We’ve been talking in the past few posts about self-reliance, self-sufficiency, the mindset of the entrepreneur and the professional.

“If you believe the critics when they tell you you’re good, you have to believe them when they tell you you’re bad.”

My business partner Shawn Coyne has a term that he can’t utter without personal and emotional abhorrence.

Have you read Twyla Tharp’s book The Creative Habit? I quoted a passage in one of my books and she made me pay 250 bucks. It was worth it because the passage was so great. Here it is:

It’s 4:30 in the morning and we’re on our way to the gym. This is six days a week, rain or shine, Christmas, Fourth of July, your birthday. I hate it. Everybody does. We’d all rather be home in bed munching bon-bons. Why do it then? For me, it’s not because I imagine I’m going to be the next Mr. Universe.

I got a note this morning from Phil Britton about the Wednesday 8/6 post, “Empathy.” Phil writes, “I’d love to hear your take on how to balance this with the idea of ‘never play to the gallery.’”

We said in last week’s post that Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t. And that as soon as you and I grasp this concept, we have made a primary Artist’s Breakthrough.

While we’re on the subject of hardball lessons that the aspiring artist needs to learn, let’s go straight to the Big One. What follows is the underlying truth that every writer and artist from Homer to R. Crumb needs to know and deal with:

I’m borrowing (again) from my entrepreneurship guru, Dan Sullivan. Dan has crystalized the statement that every entrepreneur makes to him or herself, whether she does this consciously or not.

We declared in the first post in this series that an artist is an entrepreneur. Let’s go further.