Success

What is success? Be honest with yourself.

Do you truly believe that a successful person is defined by the car he drives, the title after her name, or their number of Twitter followers?

Life is bigger, wider, deeper than what you can fit into a shoebox.

Walk onto that beach with confidence, knowing that you are a success.

– This week’s quote by Steve Henderson in Start Your Week with Steve, a free weekly e-mail newsletter to help people start Monday off on the right foot, or just to start it at all. Join us, and invite your co-workers, friends, and family.

New Year’s Resolutions That We Can Keep

I’m not big into New Year’s Resolutions.

I know, lots of people say that, but I actually mean it. I don’t deliberately make promises — to myself or others — that I can’t keep.

That being said, there’s no reason why we can’t pursue improving ourselves — all through the year — and if an arbitrary date spurs us into trying to make  positive changes in our lives, then Happy New Year, everyone.

The key thing about successfully making changes, however, is reality, something distinctly missing from our brains after four weeks of too much chocolate, alcohol, drearily depressing office parties and too little exercise, sleep, and time with a good book. Too often, when we set our goals, we set up unrealistic ones — not because they’re too big, but because achieving them is beyond our control.

Like this favorite:

“I’m going to lose ten pounds.”

How?

By eating better? By exercising more? Even if you succeed at this, you may or may not lose ten pounds, because what you drop in fat you may gain in muscle. Ultimately, you cannot control whether you lose those ten pounds, but you can control what you do in your plan to get there: you can eat better. You can exercise more. And by doing so, you may lose ten pounds.

So let’s put this into the life of the artist, (who may, or may not, incidentally, want to lose ten pounds):

“I’m going to improve my sales this year!”

How?

By advertising more? By participating in more shows? By attending every artist’s reception in a 35-mile radius and hobnobbing with the gallery staff (easy on the truffles and cookies, by the way, or you may gain ten pounds)?

These latter three are actions that you can control, and they may or may not result in increased sales, which you ultimately can’t control.

I think our fascination with New Year’s resolutions arises from a sense of discontent with where we are, and the perception (accurate sometimes, inaccurate others) that our dissatisfaction with our lot stems from some lack, some failure on our part. So, at the end of an old year and the beginning of a next, we list out all the things we want to change so that, by this time next year, we’ll be stronger, better, faster, richer.

But improving ourselves is a lifelong process, and the ultimate gain in who we are is the result of deepseated changes at the core of our being: it’s not that we’re thinner, or more popular, or wealthier, or the possessor of two thousand Facebook followers, it’s that we’re kinder and more patient, smiling more and frowning less, thanking the person who bags our groceries, offering the benefit of the doubt to the idiot who just cut us off in traffic, listening to a child’s loooooooooonnnnnnnng convoluted story of last night’s dream when we really want to check our e-mail.

Those slow, deepseated changes — which arise through little decisions we make as we move through the day — through time transform us into different, better people who approach our art each day in a different, better way.

The changes may or may not result in better sales and a slimmer physique, but better sales and a slimmer physique, regardless of what we think, do not make us happier people. Being better people, deeper, more genuine people who are solid to the core, is a solid step toward finding what we’re looking for.

Happy New Year, Everyone!

The Art — Not the Artist — in All of Us

It is popular to say — so that no one feels bad — “We are all artists!”

But we’re not, really, any more than that we are all physicists, or all machinists, or all five star chefs. Art, like any profession, requires discipline, study, aptitude, perseverence, and work, and I’ve delved into this more deeply in We Are Not All Artists, (Epoch Times, June 13, 2011).

But not to despair — while there may not be an artist within each of us, there is art, and each one of us is an individual, created work of beauty that may or may not look attractive to the world outside. It all depends, really, with what we do with the inside of ourselves.

When an artist paints or sculpts a subject, he spends time looking at the subject, studying it, with the goal of translating the essence of that subject to the canvas or the clay. The more successfully the artist 1) figures out the subject and 2) tranlslates it to artistic form, the more successful the finished piece.

Ironically, the more an artist concentrates on a “message” or “statement,” the less pleasing the finished project, because too much of the artist and his opinions and beliefs and prejudices, as opposed to the essence of what he is painting or sculpting, comes through. In another twist of irony, when the artist successfully focuses on the subject, the artist, in his own essence, successfully emerges as well. His message makes it, almost in spite of himself.

So it is with the art inside of us. When we focus on others — the people in our lives, both good and bad, with their problems and dreams and joys and sorrow — we create brushstrokes and color in our own souls that make us into better people, happier people, more content, at peace, and stable.

And yet, when we pursue happiness as our primary goal, we are like the artist who propounds his message, his thoughts, his opinions and shoves them into the painting or sculpture — the more we actively seek to be happy, the less so that we are. The more we seek the happiness of others, the more we find it in ourselves.

In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, the main character, Alice, finds that, in order to get where she really wants to go, she has to head in the opposite direction, because when she beelines toward her objective, she constantly finds herself back where she started.

We live in a Looking Glass world, a beautiful place with terrible imperfections, a reflection of a better place not marred by those imperfections. Like Alice, in order to get where we want to go, we must sometimes do the opposite of what makes sense, because much of what makes sense to us is based upon on desire to take care of ourselves, our needs, our wants, our desires.

These can be met, but only if, like the artist, we focus outside ourselves and on the subjects in our lives.