You don't make art after you become an artist. You become an artist by ceaselessly making art.

The industrial age brought compliance and compliance brought fear and fear brought us mediocrity.

Do the emotional labor of working on things that others fear.

Empathy requires something extremely difficult: accepting the fact that we are not and never will be in the other person's shoes. There's no rational, universal course because individuals have different goals, different worldviews and different experiences.

Sometimes, we're so focused on being consistent that we also lower the bar on amazing. After all, the thinking goes, if we can't be amazing all the time, better to reset the expectation to merely good. Which robs us of the ability to (sometimes) be amazing.

The minute there's a map, there is no art. Paint by numbers is not art. Paint by numbers is a mechanical activity.

Blaming the system is soothing because it lets you off the hook. But when the system is broken, we wonder why you were relying in the system in the first place.