The Starving Artist Virus Is Taking Over Your Art

What if the people we call starving artists aren't starving at all? What if we've been looking at the wrong kind of hunger? Let's talk about the word starving artist for a second. We've all heard it. Most of us have been called it. And I spent the last few months trying to understand the effect that phrase has on us. And what I found changed how I see my own life as a creator. So if you make anything, music, paintings, films, stories, I think you need to hear this. Let's start with the first step. that any over-minded person should start with. We're starting with the story we were handed. We all heard the same story when we were kids. Don't quit your day job. How are you going to pay the bills? Art's just a nice little hobby. And slowly over time, an idea got planted in us that a good life is a high-paying life. And anything less is a specific kind of hunger. And I believed it for a very long time. But here's what bothered me. When I finally sat with that story long enough, that idea, it assumes that the only hunger that counts, the only hunger important to humanity, is the kind of hunger that only money can fix. But here's the thing. Society uses money to measure our lives only because it's easy to count. It's kind of like standardized testing in schools. The reason they cut art programs is because you can't grade art. The beauty in art is the fact that we can't measure it. We can't measure emotional well-being. We can't measure a kid's growing confidence. And they took that measurement mentality from the school system and they brought it into our adult life. Money is easy to count. yes, but look at what isn't easy to count. Joy isn't easy to count. Meaning isn't easy to count. And to me, that realization is when it all hit me, there's just no way, like no way that we chose to call ourselves starving. There's just no way. Starving was a name given to us by people standing outside the creative process looking in. It was never a description of how it feels inside of it. It was a description of what it looks like. from the outside and I'm gonna go deeper on that but when I realized that it felt like permission you know like just permission to put the phrase down and really ask myself the only question that really matters what do I actually feel not what I was told to feel but am I starving and so here's what I feel I don't think we're starving for more money but I do think we're starving for more We're starving for more time with the work, starving for more beauty, more truth, more of what's real, starving for mindfulness in a mindless world, starving for deep ideas in a world that's so comfortable staying on the surface, starving for self-expression in a world of norms and sameness, starving for new experiences in a world built on routine, starving. For someone to not just buy our work but to take the time to understand the life that created it. That's the hunger. And you could have all the money in the world and still have that hunger. And so here's the thing about that kind of starving. When it goes on for too long, we do get weak, we shrivel, we die. It's the reason my book is titled Create or Die. Because I'm not talking about a physical death, I'm talking spiritually. We start walking through our days like zombies blending in chasing a dollar to eat when all we're really hungry for is true, genuine substance. So if that's what starving is, then what's thriving? I used to think thriving meant a big salary, but I just don't anymore. I think a thriving life is one where you can't wait to get back to something because it gives you an excitement for life. So think about what it feels like when you're deep into a project, deep in the story you're writing, deep in the rhythm of a song and the flow of a painting. What do we do? We go to bed late. Because we're either making the thing or we're just lying there up in bed thinking about the thing. Some of us even dream about the thing. And then we wake up early and the first thought we have is to get back to the studio. And we even eat fast, even eat standing up, even just straight up forgetting to eat. All because dinner feels like it's stealing time away from the work. We thriving. on the inside. I know that because that's that's just what happens to me. Even this video I'm working on right now it's been in my journal for months and I've just been writing about most of these ideas and most of the entries have been written at like 2 a.m and that once in that process did I feel like I was starving. I felt alive. Even Van Gogh you know the poster child Go read his letters to his brother. He would write about money. Of course, he needs it. But he also wrote about color. You know, he wrote about the light falling on wheat fields and and the paintings he hasn't made yet. The man was starving, but not for what they think he was starving for. And now let me be careful here, because I don't want to be naive about this. Right. Money matters. OK, some of us I'm working two jobs right now to keep our art alive. And I really want to reframe that too for a second. Your job is not proof that you like failed as an artist. Your job is your investor. Your first investor funds a passion. And so I just want to let you know that you are still on the right path. Philip Glass, one of the most influential composers alive, drove a taxi and worked as a plumber till he was 41. Octavia Butler washed dishes and inspected potato chips. She got up at two in the morning to write before her shift. Even Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive his entire life. He wrote poems in his head while he walked through the office and won the Pulitzer at 75 years old. None of them were starving artists. They were thriving artists. And thriving artists is the core of what I believe we all need to shift to. The real starving artist isn't the person who stayed up till 2am with paint on their hands. The real starving artist is the one with nothing to stay up for. Nothing that's keeping them up at night. That right there, that's the starving artist. It's the inner artist lying dormant in so many people. The kid who drew on everything or sang on the car or you know told stories no one asked for Most of us found the thing when we were young, when we were a kid, and we carried it to high school and even into college. But then something in us, from somebody else, from society at large, convinced us to put it down. We did. And look, if that sounds like you, I need to let you know I'm not judging you. I'm inviting you back into the thriving life. Because it is a choice. And it's never too late to pick it up again. Henry Rousseau. was a toll collector who got laughed at by the critics. he didn't paint full time until he was 49. Vera Wang designed her first dress at 40. even Frank McCourt taught high school for 30 years and wrote his first book at 66 and still he won the Pulitzer. um someone commented on one of my videos the other day and asked when should i start again and i'll tell you what i told them. the best time time to start was years ago and the second best time It's today, right now. To me, that's why I write my weekly newsletter. It's a letter to the part of you that still wants to make things, especially on days where you forget where you started. Some of my best notes on creativity Actually, if you would like to receive them for free, I'll leave a link below in the description. And look, I really need you to listen to me here. If you rebuild your creative identity brick by brick, I want you to reclaim it with pride. When people ask, say, I am an artist, as if it's good news, because it is. Not because of, you know, what it pays us, right? But because of what it gives us. And I think one of the things we're really most hungry for is to just be understood as creators, to show someone we're making, and instead of asking how much it's worth, they ask what it means to us. And that's one of the reasons I created the World of Creators Collective. It's an online home for creators around the world who share their work, exchange ideas, and help each other just keep going. Because we shouldn't have to spend our whole lives defending why we create. We deserve to be around people who already understand. And if you've been looking for those type of people, I will leave a link in the description below so you can apply to join me and hundreds of other creators. I would love to see what you've been making Because a thriving creative life isn't just having something you can't wait to get back to. it's having people who can't wait to see what you made next. We were never starving artists. We were thriving the whole time. You know, the hunger was real. We just had the wrong word for it. And the work, you know, the thing we can't wait getting back to, that right there is the food. It always was. So from human to human, creator to creator, we are thriving artists.