A book about creativity that can pass as life lessons.
Happiness
“Your list is your past and your future. Carry at all times. Prioritize: today, this week, and eventually. You will someday die with items still on your list, but for now, while you live, your list helps prioritize what can be done in your limited time.” —Tom Sachs
This was gold. Basic? But gold.
- Focus on your immediate future (i.e., “today, this week”)
- Have a list of future dreams (i.e., “eventually”)
- And know that someday you will die with things still left to do, but you will have prioritized the most important.
Seems obvious, but didn’t hit home until I read this. Oliver Burkeman said something similar in his book “Four Thousand Weeks”. With all the things you want to do with your life, you have to understand that you won’t get to do them all. You’re going to have to make choices on what’s most important to you. Then leave everything else on the plate for someone else to pick up.
I mean, until nanobots make us immortal.
Until then, prioritization is important. You are going to get to the end of your life with things still left on your to do list, but at least if you had prioritized the things that were most meaningful to you, you will have lived a good life. (Obviously, there’s going to be tasks on your list that you might’ve felt like was priority for you but will still be left undone. Regardless, same end result: if you spent your life focusing on what was most important, you will have ultimately have lived a good life.) Prioritization = happiness. Which is kinda nice.
You know, for those who know what to do with their lives. For others like me who have multiple interests, then it’s more like “What the hell—I don’t even know what’s most important to me. Can’t this be a ‘select all that apply’ kind of exercise?” Heh. A problem for another time, another article.
“Finish Each Day and Be Done With It”
More gold. It’s like I broke into Gringotts.
“Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
Cutting off the previous day and starting fresh the next day feels like a relief. Whatever’s happened, happened. Tomorrow is a new day. A fresh start. A new chance to do it right or better.
Take Over the World
“Before you go to bed, make a list of anything you did accomplish, and write down a list of what you want to get done tomorrow. Then forget about it. Hit the pillow with a clear mind. Let your subconscious work on stuff while you’re sleeping”
Making a list of your accomplishments everyday will get you used to noticing your wins. You start seeing progress. When you notice your progress, you start seeing what you’re capable of achieving. When you start noticing what you’re capable of, your confidence increases. When your confidence increases, you are ready to be Pinky’s trusty assistant when he takes over the world. (Yeah, I just dated myself.)
Write Horribly
“Another trick: When nothing’s fun anymore, try to make the worst thing you can. The ugliest drawing. The crummiest poem. The most obnoxious song. Making intentionally bad art is a ton of fun.”
Or when you’re afraid of writing a horrible story, actually write a horrible story. Purposely. Have at it.
“Pay Attention to What You Pay Attention to”
“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.”
“We pay attention to the things we really care about, but sometimes what we really care about is hidden from us. I keep a daily diary for many reasons, but the main one is that it helps me pay attention to my life. By sitting down every morning and writing about my life, I pay attention to it, and over time, I have a record of what I’ve paid attention to. Many diarists don’t bother rereading their diaries, but I’ve found that rereading doubles the power of a diary because I’m then able to discover my own patterns, identify what I really care about, and know myself better.“
Make Sure It’s Good
It’s a struggle to reread my diary entries. But having reread some of them, I realized just how much I focused on the bad stuff. There are still times I do, just to get it out of my system. But I expend more effort now to write out positive things to balance out the negative. For example, my hopes and dreams. Or I force myself to list out things I’m grateful for. Doesn’t matter if I’m feeling it. I am required to write out even the most mundane of things. The air I breathe. The food I eat. The house I live in. The people I’m surrounded by. The job I have. Everything. Eventually it starts to help. And sometimes it’s temporary. But the habit/ritual is worth it. Because when something good happens, I notice it more.
Don’t get me wrong. If something goes wrong, I still complain. First and foremost. (Gotta prioritize after all.) But then I try to think of ways the things I’m experiencing could be good for me. Usually it’s prompted by the question: “What am I meant to learn from this? What’s my weakness here?”
Get to Know Yourself
By keeping a record of your life and your thoughts about your experiences and making the time to revisit them, you can get to know yourself. What you gravitate towards, what you want, and spot problem areas to rectify.
“Set up a regular time to pay attention to what you’ve paid attention to. Reread your diary.”
“When you have a system for going back through your work, you can better see the bigger picture of what you’ve been up to, and what you should do next.”
I’ve started to do a quick log everyday depending on need. But then on the weekend, I look it over and fill out anything I might’ve missed that’s worth noting. Anything the future me could possibly like to look back on.
