MAIDENFED

“I’m not in the advice business. However, people have been sending increasing
amounts of books / videos / manuscripts / poems / photographs / artworks / long raving emails
describing plans for certain masterpieces. Mostly this is a pleasure, but I would like to take the
opportunity to offer one piece of advice to young artists and writers.

Be disciplined. Be hard on yourself. Remember that you are competing with some of the greatest minds in history. If you are a painter, for example, you are entering into a race where Michelangelo
and Picasso already have leads. Ask yourself if you have done everything you can, everything in
your power, to compete with those guys. It’s not a matter of painting like them or of conceiving of
art like them. You can do your own thing. It’s a matter of pushing yourself, the way they pushed
themselves, to do in art what no one else could do. Why accept anything less of yourself?

Wittgenstein: “What you have achieved cannot mean more to others than it does to you. Whatever
it has cost you, that’s what they’ll pay.”
― Supervert