Accept the biting reality that the system is unfair

Nobody said being successful as artist was going to be easy.

But if you’re an under appreciated, undiscovered genius, whose fault is that?

The talentless gatekeepers who wouldn’t know human emotion if it spit in their faces? The ivory tower corporate dolts who wouldn’t know culture unless it came with a tax break? 

Sorry, but that chip on your shoulder where you think you deserve to be appreciated and you shouldn’t have to stoop to do things, it’s not helping your situation.

Take the music industry. Most bands have to play their way out of obscurity.

Wayne Coyne started Flaming Lips, one of the great alternative rock bands in his early twenties, and his group didn’t have a hit single until a decade later.

Leonard Cohen labored in vain as a poet during the fifties and most of the sixties, until he finally released his debut album when he was thirty three.

This is both the attitude and behavioral pattern we see with so many successful creators. Once they accept the biting reality that the system is unfair, all there is left for them to do is hire themselves and go create something undeniable.

There’s no guarantee that anyone will care about their work, but it’s a whole lot better than brooding around while bitterness and envy eat up their hearts.

They may as well spend their time cracking open their soul and bleeding out something that might inspire the world, rather than bemoaning how under appreciated and insufficiently compensated they are by it.

If you’ve ever felt that way, you’re not alone. Making art can be as equally liberating as it is soul crushing. People have committed suicide over less.

But let’s not forget that it’s not the world’s job to value the things we make.

The onus is on us. Not only to value it for ourselves, but to generously share it with all. To pass our gift along as the final act of gratitude that finishes our labor.

Besides, even if we did wake up tomorrow and we were suddenly appreciated and discovered, would that really change everything? Or even anything? Would it set us free and make us whole?

Or would it simply put greater pressure on us to ratchet up the treadmill of external approval to that elusive next level?

Duritz sang in his legendary hit single with Counting Crows, Mr. Jones, when everybody loves you, then you can never be lonely.

But once he became a globally recognized icon ten years later, he changed the lyrics to say, when everybody loves you, that’s just about as messed up as you can be.

Do it for you. Bless your soul with the intellectual food of your own creative joy. Learn to treat everything else that happens to your work as the icing on top, and you will be able to have your cake and eat too, every bloody day.

When will you have finally done enough to be okay with who you are?