling to do what it takes in order to make these changes in my life.

Sometimes I hear people talking about how “lucky” a particular actor, writer, or musician is and how that could have easily been them if they could get that one lucky break. . . this of course is complete load of crap.

Now I’m not going to sit here and tell you that luck doesn’t play any role at all in their success.  However as the writer E.B.White once said, the most successful people are “prepared to be lucky”.  Yes, unexpected things do happen and sometimes all of the pieces suddenly appear to fall into place, but realistically this doesn’t happen unless you have put in the work ahead of time. . .

How Gwyneth Paltrow learned to play the guitar

I was reminded of this fact a few weeks ago when I was reading that scholarly journal of the arts “Entertainment Weekly“.  In this particular issue they had a series where they talked about several different actors and actresses and how they had prepared for their upcoming roles.  One of the articles was about how Gwyneth Paltrow learned to play the guitar and sing for her movie “Country Strong“.  Apparently she had never even picked up a guitar before when she had agreed to do this role.

So what did she do?

Well she hired a guitar teacher and she began practicing. . . a lot. And it wasn’t exactly easy.  In fact in her own words she said,

“I played all the time, and my hands were bleeding and cramping.  It sucked.  I cried, like, five times at various points over four months.  It’s really f—ing hard.  It’s much harder than it looks.”

All this preparation paid off and as ‘luck’ would have it, she not only made a great movie, but she was later invited to perform live at the Country Music Awards and guest star on a little show called “Glee“.  Now of course Gwyneth Paltrow was already a famous actress before any of this happened, but no one including herself, had any idea that she could sing and play guitar as well as she did.

In other words, all of this preparation created some very unexpected opportunities for her (i.e. luck) that has taken her career to a whole new level.  I’m sure that they could have hired a guitar playing stand-in for this one particular movie, but Gwyneth decided to do the real work, even though she could have never predicted where any of this would lead.

Why Mark Wahlberg trained 4 years for one movie

Mark Wahlberg is an actor who may be best remembered to those of us who grew up in the 80′s as the abs behind Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch.  What most people don’t realize, however, is that Mark is also a serious actor who began training over four years ago to portray real-life boxer Micky Ward in his latest movie “The Fighter”.  Keep in mind that because he still possessed his legendary abs, Mark could have easily trained for this role as a boxer in a couple months and been done with it, but in his own words he said, “I wanted to look like a world-class boxer, not just like some actor who can box pretty good.”

So what did he do?

Mark built a boxing ring in his home.  While he was working on other projects he would take his boxing trainers along with him.  According to Mark,

“We’d train 8-10 hours a day. Micky and Dicky [the real life brothers on which the movie is based] lived at my house, and we would start the day at six in the morning, running eight miles to church and back.  We’d have breakfast and then start training.”

Mark Wahlberg could have taken the easy way out and played the part of a boxer, instead he became one.

So what are you willing to give up in to achieve your goals?

What you have to understand is that none of this is really that unusual.  I could probably give you at least a dozen more examples of actors, writers, musicians, and yes–even visual artists who went far above and beyond what was expected of them often for no other reason than it was what they felt they needed to do in order to achieve their goals.

One of the reasons I started writing articles for this site was that I really wanted to become a better writer.  I knew that in order to do that, I had to start writing a lot, which unfortunately is something that’s easy to avoid when no one else is watching.  As this site continued to grow, I began to feel some positive peer pressure to keep writing and publishing new posts regularly. Not that you can probably tell by actually reading this stuff, but writing these articles week after week has helped me become a better writer. Although I’m still nowhere near where I hope to be someday as a writer, I at least feel like I’m heading in the right direction.

What are you willing to do in order to become a better artist?

Are you willing to do what it takes to become a full-time-making-money kind of artist/writer/musician?  In order for that to happen, you’re going to have to find the motivation and the self-discipline to put in the work when nobody else is looking.  Not only that, but you’re going to have to keep doing it day after day even though you’re probably not going to see any immediate results.

This might mean that you’ll have get up early or go to bed late.  This might mean that you’ll have to be a parent, work a day job, or do the laundry during the day and then create your art or write your novel at 2:00 in the morning.  This might mean that you’ll have to turn off the television, put down the book, or log off Twitter or Facebook once in awhile in order to get done what you need to do.

People are doing extraordinary things everyday to create their art.

What about you?

• What do you want to accomplish this year as an artist/writer/musician/photographer?
• What are you willing to give up this year to create your art and achieve these goals?
• What have you done so far today to become a better artist/writer/musician/photographer?

Tell us about your Artistic New Year’s Resolutions. . .

Success can be a bit of a double-edge sword sometimes. . .

On one hand a little bit of commercial success gives us the confidence we need to continue creating our art, but on the other hand, it can also lull us into a sense of complacency and prevent us from taking risks and exploring other forms, styles, and techniques.

I think that most of us have experienced this at one time or another.

