Jock Genius

Work like you don’t need the money.

 Love like you’ve never been hurt. 

Dance like nobody’s watching. 

Satchel Paige

IOW, do your work like you're not getting paid. Do the work you want to do. 


I’ve worked in the marketing and corporate communications space for a while now. I've had to write about all kinds of subject matter that, on the surface, wasn’t that interesting to me. But I used a technique I forged when I worked as a bartender in a restaurant that catered to a mostly dull and self-serving grayhead clientele: Find whatever’s in there, be it a person or a subject, that’s interesting to me. Make them/it interesting. Sometimes that means taking the subject/person places they wouldn’t go without your guidance. 

Work like you’re the audience. And find the things within it that are your loves and passions. 

And then dance about it like nobody’s watching because it isn’t for them—it’s for you: All you.

Trying the Previously Untried = Good

How to Do Great Things with Crap Self-Esteem

Master Love First

That dude from Queens of the Stone Age:

Conscious Uncoupling: I won't lie—It's painful

Søren Kierkegaard Gets Unvexed

I need the enchantment of creative work to help me forget life’s mean pettinesses. 

Only when I write do I feel well. Then I forget all of life’s vexations, all its sufferings, then I am wrapped in though and am happy. If I stop for a few days, right away I become ill, overwhelmed and troubled; my head feels heavy and burdened.

Go Hard for You

No one needs your art. 
Imagine if Harry Potter didn’t exist. Pottermania—or Twi-hards, Gleeks, Trekkies, whatever—would’ve just flowed somewhere else—like water. 

But you need your art. 
If you don’t need it, it’ll be the worst thing anyone has seen—even to you. You need to need it, hunger for it. 

What’re you passionate about? 
Turn that passion toward yourself. This is the formula for better work. Just make better work—only strive for better, not perfection.

As Dita Von Teese famously said: You can be the ripest, juiciest peach in the world, and there's still going to be somebody who hates peaches.
Let them hate your peaches, but whatever you do, don’t hate your own peaches. Load them with passion and work them over and over. Make sure your fingerprints are all over them.

Start now. Or first thing tomorrow.

Sit Down and Shout Into the Machine

Your Morning Would

I write when I’m inspired—
and I see to it I’m inspired at nine o’clock every morning.

Peter DeVries

Surprise Yourself with One

Hate Warhol: Love War-Haul

You know what? F**k Andy Warhol. I’m tired of those crappy silkscreens of celebrities. I’m tired of him getting to diamond-encrust his a-hole for purloining someone else’s graphic design (Brillo boxes, Coke bottles, Campbell’s Soup cans, etc.), screening copies of them, and selling them for millions (eventually). His great innovation was doing Marcel Duchamp’s schtick for household products.

So what? Well, now we have to live with that. For the last 60 years galleries have been loaded with pop cultural (among others) appropriations by unimaginative come-latelys. 

Enough is enough. The problem with pushing boundaries is, that once pushed, they rarely go back again. It can be good – Little Richard – and very bad – the petulant and rude, profane, ignorant, rantings of the current POTUS.

Despite my Warhol fatigue, he did get one thing right, however: The working process. He was disciplined. In The Art of War he came back with plunder—i.e. work. He worked hard. And though much of his artistic life, I’d argue, was about pandering for big-ticket sales, it wasn’t always that way. Early in his career he was a brilliant illustrator; later, an ingenious conceptualist. But like all heroes, he, at last, became a bore. But then it was his right and duty as an artist.

Make it yours too.

 

Not Everything Happens for a Reason, but Everything that Happens Can Be Used

Feeling does derange you. That’s why so many of us will go to such great lengths to avoid it including fleeing to toxic and compulsive behaviors like porn, chemicals, and other self-destructions.

The answer is: Creating. Write the f**k out of those deranged feelings. Dance them into the dirt. Draw and paint over them, through them, and from within them even. Sculpt them, make them into a chair or quilt.

But don’t run from your demons. Play with them. They always bring the best music.

And When Starting, Remember Why You Quit Last Time

Get This Into Your Head – It's Not for Them

David Hare's Rules of Writing

So What If No One Reads It – Write It

The Bitch writes. So Be One.

Another Lamott Bon Mot

Listen to her. She knows.