Newspaper + Marker = Poetry.
My work with Praxis puts me in touch daily with young people at the beginnings of their careers.
The hardest lesson they have to learn? Nobody cares about your wants. Your friends don’t. Your colleagues don’t. Nothing you think or say can help you cheat reality.
You’ll just have to work.
It seems there is almost an inverse relationship to your long term success and the amount of recognition you receive early on in your career. There’s a great quote by Ayn Rand in The Fountainhead that says this better than any poem I could make:
Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. Their goals differed, but they all had this in common: that the step was first, the road new, the vision unborrowed, and the response they received — hatred. The great creators — the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors — stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new thought was opposed. Every great new invention was denounced. The first motor was considered foolish. The airplane was considered impossible. The power loom was considered vicious. Anesthesia was considered sinful. But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered and they paid. But they won.
Just do your work. Do it well.
Everywhere I look there’s someone with a “25 under 25” title or some other ultimately meaningless accolade or self-description like “forward thinking,” “driven,” or “innovator.” Generally it’s not good to lead with these.
It’s not that they are necessarily bad, but most of the truly successful people I know are too excited to talk about what they do to care about talking much about who they are.
A good example I like is Pieter Levels’ Twitter description:
Notice that it’s all things he’s built. Sure he calls himself a “serial maker,” but his claim is proven immediately after that by listing what he’s created, and he frankly doesn’t even need to say it. I know it already just by looking at the links.
This is hard to do because it doesn’t allow you to cheat reality. If someone checks on something you claim you did and you haven’t, you’re in trouble. But in a world where everyone is trying to self-describe as “entrepreneur” or “innovator,” the personal branding reward for someone who can point to something concrete is big.
I was talking to my friend T.K. Coleman today about the role art plays in shaping your values. Ayn Rand has a great quote on this in The Romantic Manifesto that get’s at what we were talking about:
Art is the indispensable medium for the communication of a moral ideal . . . This does not mean that art is a substitute for philosophical thought: without a conceptual theory of ethics, an artist would not be able successfully to concretize an image of the ideal. But without the assistance of art, ethics remains in the position of theoretical engineering: art is the model-builder . . .
It’s my belief that you can tell very quickly the kind of art a person grew up consuming. If you grew up watching old western movies, I think it’s easy to tell. If you grew up consuming post modern trash, I think it’s easy to tell. If you grew up watching movies that told you that you must choose between your career and your family, that will probably affect how you view the world.
Once you know the signs to look for, you can start to become a sort of “art detective” and uncover the kind of artistic tastes people have before they tell you.
So if this all happens to be true, if art holds this power over us, what do we do? The obvious answer is to consume good art. What’s more, you should regularly consume art that reflects your highest ideals because that will get you closer to achieving those ideals.
But there’s another responsibility that is less obvious but maybe more important: make your own art. If the process of consuming art provides you with, as Ayn Rand said, a “model” for a “moral ideal,” then creating art is that and more. I know of no better way to understand yourself and how you view your place in the world than this process.
It’s been my experience that meetings can open more needless questions than they resolve important ones.
Sometimes it’s better to act first and meet later.