Find new ways to be free and to own your world

Ayn Rand’s books have evoked extreme condemnation over the years.

Her work has been called, egomaniacal, hostile destructive and anarchistic, and that’s not even the bad stuff.

One reviewer referred to her bestselling fiction novel as:

A worthless monstrosity of utter hyperbole and shocking disgrace whose sole redeeming feature is helping people with insomnia fall asleep.

Wow, such eloquent prose. Maybe that critic should be the one writing books.

The point is, when you zoom out and separate art from the artist, you realize something remarkable about this prolific creator. Rand overcame oppressions in her life that most of us could never even imagine, including war, abject poverty and the rise of communism, to name a few.

And yet, she used her creativity to scuttle her way out. She began writing screenplays at the age of eight, novels at the age of ten, and attended college at sixteen. Rand then immigrated out of oppression and into the land of the free and the home of the brave. She worked various jobs in television, until she finally became a published author.

She continued to find new ways to be free and to own her world. And as her novels began gaining widespread acceptance, she started a movement of philosophy that transformed the way millions of people think about business, individualism and art.

My favorite little pieces of trivia about her is when, in the forties, her book publisher made this disclaimer:

If we publish your work, nobody is going to try to censor you, you can write anything you darn well please and we’ll publish it.

Man, for someone with her background and in her position, succeeding against those kind of odds, it doesn’t matter what the books were about. She could have written novels about schizophrenic fleas having tea parties for all I care.

For it was the sovereignty she had over her work, over her career and life and values, that was the ultimate work of art.

If you’ve sold tens of millions of books and your work has been translated into twenty language, you win. No matter how many one star reviews you have.

Proving, that the only artistic goal worth pursuing is freedom. Freedom over what you create, freedom over why and how you create it, freedom over whom you create it with and freedom over what you do with it once it’s created, that’s what prolific dreams are made of.

The closer you can get to complete sovereignty over your work, supreme, independent authority over your creations, the more fulfilled you become.

Are you conquering your work, or is your work conquering you?