Insist on Great Work

On the topic of creating, Godin says, "Passion is a desire, insistence, and willingness to give a gift. The artist is relentless. She says, I will not feel complete until I give a gift. This is more than refusing to do lousy work. It's an insistence on doing important work. This relentless passion leads to persistence and resilience in the face of people not accepting your gift." 

This is what happens, especially at first when you start and you're inexperienced, you'll give a gift of your art to someone and they will reject it or not want it.

And this will perhaps hurt you, or it'll offend you, or it'll shake you, shake your confidence. Why don't people want this gift? I'm giving it away for free. I'm not even charging anyone for it, and still they don't want it!

And that's okay. You have to develop the maturity to understand that not everyone wants your gifts.

Part of your mission in life is to find those people that will want your gifts. First for free, and then for a little bit of money, and then for a little bit more money, and then sooner or later for tons of money. That's basically what the path looks like.

Next he says, "there's a strong streak of intellectual integrity involved in being a passionate artist. You don't sell out because selling out involves destroying the best of what you are."

Make sure that when you're on this journey, you never sell out. In the beginning, you're probably idealistic, and it's easy not to sell out. 

But five years down the road, ten years down the road, after you've gone through those initial greenhorn stages of your growth, and you're getting a little jaded with the industry that you're in, and that sort of thing, it becomes easy to just let go of the reins, and to let go of your integrity, let it slide a little bit, and sell yourself out. 

And then what you're doing is that you're breaking your commitment to your life purpose. So make sure you never do that.