Is it a bad thing to always look to the next thing?
I mentioned last week the panel of sorts that I sit on for women trying to start their own businesses. The woman who presented to us, while being a perfectly nice woman, didn’t really have any idea where she wanted her business to go. A sort of haphazard approach to a start-up, which I have never seen end well in the infancy stages of new businesses.
The one piece I did vaguely understand was that she was basing her business on a movie she had made. A piece of art, a representation of something very dear to her. In explaining why she needed to use this movie as a stepping stone to continue growing her business wisely, I stated “You said before you were a freelance artist, so let me put it in an artistic terms. You have your first work of art that is going to “burst” you onto the scene. If you want to have long term success, however, you need to continue working to get to your next piece, cause no great artist has ever rested on one piece.”
The woman nodded, seeming to understand, when another counterpart suddenly burst in saying “That’s complete bullsh*t…an artist can become world famous with just one work.” We all sat in a bit of silence for an awkward 5-10 seconds, not knowing what to say. And I must admit, while in my younger years I would have crawled under the table in horrified embarrassment, now my temptation is absolutely to get ghetto fabulous on a someone.
I refrained, but the statement this woman made just sits painfully in my mind. More importantly, it sits painfully in my heart. How on earth would ANYONE encourage someone to do one great thing and never aspire to do anything else is…painful! To say that Picasso should have just stuck with his portraiture we would not have had such an impactful cubist movement. To say that Johnny Cash should have stayed with the gospel and folk music would have left us without the Folsom Prison Blues. I could create this entire post with even more examples like this.
There are so many people in the world that seem to adhere to this theory, and more and more I see why the arts are dying so quickly in our society. To think that you can produce one great work of art and never want to challenge yourself to go beyond is frankly a sign of fear. Not a lack of talent nor a lack of effort. It is pure and simple fear. Fear that you’ll never be better than your first work. Fear that if you go to a different style with the next no one will accept/understand it. Fear of change.
I kinda feel bad for this woman. Scratch that, I feel VERY bad for this woman. I wonder what hopes, dreams, future she has hung up to rest on the laurel of whatever her one great work is. Or maybe, at an age much further progressed from mine, she doesn’t have one yet. To live a life of complacency is a sad place to be.
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