I share four quotes from this blog by Jason Liu.
Happiness
In the short term, you would be much happier if you accepted and admitted to yourself that the reason you don’t have what you want is simply because you do not want it badly enough. The sooner you accept that, the happier you’ll be. Then the next question is: Do you want to be happy or do you want to achieve what you want?
Luck
You make your own luck. There’s a great experiment that I can’t cite, but it has stuck in my mind since I was a child. They identified people as lucky and unlucky and asked them to count the number of photographs in a newspaper. The unlucky people took a long time to count the photographs, while the lucky people took a very short time. The reason is that the unlucky people were so focused on counting the photographs that they missed the giant text that said, “Stop counting, there are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” What I took away from this experiment was the idea that it might not be the case that lucky people and unlucky people have different opportunities, but rather that their field of perception is wider. Lucky people can actually see the opportunities. A lucky person and an unlucky person might meet the same businessman, but they might talk about different things. One could be presented with or ask for an opportunity that the unlucky person doesn’t even see as possible.
Taste
When I was in art school, one thing I discovered was that many people believed they were defined by the work they created. If their work wasn’t good, they saw it as a reflection of their skill rather than a reflection of their taste, which was actually superior to their ability.
Celebrity
You don’t need to believe in yourself to be an artist, you just need to believe in your audience. To believe that it is important to communicate with them. Make sure that if your goal is to build an audience that you have some message to say. Otherwise it just gets hopeless. Celebrity is the cost you pay to deliver your message. Celebrity is to be hated.