Interesting quotes from a book I found: An ABC for Grown Ups...

"Life Outside the Comfort Zone," Seth Godin

Quotes that have made me think more about my art practice and given me confidence in producing art and staying true to my ideas.

• Anxiety is experiencing failure in advance. Tell yourself enough vivid stories about the worst possible outcome of your work and you’ll soon come to believe them. Worry is not preparation, and anxiety doesn’t make you better.
• Commitment is the only thing that gets you through chasm. Commitment takes you from “that’s a fine idea” to “its done.” Commitment is risky, because if you fail it’s on you. On the other hand, without commitment, you will fail, because art unshipped isn’t art.
• Effort isn’t the point, impact is. If you solve the problem in three seconds but have the guts to share it with me, it’s still art. And if you move ten thousand pounds of granite but the result doesn’t connect with me, I’m sorry calluses, but you haven’t made art, at least not for me.
• Feedback is either a crutch or a weapon. Use feedback to make your work smaller, safer, and more likely to please everyone (and fail in the long run). Or use it as a lever, to further push you to embrace what you fear (and what you’re capable of).
• Gifts are the essence of art. Art isn’t made as part of an even exchange, it is your chance to create imbalance, which leads to connection. To chare your art is a requirement of making it.
• Heroes are people who take risks for the right reasons. Real art is a heroic act. Hipsters, on the other hand, are pretenders who haven’t risked a thing but like to play the part.
• Initiative is the privilege of picking yourself. You’re not given initiative, you take it. Pick yourself. If you’re not getting what you want, it may be because you’re not making good enough art, often enough.
• Joy is different from pleasure or delight or fun. Joy is the satisfaction of connection, the well-earned emotion you deserve after shipping art that made a difference.
• More is not the goal of the artist. Better is the artist’s dream. Better connection is the point of the work. More stuff leads to a world of scarcity, while better connected creates abundance.
• No feels safe, while yes is dangerous indeed. Yes to possibility and yes to risk and yes to looking someone in the eye and telling her the truth.
• Pain is the truth of art. Art is a hobby or a pastime. It is the result of an internal battle royal, one between the quest for safety and the desire to matter.
• Quality, like feedback, is a trap. To focus on reliably meeting specifications (a fine definition of quality) is to surrender the real work, which is to matter. Quality of performance is a given it’s not the point.
• Remix, reuse, respect, recycle, revisit, reclaim, revere, resorb. Art doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.
• Vulnerable is the only way we can feel when we truly share the art we’ve made. When we share it, when we connect, we have shifted all the power and made ourselves naked infront of the person we’ve given the gift of our art to. We have no excuses, no manual to point to, no standard operating procedure to protect us. And that is part of our gift.
• The Warranty of merchantability is a principle that guarantees that something you buy will do what the seller promises it will. Your work in art doesn’t come with one. Your art might not work and your career might not work either. If it doesn’t work today, it might not work tomorrow either. But our practice is to persist until it does.
• Youth isn’t a number, it’s an attitude. So many disruptive artists have been youngsters, even the old ones. Art isn’t a genetic chronological destiny, it’s a choice, open to anyone willing to trade pain in exchange for magic.