Largely unknown artists often forsake the benefits & leverage that come with being small.
Agility. Optionality. Less accountability to power.
It’s easy to waste these edges by trying to mould ourselves to the demands and standards of industry – the world of scale and other people’s rules. We dream of elephants, seduced by the notion that size and visibility is what matters most.
I guess we’ve been trained by an industrialised world to look up to scale. To admire it. To desire it. To chase it. Too often, it feels like the goal. But we forget that with size comes constraint.
Rather than becoming frustrated and embittered by the fact that everyone can’t see you coming down the street, maybe a better path is to embrace it, and lean into the freedoms.
The Thoughts of Others
“Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don’t think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn’t stop you from doing anything at all.” – Richard Feynman
