Real Artists Take Responsibility.

When you have one of those ideas that that stops everything your doing...you know what I mean, don't you? When you wanna pull the car over, ditch the meeting, stop the deeply personal conversation with your wife mid-sentence, abandon your schedule, leave your kid hanging on the monkey bars...

When that idea hits, politely yet quickly take a pause, make a note, sketch a pic, record a melody, jot down the set up or the punchline...DO IT! Do it with the grace and civility of a wild animal acting on instinct.

Then immediately forget about it and get back to what you were doing. Let it simmer under the surface in your subconscious like my wife's chili with pineapple and beans. Yes chili can have beans. And yes, chili is fantastic with pineapple.

Unless of course you have the time, freedom, and resources to drop everything and spend an hour or two on the idea. In that case...Eat It Up!

Don't let inspiration dissipate simply because you can't chisel away at it ASAP. Be prepared. Be responsible. Be creative on purpose and with purpose.

Fruit Trees Produce Fruit

Fruit trees are designed to grow fruit.

Whether or not you believe they were spoken into existence with the intent of bearing fruit or they developed over time to do so, they do. And they do so with purpose.

The fruit of fruit trees are often sweet and eaten by animals and insects.

This fruit often carries seeds within.

These seeds fall, are consumed or carried away and purposefully designed to root and grow. To multiply. And to be fruitful.

When a fruit tree isn't fruitful in an orchard or a backyard, when it isn't doing what it's created to do, it gets replaced. We cut it down. We use the wood for campfires, grills, smokers, and mulch. And we plant another to produce and multiply and sustain us. It isn't personal. It's practical and it's purposeful.

Creatives create. Whether you create one book or twenty. One song or an endless parade of new drops. One play or two or thirty. One design or a showroom filled to the brim.

You're created to co-create.

If you're not creating, why? Yes, you're more valuable than what you create and if you've created what you needed to and you're done, then great! Move on, learn, and grow again. But if you're not done...put it on the calendar for tomorrow. For an hour. Work the muscles and prime the creative pump. Take one step. Produce the fruit you ought to produce.

Successive Goal-Setting

Boiled down to its thickest meat-sauce, psychological successive approximation is a wildly technical way of saying:

Set a goal.

Work toward it.

Review the successes and failures.

Celebrate your healthy responses and choices that approximately match your desired outcome.

Then set another goal a bit further out and do it again.

Do this daily. Do this with your art. Do this with your attitude. Do this with your relationships and faith and decisions. One step at a time, in one area of life at a time, and you'll see compound growth take shape.