Being a Starving Artist is a choice

“ The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.”—Michelangelo

I want to offer a very simple but challenging argument: Real artists don’t starve.

Making a living off your creative talent has never been easier. The idea of the Starving Artist is a useless myth that holds us back more than it helps us.

Today, with more opportunity than ever to share our work with the world, we need a different model for creative work. The Myth of the Starving Artist has long since overstayed its welcome, and what we need now is a return to a model that doesn’t require creative workers to suffer for their art. We need a New Renaissance.

Being a Starving Artist is a choice, not a necessary condition of doing creative work. Whether or not you starve is up to you.

The world needs our work—whether that’s an idea for a book, a vision for a start-up, or a dream for a community—and you shouldn’t have to struggle to create it. We all have creative gifts to share, and in that respect, we are all artists. But what does it mean to be a “real artist?” It means you are spending your time doing the things that matter most to you. It means you don’t need someone else’s permission to create.

It means you aren’t doing your work in secret, hoping someone may discover it someday.

The world is taking you seriously.

Do you have to become a millionaire like Michelangelo? Not at all. The goal here is to build a life that makes creating your best work not only possible but inevitable. And so, we must exchange this idea of a Starving Artist with a new term: Thriving Artist.

If you don’t want your best work to die with you, you must train yourself to think and live differently than the ways we’ve been told artists behave. Don’t starve for your art. Help it thrive.

Jeff Goins is a full-time writer - these are greatest thoughts from his new book, Real Artists Don’t Starve