“If you want to change your life, change what you pay attention to. ‘We give things meaning by paying attention to them,’ Jessa Crispin writes, ‘and so moving your attention from one thing to another can absolutely change your future.'”
Like Marcus Aurelius, who’s the best example of what you can do for yourself if you journal consistently and focus on the right stuff.
Art Monsters: Don’t Be One
“Take a quick dip into any one of the thousands of years of art history and you’ll find that…plenty of great art was made by jerks, creeps, assholes, vampires, perverts, and worse, all of whom left a trail of victims in their wake. To steal a term from Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, these people are what we call ‘Art Monsters.'”
“It can be hard and downright painful to grapple with the idea that people we find reprehensible in their personal lives might also be capable of producing work that is beautiful, moving, or useful to us. How we handle and process that information and how we choose to move forward is part of our work.”
“…we all have our own little Art Monsters inside us. We’re all complicated. We all have personal shortcomings. We’re all a little creepy, to a certain degree. If we didn’t believe that we could be a little better in our art than we are in our lives, then what, really, would be the point of art?“
Could art be our way of imagining a better us? A better world?
Then what about the depressing art out there? A way of working through our inner turmoil?
But then think of the writers of horror stories who’ve never even experienced anything close to traumatic in their lives before they started writing horror. What of them? A way to fight boredom? To go into a world more thrilling than their own?
“Leave Things Better Than You Found Them”
I love this idea the most. Make art to make a better world. Figure out a way to tell stories that make the world just slightly better in some way.
“Great artists help people look at their lives with fresh eyes and a sense of possibility. ‘The purpose of being a serious writer is to keep people from despair,’ writes Sarah Manguso. ‘If people read your work and, as a result, choose life, then you are doing your job.'”
“Quite simply: Art is supposed to make our lives better.”
Hear hear. Art should be uplifting or entertaining, or used as a means for you to work through and make sense of your experiences.
“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.”
“Art is for life, not the other way around.”
Art exists to enhance our lives. To imagine new possibilities. We should not sacrifice our lives for the sake of art (i.e., the ‘tortured artist’ idea should be a thing of the past).
“If making your art is adding net misery to the world, walk away and do something else. Find something else to do with your time, something that makes you and the people around you feel more alive.”
If writing ever starts to make your life worse instead of being a form of escape, drop it. Move on to something else. If it’s causing grief in someone else’s life, same rule applies.
“The world doesn’t necessarily need more great artists. It needs more decent human beings.”
You can use art to help humanity become better humans.
Accept the Situation and Make it Better
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald
Assess & accept the situation before you, but be ready to roll up your sleeves and improve things. Even if you feel like it’s hopeless. No effort you expend on improvement is hopeless. Either you enact change or you inspire others.
Say “I Don’t Know” and Be Kind
“The world needs you at the party starting real conversations, saying, ‘I don’t know,’ and being kind.” —Charlie Kaufman
There’s so much you can learn just by admitting you might not have the answers to everything and listening to others’ opinions, especially if they are directly opposed to yours. There might be something there you missed.
“Tidying is Exploring”
“WHEN IN DOUBT, TIDY UP.”
Since this was a strategy I seemed to use, to have it recommended by someone who knows what they’re talking about was validation I didn’t know I needed. Most of the time I felt like I was wasting time when I was reorganizing my work.
“productive procrastination. (Avoiding work by doing other work.)”
“The best thing about tidying is that it busies my hands and loosens up my mind so that I either a) get unstuck or solve a new problem in my head, or b) come across something in the mess that leads to new work. For example, I’ll start tidying and unearth an unfinished poem that’s been buried in a stack of papers, or an unfinished drawing that was blown across the garage by the air conditioner.”
I love how he akins tidying to exploring. When things get muddled, all I can do is go back and organize my writing. It reminds me of things I had thought of before that would be useful in untying the tangled web of a story. Or come across new sparks of inspiration.
“The best studio tidying is a kind of exploring. I rediscover things as I work my way through the clutter. The reason I tidy is not really to clean, but to come into contact with something I’ve forgotten which I can now use.“
“This is a slow, dreamy, ruminative form of tidying. When I come across a long-lost book, for example, I flip to random pages and see if they have anything to tell me. Sometimes scraps of paper fall out of the book like a secret message from the universe.”
