"To have your existence witnessed is a basic human need and the opportunity to share that in an artful way is EVERYONE's right"
So... are you going to just exist? Bending passively with the paths of least resistance... paths, the majority of which, are dictated by external forces - most of whom have zero interest in your existence other than for their own purposes?
NO.
Stand up for yourself.
Use your creativity to present your best self to the world.
And don't just mimic the icons from before. It's no longer good enough to stand on the shoulders of giants: be a better giant!
There are a few rules to live by, though, if you are going to do this both without delusions, and in the most ethical way possible.
Rule #1 : No one is going to rescue you.
Stop thinking "if only so-and-so gave me a chance... or if only so-and-so would hire me... or if only so-and-so would give me a ton of money" - if your entire career progression depends on this kind of logic, it is bound to fail.
Rule #2 : Success is never stopping the hustle
So you took your first tentative step. And you failed. Then you started second guessing your career choices and talked yourself into thinking it's pointless. At this point you do one of two things that will change your life
a) you resign and continue to feel sorry for yourself - at best it will take you months to recover, and at worst you might do something really, really stupid you'll live to regret, or the people who care about you will regret
- or -
b) you admit failure, but you don't resign - if the first path was a failure, you push yourself to find another path. if the career choice itself is a dead end, pick another career choice. there really is no right path or destiny at play here - there's only that eternal search for the right mix of opportunity meeting preparation. you have little control over the opportunities, but you do have control over the search for them, and when you find an opportunity, it's all on you to prepare and execute for it. just remember you might fail again, and factor that in that you'll need to set aside reserve energy for the next attempt.
the point is YOU NEVER STOP.... just keep going. to stop is to die. stopping is not even failure. failure is an opportunity to try again. stopping is no opportunity, it's just inaction and depression - avoid this at all costs.
avoiding stopping is a learned skill that requires practice from repeated failure. if you're a person who wins all the time, it's going to suck for you when you do fail because you'll be out of practice. the real winners in life have failed OVER and OVER again.
so, don't worry if it's not easy to move to the next exploration - so long as you at least orient yourself in a direction AWAY from inaction, your life experience, subconscious, and built in inertia from doing so, will head you on a productive path.
the more you fail, the more you'll learn what to avoid in the future and how to streamline this process - it'll get better each time.
the only enemy is inaction and the desire to give up. FIGHT THIS WITH ALL YOUR MIGHT. Just vowing to do so is good enough.
RULE #3 : The secret to deciding the right path to take? Simple. When presented with a choice, ask yourself, which one of these can I see myself sustaining? If you can't look past the initial decision to choose a path, if you can't see yourself doing this for many years, and especially, if you can't picture EXACTLY what it would require to maintain this choice for the chunk of your life it would take to make it a successful decision for you, don't do it.
Never go into a decision blindly on the basis of hope. Look at your choice and be realistic with yourself - can you devise a plan to sustain that life decision? Will you committ to it? Do you have the energy to do everything you really need to do that?
If you can't sustain a decision, don't move forward with it. And don't trick yourself into believing that you're morally responsible to do it under the pretense that the alternative might lie with a person less capable than you. If you can't sustain the project, that's the end of your role in the matter. The universe has, and will, continue to exist as it always has - all systems that are capable of being sustained, will do so... those that won't will be replaced by those that will. If someone less capable takes a project you were thinking of doing, but refused because you knew you couldn't sustain it yourself, the project will naturally fail and either someone else more capable will be found, or the project creators will need to figure a way to make it more sustainable for future applicants in the job market. Or they might decide it was a bad idea to begin with and try another tact.
If you can't see yourself sustaining a project, even if you win it, don't bother. Find something that you can sustain instead ... it may take some time, and you might have to finagle your survival in the meanwhile, but the experience will be worth your time, and the time of others, in the finish.
RULE #4 : NEVER ask someone to work for free.
If you manage to find a sustainable path to take your career - don't fuck it up by relying on free labor. That's a sure fire path to making your decision completely UNsustainable. Sure, you might find a few suckers to help you, and you might ride a brief wave of initial success... but that will quickly burn out as not paying someone, yet expecting them to work their ass off, creates a huge imbalance of knock-on forces that are beyond your control. I don't have to talk about the infinite fractals of iterant negative causality that can happen when you make one concession that multiplies with every subsequent interaction. I can leave you with a simple quote from Marian Anderson
"As long as you keep a person down, some part of you has to be down there with them, so it means you cannot soar as you otherwise might"
Look - there are no short cuts. Part of your envisioning whether something is going to be a sustainable decision on your part, is whether you have the ability, or the means, to create sustainable capital, and to hire the most suited applicants by paying them what they're worth.
if you can't do that, don't bother. it's a decision point that will iterate to every other logistical decision you make.
Rule #5 : Be that better giant!!
So you've found a path you think you can sustain and you're doing so ethically. Well, even the most ardent preparation and forethought can't prepare you for every eventuality. Once you at least have a solid foundation to embark on, you constantly need to think of ways you can outdo both yourself, and those who've done this before. It's a feedback loop that ties in with the 4 prior rules, but, with the added element of creativity you bring to the table with each cycle. In a world where everyone wants to succeed, where the tools to do so are becoming more and more pervasive, and the rewards for doing so become more and more great, being a better giant is the only way you can prevent yourself from being irrelevant - and being irrelevant is a path that circles dangerously near the point of the resignation death I mentioned earlier. But, hey, if you fail, like I also said earlier, try something else - it's that persistence and ability to never give up that will bring its own rewards... perhaps more so than even the final reward you always pictured.
Just remember these 5 rules and live by them... I promise you'll have your existence witnessed this way, and that's something we all deserve and have every right to strive for.
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