You didn’t fail. The goal was to learn something, so if you learned, you succeeded. It’s only when the unexpected happens and we don’t learn from it that we really fail. The reason why you may not have achieved what you set out to achieve was that you were measuring (and therefore expecting) the wrong thing.
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.
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.
