This chapter is the longest in the book because it is the most important. Persistence, grit, determination are more important than talent in living a creative life on your own terms. Some successful artists may argue that what matters is that you love the subject, love the materials, and thus pour your heart into the work. Yes, that too. That love is what enables you to persist, to stick with your art through thick and thin. 

The path of diving down, deep inside, finding your uniqueness, your internal beauty, and then nurturing it, mastering it, and then offering it to the world, is not the easy path. It is not the secure path. You will experience disappointments, rejection, setbacks. You have to know that, and expect that, as you start out. You do it in pursuit of the deep satisfaction that can ultimately be found tilling those fields. Anything worthwhile, anything unique, will take time to be accepted. First you show commitment. Then the market shows its commitment. That’s just how it goes.

In the twenty plus years that I’ve published Heron Dance in its various print and online forms, one of the hard lessons I’ve learned is not to expect consistent results, consistent revenue. It has been more like feast and famine, famine and feast. Overall, the money needed to stick with it at least one more day has always shown up, but there have been many days when it was not at all certain that it would. I’ve encountered a lot of rejection, and indifference. And I’ve encountered a lot of people who have told me that Heron Dance has impacted their lives for the better. Thousands, in fact. But first I wandered in the wilderness for five hard years. Well, actually not that hard. I was loving what I was doing. I was on a mission of sorts.

I learned that sticking with the work is made easier when I’ve said to myself, “It isn’t the market’s or subscribers’ job to be consistent. It’s mine. Control what you can — your own output. From there, let the chips fall where they may.” Your faith in yourself, your work, especially initially, needs to be greater than the inertia, the indifference, of the world. 

I lose my confidence sometimes, and that's where the courage part comes in.  I'm only halfway self-confident. . . If you have determination, you're going to use that determination to take the place of confidence.
   I was always willing to undergo hardship or whatever it took to be able to stay with my work. I could have quit many times — given up, because it is no great art in life to be poor and hungry, and that's what I was.
   - Erskine Caldwell, novelist, author of Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre, as well as a number of other books. Despite rejection and even scorn early in his writing career, his books ultimately went on to sell tens of millions of copies.

Find that undertaking, that occupation, with which you have infinite patience. Find that undertaking that you are willing to stick with through rejection and indifference. If you have not yet found that, use the journaling and other self-discovery methods explored in this book to consider possibilities. Don’t just select something randomly and hope for the best. Your heart and soul needs to be invested in the work. Your work needs to be based on who you are, on what makes you unique as an individual.

Discovering your destiny is not about going to therapy and finding out what I really want to do with my life, but rather finding out what is wanted of me.   What's the gift I have that others need? The gift the world needs?
      -   James Hillman, as interviewed by Wes Nisker, Inquiring Mind, Summer Issue.  

I love to walk in the woods, and since I live in New England half of the year, I frequently encounter stone walls deep in the woods. Some are miles long. A hundred or two hundred years ago, families spent years building those walls. It was backbreaking work. The land is hilly, rocky, heavily treed and only marginally suitable to livestock grazing. Ultimately, large numbers of these farmers moved west but thousands must of lived lives of abject poverty and misery. And died young. It is important that you not only persist, but persist at the right endeavor. By which I mean a unique endeavor.

When I started Heron Dance, I had no experience managing people. As it grew, I needed help. I discovered, over a period of years, that I had no talent for hiring the right people, or managing them once hired. I hired way too quickly. Perhaps, if I’m honest with myself, I wanted to get back to art and writing and didn’t want to interview twenty people. And when people inevitably failed — whether it was fail to show up on Monday morning or failed to put their heart into their work, I lost patience way too quickly. As you can imagine, this approach didn’t work. Perhaps worse, the publishing industry was undergoing major change in terms of online content and self-publishing. I didn’t notice those changes because I was deep into dealing with people problems. I got into a negative spiral of frustration and discouragement. Had I kept my perspective and positive mental outlook, I would have noticed that the changes in everything from YouTube to print-on-demand to Amazon meant that I didn’t need staff to pack and ship books, answer the phone, print prints, etc. Heron Dance could have easily survived based on what I can do —- art and writing. 

