Art

3 Steps To Get Better At Anything

Garth Beyer

1. Consume: Read and read often. Find idols, heroes, and infamous artists. Study them. Research what they researched. You’ll quickly discover that while tracking their footsteps, you’re leaving your own.

2. Produce: Try. Create. Make. Experiment. Fail. Produce something as often as possible. Choose not to have a choice if you construct something each day, just do it. Your goal is 10,000 hours or 10,000 lightbulbs, whichever comes first.

3. Share: Ship with style, deliver relentlessly. To share is equal amounts act of giving and feeling vulnerable. Don’t think about waiting. Tell yourself the best time to ship is now, and it will be. Whether you think you have something that matters doesn’t really matter. Someone, somewhere believes it matters. Will they find you?

 

Stay Positive & Consume Feedback Then Repeat

Garth E. Beyer

Encore

Garth Beyer

Is it at the back of your mind? When you’re selling a book? Playing on stage? Speaking in front of 15 or 1,500 people? Or just finishing your menial tasks faster than the rest?

Too often I have seen people judge their work by whether they get an encore.

What about the regular applause? Is that not good enough?

No. It’s not.

Because no one makes themselves vulnerable for applause, they make themselves vulnerable because they want to do it again. And since sooner is better, the best is when they get an encore.

 

Stay Positive & Truly, Every Moment Is Your Encore

Garth E. Beyer

Making Art

Garth Beyer

Making art, as opposed to having made art, is what everyone wants. The making of art is what catches the eye, draws people in, and fascinates the audience you never knew you had until you made yourself vulnerable.

I just watched a Cadillac commercial. As opposed to only showing the car speeding on roads with a beautiful background of wheat fields, blue-grey skies, and a sunset; I saw the crew, the camera set-up on the vehicle, and the helicopter used to record scenes from above.

Does it make me want to buy a Cadillac? No. But it makes me appreciate them more, it made me write about them, it satisfied a curiosity that I never knew I had (to know how they record all of these slick car advertisements).

This isn’t new, but how you deliver is one of the largest aspects of this artistic revolution.

 

Stay Positive & You’re Not The Only One To Enjoy Making Your Art

Garth E. Beyer

Repairing Motorcycles

Garth Beyer

You’re faced with a huge project. Or you’re trying to face one. Fear is eating at your gut. The saying now goes: No gut. Nothing to follow. But you try your hardest to not let it.

Gumption isn’t so much about putting up a fight with fear and pressing forward; actions and emotions are only half of it. The first half is having a project for fear to work on.

For me, I’m putting together a team to make ideas happen, for Robert Pirsig, it’s repairing a motorcycle, for you it may be starting a blog, showcasing your art, deploying a new business strategy, deploying a new business, talking to people who are different from you, or simply tackling the list of to-do’s you’ve put off.

Gumption isn’t associated with the tough decisions you hear CEO’s having to make, nor is it connected to those wearing hooverflags. No. Gumption doesn’t follow guidelines, restrictions, or limits. It doesn’t care how you were raised, what school you went to, or whether you skipped breakfast or not.

L. M. Montgomery said, “Anyone who has gumption knows what it is, and anyone who hasn’t can never know what it is. So there is no need of defining it.”

I suppose Maud never tried repairing a motorcycle. But now, everyone has to repair a motorcycle at some point during their life… or at least something similar to repairing a motorcycle.

Puzzling to acknowledge is that there are a lot more meaningful predicaments similar to repairing a motorcycle than not. Pirsig would agree with me that, yes, repairing a motorcycle takes courage, spunk, guts, initiative, aggressiveness, and a high altitude of resourcefulness.

It also takes fear and dances with it. When you go to repair a motorcycle, you know you’re going to have one hell of a time. Bolts won’t fit, parts will be stripped, dents will be accidentally made, you’ll have to repeat tasks, and – my favorite part – you will deviate from instructions.

If you ask me, Maud was partially right. Gumption can’t be defined.

However, it can be felt.

 

“I like the word ‘gumption’ because it’s so homely and so forlorn and so out of style it looks as if it needs a friend and isn’t likely to reject anyone who comes along. I like it also because it describes exactly what happens to someone who connects with Quality. He gets filled with gumption.