We create something we like and it’s generally viewed as a success by others (yay!).  From that point on, however, the temptation will be there for us to stick to that tried-and-true formula, instead of risking potential failure by trying something new.  So what generally happens is that we end up repeating the formula that initially brought us our success because it’s comfortable and familiar to us.  In fact, we begin to call it our “niche” or our “signature style”.

After all, if it’s not broke don’t fix it, right?

We’ve all seen this with musicians who try to duplicate the success of their debut album with a second effort that ends up sounding like little more than a slight variation of the first.  This is the paradox of the sophomore slump–we try so hard to replicate what got us to where we are, that we end up not really creating anything new along the way.

The Crazy Ones

Not that changing things up always works.  We talked in a previous article about how Bob Dylan got himself booed offstage on more than one occasion when he decided to change musical directions.  He ended up  confusing (and angering) a large part of his folk music audience in the process.  Now in the end, things have obviously worked out fairly well for Bob and his career, but he had no way of knowing that at the time.

More recently, this type of musical genre jumping/risk-taking  has become synonymous with the folk/pop/dance/country artist known as Jewel.  However, with apologies to Mr. Shakespeare, we are not here to bury Jewel, but to praise her. . .

I have little doubt that Jewel could have made a very comfortable living for herself sticking to the acoustic folk-rock stylings that had brought her so much success with her debut album “Pieces of You” that sold over 12 million copies worldwide and is one of the highest selling debut albums ever produced. Her followup album “Spirit”  was similar in style and sold almost 4 million copies in the U.S. alone.   In other words, she had clearly made enough of a name for herself (and money) at that point, that she could have easily stuck with what she knew and had a musical career that most singer/songwriters can only dream about.

But she didn’t. . .

After doing the obligatory Christmas album, Jewel began to change musical directions with her third studio album “This Way” and veered away from the solo acoustic guitar style that had brought her so much initial success. She followed this with the completely unexpected dance-oriented album “0304“.  Legions of her fans hailed Jewel’s new sexed-up pop image as her defining “jump the shark” moment and the music critics slammed her.  Undaunted and unwilling to conform to anyone’s expectations, she continues exploring new musical genres and her latest efforts have been filed under country music.

Where Jewel will go from here is anyone’s guess, but I’m confident that whatever she does, she’ll continue to ignore the naysayers and critics and she will continue to follow her own path.

Forget about the damn shark!

Let’s be clear, this isn’t just me being some fanboy gushing on Jewel.  She is just one example of the type of artists that I have always admired.  I’m talking about those artists who weren’t afraid to break free from their audience’s expectations and were determined to follow that small creative voice inside of them.  They never worried whether their latest project was going to be a success or failure, because they weren’t doing it to please other people.

These are the artists who always seem to defy explanation.

This is why you can’t sit down and easily define artists like Bob Dylan, Matisse, Verdi, Yeats, or The Beatles because they were constantly changing and evolving throughout their career. They continued to push themselves beyond the familiarity of their previous work because they knew that if they didn’t continue to expand, they would begin to stagnate and eventually become irrelevant.

Ignorance is Bliss (and courage)

Sometimes I think that we could all benefit by returning to that state of naive innocence when we didn’t know any better as artists/writers/musicians.  It seems that after we have practiced our craft long enough and found a modest amount of success, one of the hardest things we can do is to try to go back and reclaim that sense of childhood fearlessness where we tried to do something just because we didn’t know any better.

We’ve got to find a way to have the necessary experience and knowledge to create our art, while at the same time, still be naive (i.e. courageous) enough to try something new.  In order to continue growing as an artist, we need to push ourselves out of our comfort zone and find a way to scare the creative crap out of ourselves once in awhile.

Work on your Weaknesses

Switching genres or creating self-imposed limitations on yourself (ex. creating a painting using only shades of blue) is one method of pushing yourself out of your established patterns and forcing you into exploring new territory. In other words, you need to approach your work from a new, and often uncomfortable, perspective.

I know that we talked in an earlier article about some of the dangers of constantly switching your focus and bouncing from one genre to another and becoming a jack-of-all-trades but master of none.  However, we’re not necessarily talking about your long-term growth here as an artist, but more of a self-induced creative shock treatment intended to push you out of your routine and comfort zone.

In other words, I’m going to ask you to do something here that you hate!

So for example, if you are a visual  artist who really hates to draw or paint hands, perhaps you could challenge yourself by doing an entire work of nothing but hands.  Or if you’re a writer who only writes novels, maybe it’s time to force yourself to write that short story.  If you’re a photographer who usually only works in color, try shooting your next series entirely in black and white.  If you are a songwriter or musician who usually works in 4/4 time, maybe it’s time to create something in 3/4 or 6/8 time just to see what happens.

Whatever it is you usually do — find a way to force yourself into doing something else.

Don’t be afraid to get messy and don’t waste your time worrying about the result.  Just find somthing that makes you cringe creatively and do it.

What are you willing to do to grow as an artist?

Here are some other articles you might enjoy:

1. 9 Warning Signs of an Amateur Artist