Being an artist

Art is seeing the world that does not exist…Civil rights activists are artists. Athletes are artists. People who imagine something that is not there. — Oscar-nominated filmmaker Ava DuVernay

Every change that leads to flourishing is made possible by artists who imagine a better, more helpful version of the world and then commit the rigor required to make it real.

If you are enrolling others to make a change, you’re an artist.

If you are solving for an unmet need, you’re an artist.

If you routinely ask “what if” and “why not”, you’re an artist.

Artistry is the habitual contribution of work that makes things better.

If you want to be an artist, you can become one by choosing to be a person who does generous things for other people.
In my mind I see artist as you've used it here as less about the work and more about the living/life/being. 

I heard somethign interesting by a English rapper Skepta. He said that he wasn't a rapper but rather an activist who fights for change through his rap music. Let's just inject the word 'artist' in there instead for this comment.

I think we need a world of more activists through art. What will your art be? Whatever you want. Sports? Digital Media? Food? Whatever it might be I think we need less people who are so fixated on the form of the art whats the painting look like, what's the music sound like, how was the code written? and more thoughtful on the change they want to actually impart on not only the world but concurrently themselves. 

Just like there's maslow's hierarchy of needs, I believe that there is a hierarchy of creation and also one of being. I believe that until a certain competency is hit in the hierarchy of creation people get stuck on the form rather than the impact. 
2021-01-26 16:31:30
This is interesting and something we should discuss next Wednesday. 

I tend to agree what what you're saying, but I also think Maslow's hierarchy was never meant to be linear. People can toggle between different levels of his hierarchy depending on where they are at -- likewise, we start with form and then go to impact, but that doesn't we _graduate_ from form... both inform the other. 

How do you distinguish work from living? 

2021-01-26 16:38:40
Looking forward to it!

So I think as you move up the hierarchy you don't negate the previous rungs. Like if you're self actualized you still require safety/food/everything-else-under-self-actualization. It's just that the top rung becomes the dominating perspective for how you do things. For example, on the bottom of the rung is survival. You might be fighting for food and scarfing it down. 

When you're on top of the rung then you will still need to survive and eat, but you approach it differently. Now you don't scarf down food. You obtain your food in a way that complements your individuality. Maybe that means you don't care about food as an aesthetic experience and are happy using it simply as fuel. Maybe it means you do value food as an aesthetic experience so you practice the craft of making food and you connect it to social reasons for eating (pleasing others) not just your own literal caloric survival. 

Likewise with creatioin and intention, I think that at the bottom rung you are literally just fighting to be in the know. Crawling for every inch of knowledge you can soak up. And then you are crawling for every inch of implementation you can get. And then you start to develop an intuition for how it all works and then you get the chance to begin reflecting on intentionality and impact. But once you reach this stage your ability to intend and imapct is all predicated on the comptency developed at the lower rungs. And likewise your newfound reflections further influence what further forms/competences you want to develop in order to have further impact/intentions. It's an interaction between the two.

In this conversation I'm using work as literally the output and inputs that go into that output. So let's say the literal hours you spend on the writing and editing and publishing of a book. Whereas life is the whole human experience of the person. So in this example the-work/work is a subset of life. The reason why I make the distinction is because I think many of us endanger the richness of life by allocating so much of it to work.
2021-01-26 17:34:34