A person filled with gumption doesn’t sit around dissipating and stewing about things. He’s at the front of the train of his own awareness, watching to see what’s up the track and meeting it when it comes. That’s gumption.

If you’re going to repair a motorcycle, an adequate supply of gumption is the first and most important tool. If you haven’t got that you might as well gather up all the other tools and put them away, because they won’t do you any good.”

― Robert M. Pirsig

Stay Positive & Go Find Your Motorcycle

Garth E. Beyer

Looking for team members!

Garth Beyer

The other day I caught myself with Twitter opened up to interactions. I was sitting and waiting for someone to interact with me. I would tweet an interesting idea or question and wait for someone to notice, someone to reply. Boy, was I doing it wrong.

After realizing this, I switched back to my Twitter feed and started interacting with others. In minutes I was in the middle of conversations with a handful of people.

It seems that on Twitter – and in life, really – more people sit and wait rather than seek what they want out. Often times, what you are waiting for, is more or less, exactly what hundreds, thousands, millions of others are waiting for. Almost everyone I interacted with obviously had there interactions tab opened, waiting for someone to reply.

People seem to be classified as one of two people: either you move or you wait.

This blog post is about a little of both.

A partner and I are getting together a team of creative, passionate, and communicative people. Some ideas we will be producing this summer is a community art event where everyone can be an artist, as well as an online news website where people can go to discuss ethics in regard to recent events, e.g., Boston Bombings.

We are based in Madison, Wisconsin, so first, if you do not live in Madison, I would like you to share this post with anyone who does that you think would have interest in participating. We are very open to ideas and odd talents. If you do live in Madison, right on!

Secondly, I want to note that if you want to be part of the team and do not live in Madison, that’s not a problem! Obviously, we will need tech and organization tasks fulfilled. In this world, distance no longer prevents the important work of getting done. We need you.

Ethics, Energy, And Enigma

We aim to create a positive enigma. We plan to puzzle people in a way that they wonder why people have not put on events like ours before, or surprise people by connecting them with other like-minded people they have been waiting for. Through this transfer of energy, we will make a ruckus that leaves a ripple effect into the thoughts of everyone involved. The way one views the world will be brightened and we are changing the way ethics are influenced in this post-industrialistic connection economy. It’s the time of the creative class. It’s the time to stop waiting and start moving. We are here.

You can get in touch with me through email at: thegarthbox@gmail.com

 

Stay Positive & Be Bold

Garth E. Beyer

 

Blink

Garth Beyer

Blink is an aberrantly exceptional book by Malcolm Gladwell, yes. But the action is something entirely significant on its own.

An artist notes, “on a good day blinking refreshes sight and brings clarity.” The act of blinking revitalizes focus and perception to the world, and I state this on no low-level.

If you were to walk around with your best efforts to refrain from blinking, you would experience every emotion on the right-wing of negativity. Alas, this is not necessary. In fact, for lack of a better term, I would consider us lucky that blinking is primarily involuntary.

It seems suggestive that in order to perceive, understand, inspirit and reanimate life, we must blink. What if we conceptualized blinking into our work and our art?

When we incorporate “blinking” into our efforts – whatever they may be – we are naturally prone to create more understandable products: alive, lit up, stimulated, lucid.

The only difference: this type of “blinking” is voluntary. Though, equally invaluable.

 

Stay Positive & Be Sure To Blink, And Blink Often

Garth E. Beyer

When To Talk About Your Work

Garth Beyer

Running it by someone who might not understand is waste of your time.

Sure, you may get some variant input, but no serious support.

Instead, follow the motto: run with it and review.

Talk about your work after it’s shipped, not while you’re working, not while you’re creating, not while you can be manipulated by poor forms of criticism.

“Talk about what you have written, by all means, but do not read from it while the work is in progress. Every gratification procured in this way will slacken your tempo. If this regime is followed, the growing desire to communicate will become in the end a motor for completion.” Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street

 

Stay Positive & Until It’s Shipped, Follow The First Rule Of Fight Club

Garth E. Beyer