I recently read the following advice from portrait painter Chuck Close. He was talking about art, but it applies to a lot of life situations where we wait and wait and wait till the “right moment” to fulfill our dreams.
“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.”
Chuck is like Nike, saying “Just do it.” But think about it! It’s true. Once you start trying you’re bound to get somewhere, so get to work.
(I can’t remember who pointed this out to me, so if it was you, let me know!)
I love this so much. Inspiration seeps in, every day, from all sots of places, and we often aren’t even aware of it. Our minds are filled with potential creative thoughts waiting to be unlocked.
So true!!!
Great advice – a hobbyist can afford to wait around but a professional has to do things like eat and pay for heat. Process, process. Such true words.