I was out to breakfast with Huck Gee this morning, and we were talking about being artists that do business.  Most artists just want to make art and most businessmen just want to make money.  Huck and I are oddballs who insist on doing both, though the approach we take is quite different.

I enjoy business.  Making things is fun, and selling them to people who appreciate them is fun too.  For me personally it’s a lot more interesting to make a bicycle and watch a customer ride away on it smiling than to produce artwork to hang on a museum wall.  But that’s just how I’m wired.  I’ve had work in museums and I get how that can be fun for people as well.

Running my own business means that I’m in charge of the economics that allows me to make beautiful things.  I don’t have to ask someone’s permission to take a giant leap of faith if I have an idea that’s worth pursuing — even if on the surface that idea doesn’t seem to make so much economic sense.  

At the same time, I’m extremely demanding.  Not of the outside world, which more or less does its own thing and is almost completely out of my control.  I’m very demanding of myself, because it is my experience that working correctly, reality bends.

It’s interesting how this happens.  I have an idea that I’m passionate about, which at the start seems dauntingly difficult (or just plain stupid).  Like starting a high-end titanium bicycle company.  I get started and I always hit a wall that it looks impossible to get over or around.   This happens every time.  There is always a point at which the whole project looks terminally fucked.  At this point I am always looking out for it, just wondering when things are going to all go to hell.

This is the point where people tend to give up.  I’m fairly stupid though, and stick to it.  Relentlessly, but with a kind of gentleness that understands that disaster is part of success.  It’s all the same road, you don’t get one without the other.  Eventually the universe blinks and I slip through the gap, and things work themselves out.

It’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t gone through this the power of relentless, hard work.

I’m the first to admit that I’m almost completely talentless.  If I was talented I wouldn’t have to do so many different things.  Man, if I could have played guitar like Johnny Cash, or draw like Huck I’d have done just that and stuck with it!  

Without anything particularly special about me, I had to learn to make things out of nothing.  What I learned was, just showing up is enough, if you’re willing to do it over and over and no worry so much about how it looks along the way.