Real Artists Don't Starve: Timeless Strategies for Thriving in the New Creative Age

by Jeff Goins

Without Paris, you do not get Hemingway; and without a scene, you do not get a creative genius.

Without a network, creative work does not succeed. Exposure to the right networks can accelerate your success like few things can. This

A network is your insurance against anonymity. The greater access you have to influential people in your field, the further your work will spread. Of course, you have to be good, but being good is not enough. Skill gets you in front of the right people, but network magnifies your reach. Creative success, then, is contingent on your ability to connect well with those who can vouch for your work. It doesn’t take a lot of people—just a few friends, as Hank said. You don’t need an army, but you do need a network.

When the game is unfair, change the game you’re playing.

Move to another city, create a new art form, get a different network. If the group you want to be a part of doesn’t want you, then create your own.

If we allow ourselves to accept the new definition of artist not as a lone genius but as a visionary who brings people and resources together, this creates opportunities for our work to flourish.

A sense of competition often drives our collaboration, even when we don’t realize that’s what is happening. To be creative, you must break away from what is expected, essentially competing with what has come before so that you can create something new. But you can’t do this alone. It’s too discouraging. So, you connect with peers who share your ideals and who resonate with your work. After that it is only a matter of time before you begin comparing your work to theirs. This is not a bad thing, however. This is how you get better. All art requires some level of healthy competition to make the creator a true master. And this requires some gumption, an attitude that goes beyond meekness but doesn’t quite become arrogance.

If you want to do world-changing creative work, you must reconcile the fact that you likely won’t be able to do it alone.

You need help. Find your band of misfits, use the accountability of that group, and let your sense of competition drive you to create better work.

Sometimes our most obvious gifts are the hardest for us to recognize.

“In order to be found, you have to be findable.”

We all need our work to resonate with someone; our art needs an audience. The way the Starving Artist attempts this is by working in private, secretly hoping to be discovered some day. She spurns the need for an audience and chooses to suffer for her work instead, holding out for that lucky moment when someone stumbles upon her genius. The Thriving Artist, on the other hand, chooses a different path: she shares her work by practicing in public. Not by being sleazy or self-promotional but by letting people simply watch her work.

This is what happens when we practice in public: we not only hone our abilities but attract an audience interested in what we’re sharing. The more we do this, the better we get, and the more confident we become.

But that’s a myth. This brings us to the Rule of the Audience, which says that before art can have an impact, it must first have an audience. No one is exempt from this rule, not even Picasso.

There is no better way to improve than to put your work out there—sharing it for the whole world to see—no other way to get discovered than to risk rejection. You have to practice in public.

Everything else is prologue. That’s not to say we shouldn’t pursue excellence or that we prematurely step into the spotlight. But it does mean the way we hone our craft is by doing it—not talking about it or studying it, but by getting to work. Thriving Artists do not wait for these opportunities to share; they seek them out.

Of course this means we will eventually encounter failure. But in every failure and disappointment, there is an opportunity to either give in to frustration or see such shortcomings as practice.

all that practice adds up to something—not just the attention of an audience but the skill to support it. Even the most generous of audiences will not tolerate an amateur.

the Rule of Value: the Starving Artist works for free; the Thriving Artist always works for something. As artists, we must value our work before others will.

Money is part of the process of becoming an artist, if for no other reason than it affirms you are a professional, but the decision to be taken seriously is yours alone. You set the tone for

how people will treat you, which means you must believe your work is worth charging for.

Don’t make a habit of working for free. Without money, you don’t get to make more art. Try to always work for something, even if that something is the chance to do work that pays. But be very careful here, because it can be easy to set a bad precedent that you don’t value your work. And if you don’t, neither will anyone else. So, charging what you’re worth begins with the belief that you’re worth what you charge.

Recently I met with Bill Ivey, the former chairman for the National Endowment of the Arts. He told me that we sometimes think the alternative to the Starving Artist is what he calls the Subsidized Artist, but that’s the wrong way to think about it. Art needs money. We can deny it all we want and pretend starving makes for better art, but starving often makes for no art at all. Paint costs money. Ink does too. So does food and just about everything else in life. You have to find a way to pay for your art if you want to keep making it.

the responsibility for your getting paid is yours and yours alone.

