Necessary but Not Sufficient

Photo by Aedrian Salazar on Unsplash

Today I'm thinking about the futility of making art. David Speed (excellent podcast, highly recommend) says that all the artists he talked to say that you just need to keep making things. Which is decent advice, I guess. But he doesn't interview the thousands of people who kept making things their whole lives and stayed obscure; no one ever heard of them, and only very few people even engaged with their work.

It's not that I intend to stop writing. But there's just something dispiriting about knowing that I can work hard and make really cool things that no one will ever see, read, or hear about. Persistence, hard work, and marketing skills are necessary but not sufficient for success in this industry--and I'm not even talking about being globally known, just making a living out of the work.

That said, maybe the argument here is that if luck is a bit part of success anyway, we might as well play by our own rules rather than try to play someone else's (e.g., big publishers or social media algorithms) game.