~ on making mistakes

Seth Godin asks: 'what's your biggest failure'?

A: My biggest mistake? I used beat myself up for not starting sooner. For not standing up for myself when I was in school. For thinking too much. For doing too little. My biggest mistake was believing the messages I got from other people. My biggest mistake was buying into the idea that you can't do art for a living (people still try to tell you that, while you're standing there making a living at it). Human beings are complex. I was able to heal from these things and move forward from them by *doing music*. I'm certainly not a perfect human being, I certainly make mistakes. My hard drive is full of musical tracks that went nowhere. My bedroom is stacked with canvasses, illustrations of ideas that dried up. I have the half-finished books and scripts. But I consider these educational experiments, playing, trying things out, doing art for the sake of doing art. My biggest mistake is when I think too much about the end product, what other people might say about what I'm doing. If I can focus on the moment and trust my instincts... who knows where I will end up.