This week’s book learning is from The Icarus Deception by Seth Godin. (I enjoyed reading ‘The Icarus Deception.’ It’s one of those books that is hard to summarize as it’s a collection of really cool ideas. So, I thought I’d pick out a couple of ideas that touched a chord for the book learning series. I hope you like it.)
“Art is an attitude, culturally driven and available to everyone who chooses to adopt it. Art isn’t something sold in a gallery or performed on a stage. Art is the unique work of a human being, work that touches another. Most painters, it turns out, aren’t artists after all – they are safety seeking copycats.
Art isn’t something that’s made by artists. Artists are people who make art.”
Failure is an integral part of making art. And, if your art fails, you just have one way forward – make better art!
Seth asserts that we are all artists, capable of making “art.” Artists aren’t special people. Evidence of this fact is that great artists are fairly normal rest of the time. Steve Jobs wore the same style and color of shirt every day so he wouldn’t have to think about fashion, for example.
Creating art is a process that brings risk, pain and effort (think: deliberate practice). So, we can only invest that in a few areas in our life. Let’s choose and then make great art..
2 questions to reflect on –
– What areas in your life are you making art? (i.e. creating something that touches other human beings)
– Are you investing enough time, effort and pain to be the best artist in your field?
This book made me reflect on my own “art” projects. And, it inspired the change of tag-line of the Bookbytess project from a book byte blog to a community art project! A different and more inspiring way of looking at what we do.
Here’s to working like artists this week!
A Learning a Day 
