Ignore Everybody

Ignore Everybody outlines 40 ways for creative people to let their inner artist bubble to the surface by staying in control of their art, not selling out and refusing to conform to what the world wants you to do.

Here’s the crux of creating art: if people can give you extensive and helpful feedback on it, you’ve failed to do your job. Think about it. What allows you to give good feedback? Understanding the situation really well.

But if you write something and your friends can tell you exactly what’s good and what’s bad about it, then what you’ve written can’t be very original, can it? If your art is perfectly understood it likely just regurgitates other peoples’ art.

The more original your idea is, the less proper feedback and advice people can give you.

That doesn’t mean people have to be confused by your art all the time. But if you start something you think is new and it ends up not upsetting anyone, you know you’ll have to try again. If people had been used to Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings the first time he created them, well then he wouldn’t have been such an original artist.

With art the function of feedback is reversed. The better the feedback, the more work you still have to do. Beware though, ignoring your friends will affect your relationships. Since they won’t understand, some will turn away, but that’s the price a true artist has to pay.

You might say: so what if I listen to my friends’ advice? Isn’t it good to implement feedback? You tell me to do that in business all the time! Right, but art isn’t business. The moment you listen to other people about how you should create your art is the moment you compromise it – it ceases to be art. You’d be creating what the world wants you to create, not what you want to see come to life. Ignoring your friends is one thing, but this becomes a real struggle when it comes to using your art to pay the bills. First of all, you should never ever start your journey as an artist this way. For example, if you start a blog in your spare time, but launch it with the idea of having every post make money, you’re better off not even starting. What you’ll create will be completely driven by the desire to make money. Instead, get a job to pay the rent and bills to detach your art from the money. This is the only way to buy yourself the artistic freedom you need to make something original. If your art becomes part of how you make money down the…