What Goes Around

Garth Beyer

used to come back around.

You do a good deed and someone will do a good deed for you. The saying was more about reciprocity than anything. Karma, if you will.

All positive for the most part, but slightly selfish. Karma has caught on.

What goes around no longer comes around, rather, what goes around, goes around.

It’s about the domino affect, about doing that good deed for someone and not knowing, not expecting, and not hoping that that person will do a good deed for someone else (or that it will ever come back to you). It’s doing a good deed for the sake of doing it. The action is the result.

You’re a dot. Everyone is just a dot. And no greater good can be done than connecting dots, sending frequency, life, emotion throughout this network we have created. In one sense, we have all come to realize that if we all give, care, and connect, that we need never to worry about enacting reciprocity, that to have the door held open for us, we need not to hold it open for someone else.

What goes around, goes around. Wouldn’t want it any other way.

 

Stay Positive & Puts Some Faith In Humanity, Doesn’t It?

Garth E. Beyer

Maintenance Is Nothing New

Garth Beyer

It disturbs me to hear someone say that something (or someone!) is high maintenance. It’s the same as saying that it’s only a short matter of time until they drop whatever it is, (or who!).

Humans are naturally inclined to create, to stack blocks on top of each other – you don’t have to show a kid how to play, they just do.

But you do have to show a kid how to put those blocks away, to take care of them, to clean and nurture them.

Anything we create is not too different from the blocks to the kids, yet we decide that if the blocks are too high maintenance, we would rather not have them to begin with.

This prevents creation, prevents you from building, prevents art.

Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, “Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”

To hell with too much maintenance – that’s the most exciting art. That’s the most thrilling challenge, the greatest emotional-sociological-psychological roller coaster ride. Those moments of high maintenance are the ones you will look back on and not need anyone to thank you for the work you did… you will thank yourself.

And that is a feeling that just can’t be beat.

 

Stay Positive & Perpetuate Your Art

Garth E. Beyer

Putting Yourself Out There (to be judged)

Garth Beyer

Keeping tab of the facts, every time you stick your neck out on the line, people are judging you. They can’t help it and maybe you can’t help judging them in return. Regardless, putting yourself out there is a chivalrous task: respectable, rare, personal.

There is a societal shift, though. Before, putting yourself out there was sharing your story, laying out all the highs and lows of your life (always more lows, of course) and making yourself vulnerable to the fact that you have connected with someone, that they know your secrets.

Now, this happens within the first few weeks of meeting someone. These facts and life experiences are no longer associated with vulnerability – they are simply common knowledge to anyone willing to ask. There’s been a switch.

Putting yourself out there has become talking about your passion, about showing the work you have created, and about sharing your notes, your ideas, your art.

Just as difficult as it was before.

But more worth it.

 

Stay Positive & Put Yourself Out There

Garth E. Beyer

To My Friend That Needs The Reminder

Garth Beyer

At the core of the long tail, what matters is not where people who connect with you are, or even how many of them are seeking a particular way you word things or express yourself or display images, but only that some number of them exist, somewhere.

 

Stay Positive & Don’t Let The Fact You Don’t Appeal To Most Shy You Away From Appealing To The Few

Garth E. Beyer

Inventors Sought!

Garth Beyer

We’re extraordinary inventors.

Not my generation, not Generation Y, not our parents’ parents, not teenagers, not our ancestors, not students at Harvard or Madison, not one specific group. All of us.

All of us are extraordinary inventors. And we should be ashamed.

We invent something in particular that there is already a surplus of. This something, we receive no credit for, no handshake, no raise, no stamp of approval, ribbon, medal, or award. We invent this something that should have only began as an idea that we acknowledgingly and self-respectingly shrugged off.

We invent new excuses.

 

Stay Positive & It’s Not Something To Be Proud Of (then why do it?)

Garth E. Beyer

Visitors, Clicks, Subscriptions

Garth Beyer

Visitors, clicks, subscriptions, pinbacks, emails, tweets, retweets, follows, facebook impressions, favorites, stars, ratings, statistics, forwards, reblogs, and bookmarks are all great. All fantastic. All give the ego a boost, maybe your moral too.

But do they matter?

If you create out of the necessity for subscriptions, if you create solely because you have people reblogging your creations, if you create to see your stats rise, you’re working, not creating.

If you can take out all stats, trackers, measures, feedback, impressions, reach, views, and audience and still create – that’s what defines an artist. A creator for the sake of creation, a creator that will follow through no matter what, with no guarantee of it working, and no expectation of it meaning anything to anyone but you, the artist.

 

Stay Positive & Artistry Is Always A Lonesome Process At Its Core

Garth E. Beyer

Avant-Garde

Garth Beyer

It’s been said that everything popular was once ridiculed and the thinkers behind it demoralized. The reason “it” became popular was definitely not the work of those who gave up, who let themselves be emotionally influenced, who backed off in the face of criticism.

Nor was it brought forth by those who were indifferent. Take, for example, the move to legalize gay marriage. Those who could care less whether it’s legalized or not have little to no influence over it being legalized. (counterarguments anticipated)

It’s the avant-garde who break through the glass, the threshold, the wall, the oppression, the fear, the criticism; all the obstacles that go along with something incredible.

“Those who belong to the avant-garde are committed to the future and thus by necessity, are also isolated; but their conviction that they are ahead of their time enables them to endure.” – Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann

More or less this is a salute to the avant-garde, as well as an expression of hope that you will become/remain one of them.

 

Stay Positive & There Is No Popular Without Avant-Garde

Garth E. Beyer