This is kind of nice, like using tarot cards for storytelling (yeah, more on that thought process for another day :P). Whatever card you pick, whatever page of a book you pick up, it’s what you need to know in that moment. It either helps you open up to another idea that’s coming down the pipeline or it’s exactly what you needed at that moment to break you out of writer’s block.
“I often stop tidying because I get swept up in reading. This is the exact opposite of what Marie Kondo prescribes. When going through your books, she says, ‘Make sure you don’t start reading it. Reading clouds your judgment.’ Heaven forbid!”
“Tidying in the hope of obtaining perfect order is stressful work. Tidying without worrying too much about the results can be a soothing form of play.”
Tidying can be relaxing. Who knew?
“Creativity Has Seasons”
“The comedian George Carlin lamented how obsessed we all are with the notion of forward, visible progress. ‘It’s the American view that everything has to keep climbing: productivity, profits, even comedy.’ He felt we made no time for reflection. ‘No time to contract before another expansion. No time to grow up,‘ he said. ‘No time to learn from your mistakes. But that notion goes against nature, which is cyclical.‘”
Hundred percent. The link to nature drove home the fact that we can’t keep plowing forward without making time to reflect. We might need to recalibrate, but how would we know if we keep barging on without considering the impact of what’s been done so far? Set up time to stop, reflect, recalibrate if needed, then continue.
“You have to pay attention to the rhythms and cycles of your creative output and learn to be patient in the off-seasons. You have to give yourself time to change and observe your own patterns. ‘Live in each season as it passes,’ wrote Henry David Thoreau, ‘and resign yourself to the influences of each.'”
“One way to get in touch with your own seasons is to follow Kent and Thoreau’s leads and observe the seasons in nature. Draw the same tree every week for a year. Take up casual astronomy. Watch the sun rise and set for a week. Observe the moon every night for a few cycles. Try to get a feel for nonmechanical time, and see if it recalibrates you and changes how you feel about your progress.”
Also gets you into a new ritual. Gets you exposed to a different way of doing things. Gives you new insights. Provides you a sense of how time passes. How a project requires a certain amount of time invested (and practice) before it starts to look good.
“Our lives, too, have different seasons. Some of us blossom at a young age; others don’t blossom until old age. Our culture mostly celebrates early successes, the people who bloom fast. But those people often wither as quickly as they bloom. It’s for this reason that I ignore every ’35 under 35′ list published. I’m not interested in annuals. I’m interested in perennials. I only want to read the ‘8 over 80’ lists.“
‘8 over 80’ signifies endurance, a long-lasting success story.
“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. I want to know how Bill Cunningham jumped on his bicycle every day and rode around New York taking photos in his eighties. I want to know how Joan Rivers was able to tell jokes up until the very end. I want to know how in his nineties, Pablo Casals still got up every morning and practiced his cello.“
Me too.
To me, the essence of this chapter was to learn to grow at your own pace and to remember to take time for reflection.
Patience is Everything
“There is no measuring with time, no year matters, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide. I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful: patience is everything!” —Rainer Maria Rilke
“It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: ‘And this, too, shall pass away.’ How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! —how consoling in the depths of affliction! ‘And this, too, shall pass away.’” —Abraham Lincoln
The fact of the matter is that art takes time. Writing a story takes time. Be ready to piece apart the work and enjoy each moment you spend on it, without worrying about the end. Yes, envision the what you want it to look like in the end, but know that it will take a series of steps to get there. Making art is about enjoying each of the individual pieces you create that will eventually add up to the whole of what you envisioned. Patience is the faith and confidence (the self-assuredness) you exhibit that you will eventually get there.
“Believe in yourself and there will come a day when others will have no choice but to believe with you.” – Oscar Wilde
But more than others, just the first part matters. Foster your own self-belief. Create an unshakeable one. Do it by doing the small stuff first.
Ray Bradbury encouraged new aspiring writers to start with short stories first. Then novel writing.
The logic is sound. It’s impossible not to improve on things you work on. As soon you have a handle on the small stuff, move on to bigger works. You’ll also get a sense of the time it takes to complete the small stuff and so you’ll be able to exercise more patience when you get to the bigger stuff.
Parting Words
“Whenever life gets overwhelming…Worry less about getting things done. Worry more about things worth doing. Worry less about being a great artist. Worry more about being a good human being who makes art. Worry less about making a mark. Worry more about leaving things better than you found them.“
Work patiently on making art that makes a better world. I promise it’ll be worth your while.
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