The specifics outlined above are personal to me, and may not apply to you. You may be a great people manager. I know people who are. My dad was. It is an art all its own. My point is just that your area of focus, what you persist at, needs to be based on a realistic assessment of your skills, and on how you can make a unique contribution to other people in a quality way.

I collect quotes and longer excerpts from books that help me through the rough times. Here are my favorites.

“Renoir brings us bread from his own home or we should die of hunger,” Monet wrote to Bazille in the summer of 1869. “For a week now we have been without bread, without fuel to cook by, and without light.” But at least they were actually painting the pictures that would eventually bring them to public notice, and they were convinced that the time would come when, as Cézanne told Zola, “a bunch of carrots truthfully and powerfully painted would create a revolution in art.” 

Among the major artists of the generation born around 1840 — Cézanne, Monet, Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Sisley, Redon — only Rodin was still wholly unexhibited by 1870 and had produced virtually none of his important work. The others had a history; Rodin remained shrouded in obscurity. Even Redon, the most reclusive artist of this generation, had exhibited prints in the Salon of 1867. 

When Fantin-Latour, in 1869, painted his group portrait of the young innovators of French painting, he included Manet, Zola, Renoir, Monet — people whose stars were clearly rising. Rodin, meanwhile, was busy putting the finishing touches on Carrier’s confections for the fabricants de bronze. Had he been killed in the Franco-Prussian War — as were Bazille, Regnault and several other artists — he would have been merely one of the innumerable forgotten sculptors of the century.
     - Frederic Grunfeld, from Rodin, A Biography.

In a statement reminiscent of Taoism, Ruskin describes the power of patience. Taoism, that spirituality or religion or whatever it is — and whatever it is can’t be put into words — tells us that simplicity, patience and compassion are the three principles that matter.

On the whole, it is patience which makes the final difference between those who succeed or fail in all things. All the greatest people have it in an infinite degree, and among the less, the patient weak ones always conquer the impatient strong.  
     - John Ruskin

Do not let the fact that things are not made for you, that conditions are not as they should be, stop you. Go on anyway. Everything depends on those who go on anyway.   
   - Robert Henri, The Art Spirit 

I follow closely the work of half a dozen artists, and among those I most respect is Barry Moser, best known perhaps for the dozens of children’s books he’s illustrated, both in watercolor and woodcut. Moser’s collection of essays entitled "In the Face of Presumption" explores the role of talent in a creative life.

It is a fact that no one ever made a wood engraving or wrote a sestina by merely being creative. That’s like a tail wagging a dog, for God’s sake. Rather than teaching kids to be creative they should be taught what art really is. They should be taught the history of its practitioners, and a good deal about the role craftsmanship plays in the process. They should be taught form, not finger paints. They should be taught that art, contrary to the conventional wisdom, is not self-indulgent. They should be taught that art does not come to those who wait. They should be taught that art comes from those who do — that the very genius of art lies in action. In doing. They should be taught that art comes from study and from hard work and from solid craftsmanship, they should know that beyond determination and persistence, art comes about only through study, work, and knowledge of their craft.

I taught school for twenty-five years. I have no record of how many students I taught over all those years, but it has to be in the tens of hundreds. Based on that experience I can say honestly that I never met a student who was not creative, nor did I ever meet one who was not talented.  I can count on one hand and still have fingers left over the ones who manifest the necessary persistence, determination, drive, desire, patience, and indefatigable energy, and the willingness to fail to make it as an artist. Why them and not the others, if, as I say, all of them were creative and talented?

The answer is simple: some of my students persisted and some did not. Those who did persist persisted because they had energy, they had courage (or sand as my granddaddy would have put it), and they developed a need to work.

Moser’s three rules for the so-called creative life, are, therefore,

      Persistence
      Indefatigable energy.
      The habit of work.