This matter of art and money is not a balancing act, though. It is a dance. Our best work comes from the tension of trying to serve our craft and meet the demands of the market. This is the world we live in. Charles Dickens did some of his best work while serializing his stories to pay the bills. Vincent van Gogh’s genius may have emerged from the financial strains that ailed him, but it was his brother’s money-mindedness that kept him creating. Money and art: we need them both.

To be an artist is to be an entrepreneur.

Charging what you’re worth isn’t just about compensation. It’s about dignity—the value you place on your own work and the value other people give it.

Your work matters. But the world won’t recognize this until you do. You have to avoid the temptation to give all your work away for free, believing it will somehow lead to compensation. It won’t. Those opportunities often leave the artist feeling frustrated and bitter. I’m not saying you can’t be generous or that you should be arrogant, but there’s nothing wrong with seeing the value in your work. In the New Renaissance, art can be business, and business can be art. To believe anything else will leave you feeling stuck, frustrated, and bitter. It’s time to stop undervaluing your work and charge what you’re worth.

For any creative, the challenge of earning a living is formidable. We need to sell our work in order to live and eat, but if we sell off everything we create, we can end up starving again. The goal is to not live month to month, but to have enough margin to keep creating. The more you own of your work, the more creative control you have. The Starving Artist sells out to an early bidder, but the Thriving Artist holds out and owns as much of his work as possible.

This is the Rule of Ownership. As creatives, our job is not only to create great works but to protect those works. We must, therefore, resist the temptation to sell out too soon. Settling for a nice payday can lead to short-term success, but it won’t buy the kind of legacy we want.

At that point he learned an important truth: while gatekeepers may give you a payday, it always comes with a cost. And for the Sixers, that cost was freedom.

Stephen might have seen a theme: when you own your work, you get to call

the shots.

This is what ownership does. It gives you options. The Starving Artist tends to trust the system and hope for the best, but that’s a bad idea. “The object,” Lucas said, “is to try and make the system work for you, instead of against you.” The safest place for your work to stay is with you. No one has a more vested interest in your success than you do. Don’t trust the system to take care of you; that’s not what it was designed to do. Do whatever it

takes to own your work; fight to keep the control. Failure to do this will most likely hurt you far more than it will help.

“If you don’t own your masters, your master owns you.”

In the end, being an artist is about creating great work, and ownership is the way we get to ensure that greatness.

At some point, however, it may make sense to give up some rights to your work and let go of creative control. If such an opportunity earns you the chance to do more of the work with fewer financial constraints, do it.

If you ever do sell your work to a publisher or record company or investor, do it on your terms and for the right reasons, not because you think it’s the only way.

We must own our masters or our masters will own us.

But since when does a single job description define what a person is capable of?

This is the Rule of the Portfolio: the Starving Artist believes she must master a single skill, whereas the Thriving Artist builds a diverse body of work.

When we develop a diverse portfolio, we do better and more interesting work.

Creative people tend to live in the world of ideas and possibilities. Because of this, we may struggle with a lack of focus, but this is not always a bad thing. A wandering mind can be an asset if you learn how to use it.

How did he do this? He rarely said no to a new skill, at least when it could contribute to his portfolio. If we want to create enduring work and not just a series of one-hit wonders, we, too, must be open to learning new things. The path to a diverse portfolio is not a series of giant leaps but of small steps. One skill sets into motion the need for another, and so on.

Starving Artists try to master one skill. Thriving Artists acquire whatever skills necessary to get the job done. One is about short-term rewards; the other is about creating for a lifetime. If you don’t believe the myth that mastery is just doing one thing, then you, too, can create a body of work that will endure.

Cultivating a portfolio mind-set will keep you focused on what really matters: not on any single work but on the whole creative life itself.

The point is to share his gift, that thing only he can offer the world. Without the money, though, the art would be much harder to make.

And so Alan understands something every Starving Artist must grapple with: money is the means to making art, but it must never be the master.

The book explains why many modern artists struggle to make a living off their work: art is a gift, and since we now live in a market economy, there is going to be a disconnect.