Week 11, Day 4 of The Artist's Way

Today, let's focus on balancing artistic fulfillment and financial success.

SUCCESS (continued)

As a successful artist, the trick is to not mortgage the future too heavily.

If the house in the Hamptons costs two years of creative misery cranking out a promised project just for cash, that house is an expensive luxury. 

This is not to say that editors should stop planning seasons or that studios should scuttle their business bottom line. It is to say that the many creatives laboring in fiscal settings should remember to commit themselves not only to projects that smack of the sure thing but also to those riskier projects that call to their creative souls. 

You don’t need to overturn a successful career in order to find creative fulfillment.

It is necessary to overturn each day’s schedule slightly to allow for those small adjustments in daily trajectory that, over the long haul, alter the course and the satisfactions of our careers.

This means writing your morning pages. Taking your artist date. “But I run a studio,” you say—or whatever other thing it is you must do. “People depend on me.” I say, all the more reason to depend on yourself and protect your own creativity.

If we ignore our inner commitment, the cost rapidly becomes apparent in the outer world. A certain lackluster tone, a rote inevitability, evicts creative excitement from our lives and, eventually, our finances. Attempting to insure our finances by playing it safe, we lose our cutting edge. As the promised projects diverge further and further from our inner leanings, a certain deep artistic weariness sets in. We must summon our enthusiasm at gunpoint instead of reveling in each day’s creative task.

Artists can and do responsibly meet the demands of their business partnerships. What is more difficult and more critical is for us as artists to continue to meet the inner demand of our own artistic growth. In short, as success comes to us, we must be vigilant. Any success postulated on a permanent artistic plateau dooms us, and it, to failure.

(The Artist's Way, 2016, p. 183-184)

Read the following affirmation out loud with purpose and intent:

I am thriving with balanced success.

Honest Changes

Take a moment to inventory for yourself the ways you have changed since beginning your creative recovery.

“You are lost the moment you know what the result will be.“

– Juan Gris

What is one way you have changed since beginning your recovery?

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