How I became an artist
The best thing about this piece is the rationality of his decision-making: didn't get a scholarship so take a year off to get better. School was getting too expensive so find a cheaper way to go. Need to pay off student loans so move back in with parents. These are excellent artistic decisions, because they allowed him to practice his craft and never take his eyes off his goal, yet didn't wed him to any particular path forward.<p>He treated high costs as damage and routed his career around them.<p>This lesson is as true in business as it is in art: always look for cheaper, more efficient, yet still effective alternatives. Productivity is output/input, and when the output (commercial success, in his case) is a very noisy function of many factors you don't control, figuring out how to minimize input costs while keeping P(success) as high as possible is the key to making good choices. He showed creativity and pragmatism as well as dedication.<p>Also: failure is always an option (I say this as someone who has failed more often than he has succeeded in his major life goals, although the successes have been more than worth the effort.) Hard work and talent are necessary but not sufficient conditions for success. Maybe there is no audience for the kind of art you love (I'm a formal poet, and have more-or-less made my peace with this.) So make sure you're doing it for love, not money. If the money is there, you've won the lottery, but regardless of that aspect of it, making the art you love, and putting in the hours and deliberate practice to get better at your craft, is worth it.