En Route to The Mountain

Ararat

I'm guessing most of us have heard Neil Gaiman's brilliant - BRILLIANT - speech at The Univerity of the Arts. (If you haven't, see below.) Accordingly, we should all be busy now on our quest to "Make good art."

A couple of his points couldn't have come at a better time for me, and these are the ideas that resonated with me the most.

1) Mr. Gaiman refers to my goal, my elusive art, as "the mountain".

I am to keep walking toward the mountain. At all times. I am not to be distracted by things like: a job offer that doesn't take me closer to the mountain because, although it was on the way three years ago, that same job is going backwards from where I am now. (Has he been reading my emails???)

2) Pretend I'm someone who can do this.

Somehow, the very act of believing it can be done makes it possible. It does.
I think I have this one. I pretend I'm someone who can do things all the time! Hopefully, you do too, or else how will our heroines save the world?

3) Look out for the "Fraud Police".

I have no idea what he means here, because I'd have to be succesful in order to experience the feeling. Here's my closest idea though: Phillip Phillips. He stood there, scanning the crowd in that giant theater, and not believing a single second of it, I think. Then when his name was announced as the winner of American Idol, he couldn't hold back the tears. I think he was in shock.

I'm taking this phenomenon as part of the Dunning-Kruger Effect (If you're any good, you think others are much better. If you really should to keep your day job, you think you can bring down the house) which is very confusing and leads me back to rule number 2:

Pretend I'm someone who can do this.