I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Thursday Thinker, I share a smart idea or theory.
In following the path of your heart, the chances are that your work will not be understandable to others. At least not immediately, and not to a wide audience.
David Bayles & Ted Orland, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils and Rewards of Artmaking
This doesn’t feel good. People want their work to be celebrated, or at the very least accepted, not rejected.
In The War of Art, Steven Pressfield suggests that fear of rejection can keep you from doing the work you are here to do:
Evolution has programmed us to feel rejection in our guts. This is how the tribe enforced obedience, by wielding the threat of expulsion. Fear of rejection isn’t just psychological; it’s biological. It’s in our cells.
Resistance knows this and uses it against us. It uses fear of rejection to paralyze us and prevent us, if not from doing our work, then from exposing it to public evaluation.
The solution, says Pressfield, is to separate your personal from your professional self:
When people say an artist has a thick skin, what they mean is not that the person is dense or numb, but that he has seated his professional consciousness in a place other than his personal ego.
Pressfield says that “turning pro”—acting as a professional with your art—is the key to overcoming resistance. He thought this was such a good idea that he wrote an entire book about it: Turning Pro: Tap Your Inner Power and Create Your Life’s Work.
I think it’s a great idea too. In my old reinvention project blog, I shared ideas from Turning Pro many times. Here’s a quote from it that I shared on June 11, 2024, Day 66: Professional vs amateur artists:
Turning pro is free, but it demands sacrifice. The passage is often accompanied by an interior odyssey whose trials are survived only at great cost, emotionally, psychologically and spiritually. We pass through a membrane when we turn pro. It hurts. It’s messy and it’s scary. We tread in blood when we turn pro.
I feel that right now. What I’m doing right now feels anything but clean and easy. Part of me wants to quit. Resistance is getting the upper hand. I feel scared about continuing. The part of me that wants to quit is searching for exit and escape, alternative paths that don’t seem so dangerous, so revealing of myself.
Pressfield writes that this just means I’m taking myself too seriously:
THE AMATEUR PERMITS FEAR TO STOP HIM FROM ACTING
Paradoxically, the amateur’s self-inflation prevents him from acting. He takes himself and the consequences of his actions so seriously that he paralyzes himself.
The amateur fears, above all else, becoming (and being seen and judged as) himself.
Becoming himself means being different from others and thus, possibly, violating the expectations of the tribe, without whose acceptance and approval, he believes, he cannot survive.
By these means, the amateur remains inauthentic. He remains someone other than who he really is.
But, Pressfield suggests, being whoever you really are, expressing yourself authentically as an artist, doesn’t matter to other people:
The amateur dreads becoming who she really is because she fears that this new person will be judged by others as “different.” The tribe will declare us “weird” or “queer” or “crazy.” The trible will reject us.
Here’s the truth: the tribe doesn’t give a shit.
There is no tribe.
That gang or posse that we imagine is sustaining us by the bonds we share is in fact a conglomeration of individuals who are just as fucked up as we are and just as terrified….
When we truly understand that the tribe doesn’t give a damn, we’re free. There is no tribe, and there never was.
Our lives are entirely up to us.
“Our lives are entirely up to us”: an existential declaration. Or, better: “My life is entirely up to me.”
In his essay Wall Street Journal essay Your Power to Choose is Unlimited, Oliver Burkeman writes that you’re free to choose whatever you want. You just must accept the consequences. Forget about “wriggling free of the costs of your choice,” he writes, “[freedom] means realizing that nothing can stop you from doing anything at all, so long as you’re willing to pay those costs.”
Choosing to make art that is authentically your own opens you up to misunderstanding, criticism, and, possibly the worst, being ignored.1 Choosing not to make art, though, or making art that mimics what other people are making or have made in order to be accepted leads to perhaps even worse consequences: burnout, tedium, a draining of your soul’s energy. Choosing to make art that is authentically your own may mean you forego money and commercial respect. Choosing not to make art when you feel driven to by your soul could mean you are wasting whatever time you have been given in this life.
- Although when your work is rejected or harshly criticized, maybe at that point you’d prefer it were ignored instead. ↩︎