For centuries, historians believed the great Renaissance master was just another Starving Artist, struggling to make ends meet. Michelangelo himself embraced this image, living frugally and often complaining about money. He once wrote in a poem that his art had left him “poor, old and working as a servant of others.”
But it turns out he wasn’t telling the truth.
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The point of marketing is not to convince people to buy your stuff. It’s to help you find the people who need your work. Don’t create something for everyone. Create something for someone.
How do you get busy, important people to notice you? In this age of connectedness, it’s easier than ever to meet your heroes and even partner with them—as long as you know how to do it.
I have always believed in ending things well. Recently, I shared with you why I decided to end my conference. Now, I want to share with you more about it.
How do you know when it’s time to quit something and when to stick with it just a little longer? All of creativity—and life, it seems—is really just an attempt to answer this question.
People often ask me how I work and I refuse to answer the question because it has absolutely no value at all. Almost every morning after dropping off my kid at school, I go to the same coffee shop, sit at the same table, drink the same cup of coffee, and write. It’s the same ritual, every day.
Are you stuck? Are you scared? Unsure of what to do with your life? Make more things.
Do you feel like everything you create is not very good and no one, including yourself, understands what you are trying to do? Make more things.
Do you remember when you started it, this thing you now call your craft? Do you remember when you did it because you loved it, because you couldn’t stop doing it? I don’t. But I’d like to remember. I’d love to go back to being an amateur, if I still can.
Is your work timely or timeless? That is, is it something that is relevant to your current place in history, or does it transcend the limitations of its context? You may be thinking that the goal of every artist is to do work that lasts, but this is a myth.
It’s one thing to call yourself a writer; it’s quite another to actually write. So what separates the pros from the amateurs? Is it God-given talent? Natural skill? Or something else?
Of course, we all have gifts that we’ve been given. This is grace, the fact that we have things we are good at — and don’t deserve them. But what we do with those gifts is what separates the outliers from the rest of the pack.
Has a really good story every moved you to feel or to act? That is the true art of storytelling. Someone who knows this well and has honed this art is Scott Harrison of charity: water. Scott got into storytelling when he moved to NYC at 18. Initially, he rebelled against his upbringing and moved […]
Bestselling author and creativity expert Jeff Goins dismantles the myth that being creative is a hindrance to success by revealing how an artistic temperament is, in fact, a competitive advantage in the marketplace.
For centuries, the myth of the starving artist has dominated our culture, seeping into the minds of creative people and stifling their pursuits. But the truth is that the world’s most successful artists did not starve. In fact, they capitalized on the power of their creative strength. In Real Artists Don’t Starve, Jeff Goins debunks the myth of the starving artist by unveiling the ideas that created it and replacing them with fourteen rules for artists to thrive.
