Become As Little Children

"What needs to be driving you is just that childlike desire to share your gift freely with the world, whoever wants it, and now not everyone will want it, not everyone will like it, but you just put it out there and that gives you pleasure. That's the authentic motivation of the artist."

He also says, "art is a personal act of courage, something that one human does that creates change in another."

That one resonates with me because to start my business to put out my work, I had to put in a lot of labour. I take what I do very personally and for me a lot of times it is an act of courage to share something, to reveal some intimate detail of my life, or to to put myself out there on a limb and talk about some controversial subject.

Sometimes I'm not sure how people are gonna react to it. But you know, I do that because I want to create change in people, and that's exactly what Godin is talking about here. You need to have courage in yourself to put yourself out there, and that's risky.

You might get rejected, you might get humiliated, you might fail, you might stumble and trip and fall on your face, but that's the cost you're willing to take in order to potentially create a change in another human being. 

He also says, "most of all art involves labor, not the labor of lifting a brush or typing sentences, but the emotional labor of doing something difficult, taking a risk and extending yourself."

I love this. I love when he talks about emotional labour because to me this is, in a nutshell, the whole difficulty with why many people never create anything. Why is it so hard to create? It's hard because it involves a lot of labour.

It's not the typical, external, manual labor that we would normally think of, so we tend to dismiss it. Actually, emotional labour is harder than physical labour, and we'll talk about this more in the following post.