Pain s the truth of art. Art is not a hobby or a pastime. It is the result of an internal battle royal, one between the quest for safety and the desire to matter.

What are you working on? If someone asks you that, are you excited to tell them the answer? If you're not, you're wasting away.

My new favorite word is 'awkward.'...Th e reason we need to be in search of awkward is that awkward is the barrier between us and excellence, between where we are and the remarkable. If it were easy, everyone would have done it already, and it wouldn't be worth the effort.

I think that any time reality doesn't match your expectations, it means that marketing was involved.

By the time there is a case study about your industry, you are already too late.

In fact, most of the time, people with similar information, similar beliefs and similar apparent choices will choose similar actions. So if you want to know why someone does what they do, start with what they know, what they believe and where they came from. Dismissing actions we don't admire merely because we don't care enough to have empathy is rarely going to help us make the change we seek. It doesn't help us understand, and it creates a gulf that drives us apart.

Art is when we do work that matters in a creative way, in a way that touches (people) and changes them for the better.