The Pursuit of Excellence

Journal Entry: August 30, 2022

Fusion Series #2576 - 2008 - collage on paper

I used to tell my kids when they were in school, “It is easier to protect an ‘A’ than to prevent an ‘F’.

What I meant by this is that if you stay engaged and disciplined day by day in your studies and strive toward being on top of your game and excellent in your process then you will inevitably do well. If you don’t pay attention and don’t apply yourself nor take your work seriously then, without that discipline you are on a trajectory toward an unpreventable failure.

The pursuit of excellence is the foundation of the pursuit of happiness. If you are working at a job or a business the same principles apply:  Engagement, self-discipline, striving toward a goal, taking your work seriously.

Everything in life is interesting once you take an interest in it.

People can sometimes feel they are bored with life, with their career, etc. Boredom is merely a lack of engagement. If you are engaged in something, you take an interest in it and find what is interesting about it even if it is the simplest of things. On the other hand, if you are bored with something, your lack of engagement might be for a good reason. Maybe it is time to move on to something more challenging. But until you can find that more challenging thing, challenge yourself to look deeper into what you are bored by until you find something about it to make it interesting. This becomes an inner challenge to yourself and that can cause personal engagement. Everything in life is interesting once you take an interest in it.

There is a famous quote by the American composer John Cage:

“If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.”

At the same time, one can only maintain interest in so many things, so we often must choose between interest and disinterest in order to maintain focus on what we consider important for ourselves, for our path forward, in our pursuit of excellence. At any given point in our path we must choose where our true interest lies and we must sacrifice all other things that don’t match our path through the practice of disinterest.

Probably for everyone however, and certainly I see this problem in myself, that while you are focusing on what you consider the most important things to engage in, many other things are neglected that perhaps should not be neglected. While pursuing your main interests there is the need for a well-balanced life at the same time. I certainly cannot claim that I have mastered this part. I am not sure I know how one would even go about it to be honest.

I have been working on this over the years. Early on, one of my main problems was being very disorganized. In my early 20’s I probably lost my wallet at least twice a year and if there is anything you don’t want to lose it is your wallet! Keeping my space clean and organized has always been a problem for me. However, when I am working on my artwork, I always feel that I know exactly what I am doing which is why I spend a lot of time working on my artwork. I try to spread that discipline into everything else in my life, but I am not always very successful. So that part I am not going to discuss here because I am still working on it and figuring it out.

Each person has their own peculiarities, their own strengths and weaknesses and there probably are not very many people that have their act together on all fronts and there are a lot of potential fronts.

Perhaps battle fronts in a war is a good analogy. A general must be careful not to spread his army too thin by trying to fight on too many fronts at the same time or get too far out in front of his supply lines. This is a guarantee of trouble. So applied to one’s personal life, keeping the number of fronts that one is trying to operate on to a minimum helps to ensure that you can handle the battle of life. Like the famous line from the movie Dirty Harry with Clint Eastwood; ‘A man’s gotta know his limitations.’

So maybe that is a subject of its own to discuss: ‘An Artist’s Gotta Know His Limitations’

So, let’s say, you use interest and indifference as a tool, as a way to discriminate how to choose between what you want to achieve and what you are willing to sacrifice in order to achieve it. It is time to stop and consider what things in your life are important to you that need your time and interest on them. What things are you doing that you can stop doing and become indifferent toward?  Look at how you spend your day. Are there things you spend time on that you could become disinterested in so that you can spend that time working on your creative work? Things to sacrifice might be watching TV or messing around on social media or any number of other things that are entertaining but are not particularly productive.

It is a matter of budgeting your time just like budgeting your money. Time is the one thing that is a constant. There are always 24 hours in a day. No more, no less. Everyone has the exact same amount of time every day. It is the great equalizer. The only way you can increase your time is to refrain from things that waste your time and/or hire other people’s time and skills. We hire other people’s time to mow the yard, maintenance the house, build the stretchers, transport the art, a bookkeeper for our tax paperwork, etc. so that we have more time to work in the studio with less stress. My wife and I love working in the studio. Because we work in our studio and sell the work, we can hire other people’s time up to a certain point. With enough income you can hire a lot of people’s time and skills if you have need of it.

At the beginning we did everything for ourselves. My wife remembers when it was a big deal to buy a whole box of 100 metal pushpins or a few new brushes. It seemed like a luxury at the time. At a certain point we really splurged and got a nice oak easel instead of putting a nail in the wall. That was a big deal. We still have it. We have several others now but that first one has a sentimental value at this point. It is probably 30 years old and still working in the studio.

All along the trail the pursuit of excellence in your work and in your life is achieved by creating the circumstances for yourself that allow you to have the time and energy to pursue the discipline of become excellent at those things where excellence is required.

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