Make your art, tell your story, find your voice - even if you begin by copying others.Someone on the internet thinks what you’re doing is stupid, or evil, or it’s all been done before? Make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by a mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. And when things get tough, this is what you should do: Make good art. Things go wrong - and in life, and in love, and in business, and in friendship, and in health, and in all the other ways in which life can go wrong. Make peace with the impostor syndrome that comes with success. I tended to do anything as long as it felt like an adventure, and to stop when it felt like work - which meant that life did not feel like work. (As Ray Bradbury said, “Writing is not a serious business. Approach your creative labor with joy, or else it becomes work.(Hugh MacLeod put it beautifully: “The most important thing a creative person can learn professionally is where to draw the red line that separates what you are willing to do, and what you are not.”) Say “no” to projects that take you further from rather than closer to your own creative goals, however flattering or lucrative.Here, he imparts several pieces of life-wisdom on young people beginning a career in the arts, summarized below. (Which happens to be the technical birthplace of Brain Pickings as we know it today - it’s there that I took my first web design night class in the early 1800s and transformed what began as a tiny email newsletter into a tiny website.) Gaiman himself never graduated from college - in fact, he never even enrolled in college - yet he earned his place in literary culture as one of the most celebrated and prolific writers working today. On the heels of last week’s timeless commencement addresses by icons like David Foster Wallace, Ellen DeGeneres, and Ray Bradbury comes this fantastic speech by Neil Gaiman, addressing the 2012 graduating class of the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

Make Good Art by Neil Gaiman