Every artist's "how I made it" talk, ever

[popobawa4u]

@Glitch

there are very, very, very, staggeringly few original ideas

It doesn’t take much to constitute “originality”. Suppose that 32% of people are trying to accumulate money, 32% are trying to get laid, and 32% are trying to survive. This would leave a whole 3% for people who actually needed to know or do something specific which didn’t involve those three. Within this (admittedly made-up, but perhaps not far off) context, it really doesn’t take much to be original.

[hhype]

I like this story and I am glad your parents friends finally found their niches (and riches). But in some ways it illustrates the topic at hand. You haven’t shared the story of the hundreds (thousands?) of others like those two artists that also had …

@ChickieD

a comfort with living without a lot of things, patience to learn the skills of being an artist and also of marketing their work, and enough skills to earn a basic living as full time artists while they figured it out.

… who nevertheless failed to achieve the success of your parent’s artist friends. In the language of the video the artists you tell the story of “bought a lot of lottery tickets”.

If one is not persistent and gives up one is not likely to achieve their goals, yet if persistence is still not a guarantee that one will achieve their goals. There are many external factors or “luck”. maybe we should just call them factors outside of our control and admit that they may have more effect than the ones under our control.

[ChickieD]

Well, I certainly have known other artists who have tried for years and not had their level of success, but I don’t think it was a lottery. I think that the friends who made it worked a lot on the marketing and professionalism of their work. For example, the comic artist did a lot of high level commercial work (I remember he was published in Playboy) and I think that gave him an ability to show there was a market for his work that appealed to publishers and that he could work to deadlines. The glass artist - I remember when he came in not just with the beautiful artwork, but also the absolutely gorgeous posters of that work that galleries used to promote him. And later he married and his wife became his business manager. I have other friends who I find to be extremely talented and dedicated to their art, but who haven’t quite figured out how to promote themselves in a very sophisticated way - YET!

[cntrfldr]

An insightful & entertaining talk which conveys an almost universally useful message. You should continually keep hoping to catch some lightning spark of luck, but as Churchill said, “Success is the ability to go from one failure to the next with no loss of enthusiasm.”