Empowering Video: Neil Gaiman

On Wednesdays I share a video that facilitates empowerment; because when you know better, you do better.

The old rules are crumbling and nobody know what the new rules are. So, make up your own rules.

Neil Gaiman's (Fantastic, Amazing, Wonderful) Advice 

1. When you start out on a career in the arts you have no idea what you are doing.

 (And this is a good thing.) 

2. If you have an idea of what you want to make, what you were put here to do, then just go and do that.

3.  A freelance life, a life in the arts, is sometimes like putting messages in bottles, on a desert island, and hoping that someone will find one of your bottles and open it and read it, and put something in a bottle that will wash its way back to you: appreciation, or a commission, or money, or love. And you have to accept that you may put out a hundred things for every bottle that winds up coming back.

4. Make mistakes. If you're making mistakes, it means you're out there doing something. And the mistakes in themselves can be useful....Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do. Make good art. 

5. Make your art. Do the stuff that only you can do.

6. People keep working, in a freelance world, and more and more of today's world is freelance, because their work is good, and because they are easy to get along with, and because they deliver the work on time. And you don't even need all three. Two out of three is fine.  

7. Let go and enjoy the ride, because the ride takes you to to some remarkable and unexpected places.

*

Needless to say, this speech is an instant classic that will go up there with David Foster Wallace's "This Is Water" and Steve Jobs' "Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish". The speech is chock-full of inspiration, regardless of whether you have a career in the arts or not. Your "art" is your thing. The thing that you do better than anyone else. The thing that makes your heart sing and time stand still. So, we should all take this advice (or rather, reminder) to heart. 

Go forth and do great things.