art // everyday

art // everyday

yesterday i heard this speaker say that if you read only 10 pages a day at the end of two years you would have read this many books... and he brought out all these bags of books. it was a lot. he coorelated it to the concept of exercise, and said if you worked out just 20 minutes a day, over the course of a year, your body/health would drastically change. it got me thinking. what is 20 minutes in your day? what is 10 pages of a book? hardly anything. but stacked on top of each other its hours of exercise and thousands of pages. small daily increments building major brain and body muscle. expanding your mind and stretching your body to new limits.

i feel similar about creating. the act of sitting down and making space to create every single day will drastically change your life. it might not look like much at first. but similar to the 10 pages or the 20 minutes, added up, staked on top of each other, it amounts to thousands of ideas. and within that stack there is most likely quite a few ideas that can be monetized. you're sitting on the treasure.

an exert from the war of art:

"when we sit down day after day and keep grinding, something mysterious starts to happen. a process is set into motion by which, inevitably and infallibly, heaven comes to our aid. unseen forces enlist in our cause; serendipity reinforces our purpose.

this is the other secret that real artists know and wannabe writers don't. when we sit don each day and do our work, power concentrates around us. the muse takes note of our dedication. she approves. we have earned favor in her sight. when we sit down and work, we become like a magnetized rod that attracts iron filings. ideas come. insights accrete.

just as resistance has its seat in hell, so creation has its home in heaven. and it's not just a witness, but an eager and active ally.

what i call professionalism someone might call the artist's code or the warrior's way. it's an attitude of egolessness and service. the knights of the round table were chaste and self-effacing. yet they dueled dragons.

we're facing dragons too. fire-breathing griffins of the soul, whom we must outfight and outwit to reach the treasure of our self-in-potential and to release the maiden who is God's plan and destiny for ourselves and the answer to why we were put on this planet."

in all three cases perfection needs to be thrown out the window. stop trying to bring the future into today. embrace the now. enjoy the process. heaven is on your side.

read this book and get started! the world needs what's inside of you.