Amateur artists need to shut up...

The sign of the amateur is over glorification of and preoccupation with the mystery. That, again, in my own layman's terms, the amateur is the person that thinks everything is a magic trick. Like, how. How did that happen? What's. What's going on here? Right? And then the professional shuts up. She doesn't talk about it. She does her work. The professional shuts up. She doesn't talk about it. She does her work. Steven Pressfield. She kicking me in the teeth today, you guys. I can't even believe it. So I want to talk about this idea of professionals and amateurs and magic and how we feel like art is this magic trick. Like, being a professional artist is like being a flipping magician. And it drives me up the wall because I get people arguing with me about this all the time. But let me start by telling you, I remember a moment when I went. My dad's a bass player. I. I went to B.B. king's Blues Club, which he was in, the original house band there in Memphis, and I went and watched him. I was probably 11 years old, 12 years old, too young to be in, like, a bar club kind of scene. And I remember watching him, and it was just so cool. It was like the guitar player was just ripping these amazing solos, and it felt so incredible, and there was so much emotion behind it. And I remember having. It was like watching magic. For me, it was this beautiful, emotive thing. But what we have to remember here is that that's not magic at all. That is a byproduct of ours put into his craft. Right. The danger here is that we see our influences, the people that we look up to the most, as these unicorns. My wife said that just a few minutes ago. Like, we have these unicorns in our life, and we think, I can never be that. I can never be that. They have something I don't have. They have this it factor or the other side of that. The other story that we tell ourselves is like, man, they put in so much time and effort. I just don't have that time. I just can't put in that amount of time. I mean, and as we just heard from Steven Pressfield, it's the amateur that gets caught up in the mystery. And to me, mystery is nothing but a story that we tell ourselves. Okay, so I talked about it a few videos ago. Fear. That's what all this is, is fear. Do I have the it factor? Do I have enough time to put in the same hours that this person did, that my person did, that can make me live up to that influence.

That's the mystery. It's the question. It's all these questions of, you know, do I? Can I? Will I? How can I? Right? And the danger in that is that we feel like they have something we don't. And, yeah, they may have something you don't, but you also have something that they don't. You cannot forget that you also have something they don't. You have something to offer the world that the world needs to see. They need to hear it. They need to feel it. You have feelings that you need to create for people to attach themselves to. Teller from Penn. And Teller says this. Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.

It's just spending more time on something than someone might reasonably, reasonably expect. It's just shutting up and doing the work. And I want to just be cautious here because what you'll hear, some of you are going to hear this Gary Vee thing where it's like, just shut up and go do the work. Just put your head down and grind it out. No, that is not what I'm saying at all. What I am saying to you right now is sometimes it's about shutting up the questions, shutting up the fears, and. And just doing the work because you know, it's what you need to do. Not because I told you that you need to go out and work harder. Because I think there is a difference between working hard and hard work. So my coach told me the other day, I need to be careful about saying something is hard, especially if I'm talking about work or something in my life. Because when we see things as being hard, we see it as this period of something. Like, my kiddo, the other day, she said, dad, I got all this stuff in my room to clean, and it's going to be really hard. It's going to be just. It's going to be really hard, she said. And she was kind of welling up with tears in her eyes because she could feel in that moment that the work was going to be too hard, which meant that she probably wasn't going to be able to accomplish it. So I don't like this idea of, go work harder. Because I think when you do that, you're always saying that you're never going to live up to something. Working hard and seeing hard work are two different things. Working hard is just about shutting up and doing the thing that you trust in yourself that you are supposed to do. Okay, so art making, art making great art is not a Magic trick. It is not a magic trick. What we feel inside may feel like magic in that moment when we receive it. But let's remind ourselves that when these artists went out and made these things, when these creative people did the things that they did, they did not show up with this aura over them, their face aglow with the mystery of their, you know, being. It didn't work that way. They showed up, they did some work. They had an intent, they had a goal, they had a message that they wanted to put into the world. They had an idea that they wanted someone to potentially change their own mind from what they believed to the thing that this artist believed. There was something that they had to say. And when they stepped up and they did that work, they didn't get to choose which part of it got them to be famous. We don't get to choose what we're famous for. We just get to choose to show up, say our message, learn to get better at speaking the thing that we believe. Learn to get better at connecting our art with someone's feelings. Learning to get better, doing more work than one might reasonably expect.

That's all we have the choice to do. We don't get, as Seth. I mean, you guys know I got this man crush on Seth Godin. As Seth Godin says, we are not entitled to any outcome. We are not entitled to it. We just get to show up and do the work.

But we do it because we know it's in us. We do it because we have to. Not because somebody told us we need to. Not because Gary Vee says we need to hustle. Not because so and so says that, you know, if we want to get more followers, we need to just be out there grinding it out. It's not any of that. We do the work because we want to connect it to somebody, because we want to give something to someone else, Right? We get to choose what we're famous for.

So I want you to think a little more about what you have to say. I want you to spend a little more time on how you're going to say it. I want you to just kind of shut yourself up. If you hear that little voice come up and say, but it's going to be too hard, but you don't have that thing. But you're not quite ready for this. Tell that voice that to go kick it, because you don't need that one here right now. What you need is to shut up here, let that voice shut up and do the work that you know needs to be done. Because you're trusting yourself now, right? You're not trusting the feeling. If we trusted our feelings, we would never get anything done. If I could hear you say Amen, I know that you would. Right. So let's make sure that we're trusting ourselves. That showing up, putting in the work and shutting up those little voices that don't need to be there. Okay, Let me know how you're going to do that in the comments. I'm looking forward to seeing you guys this week. I'll talk to you soon.