As I tell my students, persistence is really what this business is all about. It has little to do with talent. Talent’s about as valuable as tits on a boar.
   - In the Face of Presumption, Essays, Speeches & Incidental Writings by Barry Moser. 

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
       - Theodore Roosevelt

Horace Traubel, biographer of Walt Whitman, once asked Whitman:

Suppose the whole damned thing went up in smoke, Walt, would you consider your life a failure?

Whitman’s response:

Not a bit of it. . . No life is a failure.  I have done the work: I have thrown my life into the work:. . . my single simple life: putting it up for what it was worth: into the book pouring it into the book: honestly, without stint, giving the book all, all, all: why should I call it a failure? Why? Why? I don’t think a man can be so easily wrecked as that.

Whitman didn’t merely think the work, he did it.  He wrote it and rewrote it.  He stuck with it when no one cared.  That is success.  That is triumph.  

The path of the creative outsider is one where you embrace mystery. It isn’t the path of certainty. You search for the mystery inside, for the mystery of the world out there. You take a step toward the gods, unprotected, uncertain as to whether or not you will be supported. You embark on the journey where there are no established paths. You make your own path, the path no one else could make. You enter the forest at a point of darkness. The previously unexplored path.

Your belief in yourself must be based on reality, on the hard work and study and even the endurance of tedium necessary to master your craft. Then you elevate your craft, your art, to a new place through imagination, through an exchange with the gods that govern the lives of creative outsiders. At times, your inner conviction will need to transcend reality in order for you, your work, to carry the day. Your work, your unique work, the work the world does not yet know it needs, will require faith. You need to have faith in its ultimate value.

The role of the creative outsider is to explore outer boundaries. We explore the boundaries of human existence, the boundaries of dream worlds. We explore the boundaries of our own capabilities and potential. We fail, we strive, we persist, we triumph. Eventually.

In the end, the human community, lacking conviction, lacking certainty, lacking faith in itself, having given up on imagination in pursuit of security, will salute your courage, your certainty, your conviction. But first, you need to make the sacrifice – one based on a belief in yourself and the value of your work.

Socrates demonstrated long ago that the only truly free individual is free to the extent of his self-mastery. Those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them.
       - Steven Pressfield from The War of Art

There are some things you can’t learn from others. You have to pass through the fire.
       - Norman Douglas

It may seem difficult at first, but everything is difficult at first.
     - Miyamoto Musashi

All the great speakers were bad speakers at first.
      - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly at first.
      - Brian Tracy

Talent. Ahhhhh, everyone talks about talent. Talent helps. Listen, get all the talent you can. But writing is guts and it’s courage. You cannot have a failure of courage. Everybody in the world is telling you you’re no good, and you can’t do it, and it’s not going to work. You’ve got to keep talking to yourself, say, “Come on, son. Come on . . .”
- Erik Bledsoe, Getting Naked with Harry Crews (Interviews)

You never quit.  You can't be discouraged.  But at the same time, a person should not fault himself for becoming discouraged.  It's going to happen, it's natural.  But you still have to commit yourself.  You have to do something every day for your art, or you'll never be a success at it.

      Thirty-six hours at home, and the manuscript goes right back to the post office.  It’s the only way to do it.  You do the best you can, then you send it off and forget about it.  And again and again you'll get those rejections. 'You can't write dialogue.  Your story is flat.  We're not interested.'  All that kind of stuff.  But we ensure failure when we don't send a manuscript out.  I've never seen anyone who has, once he's determined to become a writer, not achieved his goal.  I've never seen anyone fail who's actually persevered and never given up."
- Hanging Tough with James Lee Burke, Writer's Digest

And the last word goes to Rodin.

Do you know what is the greatest enemy of the artist? Talent, the gift he's born with: facility, dexterity. In a word, chic (banal or empty facility) is what spoils us and ruins us. We think we've arrived at the summit of our art no sooner than we've produced something, and we look no further. . .
      - Rodin