There are some big metaphorical questions that tend to hang in the air whenever a person starts something new—be it a painting, a newsletter, an investment account:

The questions are big ones not just because they speak to the bigger picture, but because they take all of that bigness and then ask: So what’s your first move?

First moves can feel intimidating . . . finding direction can feel intimidating. An artist puts a pencil to a piece of paper and a thousand subsequent decisions, a thousand subsequent options linger like phantom threads that stem from that one single staff-in-the-ground moment. 

Which is why I love the author’s decision to anchor Page 51 with a hand making this specific gesture. In a passage that is basically all about the way a whole bunch of tiny gestures (lines) can shape what the big gesture (the hand) becomes, I look at that hand and I hear it say: “One piece at a time.” Just go one piece at a time.

Line by line.

The shapes at the top of the page look like kindergarten building blocks, reminders to play around — to go back to basics.

For a really brief period of time almost 10 years ago, I took horseback riding lessons.

My horse was a very old boy named Walter who compared to all of the other horses in the stable, looked dried out and tired. I remember someone audibly laughing when they saw a picture of me standing next to him.

And yet even despite his stature, Walter had that thing that all horses have: horsepower. All I had to do was stand next to him and it felt to me like standing before the ocean—this big, powerful, expansive freedom there in all its glory. In my mind, I envisioned us eventually riding like the wind and off into the sunset.

In reality, where Walter and I went was nowhere.

There were so many things to remember: the grip and length of the reigns, heel positioning, posture. From down on the ground, my instructor shouted: “Look where you want to go!” She told me I had to cast my eyes out ahead to the horizon and the horse would start to move toward that destination.

It was advice that spoke to the part of my brain that has always had a predilection for horizon gazing. I love an inspired vision. But without the most basic mastery of the reigns and all the things you can do with the reigns—without the most basic understanding of which way the lines in a drawing need to flow and go and why—getting to that place on the horizon becomes a highly unlikely thing.

It becomes a dream instead of a goal, and the difference is a big one.

If everyday is our painting, our sketch, a quadrant of our masterwork—it is the small things we do day after day, 1,000 times over, that have the biggest impact. A thousand basic lines build the bigger picture.

What if every line in the cylinder (1) was a stand-in for every dollar you spent?

How is each line / dollar part of where you want to go? Part of a bigger investment in yourself? 

If one of those lines was a 73 cent banana I bought at the grocery store, what is it giving me?

What is it building toward?

If it’s greener in color, maybe it’s boosting the microbiome in my stomach, which then primes me for an idea that opens up more opportunities because the brain and the gut (our “second brain” ) are highly interconnected. If it’s spotted, maybe the banana’s sweetness is pronounced enough to bring me into the present moment and lower the fight or flight chemicals that are coursing through my system. Maybe the potassium is boosting my electrolytes and helping to maintain a healthy level of fluids in my cells so I can exercise, build my strength, build my confidence, and then funnel that into a presentation at work. Maybe the color makes me think of daffodils and reminds me that Spring is coming.

Connect 10,000 of those kindergarten cylinders, and eventually you’re staring at an intricate pipe system that’s starting to build toward a faucet of financial flow that’s got some real, intentional horsepower to it. And that 73 cent banana? It’s wedged right in there . . . a pivotal line now worth a whole lot more than its initial face value.

Your money isn’t just disappearing or gushing out. Your awareness of what it’s doing and how it’s flowing and why is helping it grow.

How going back to square one to study the basics of a thing helped catapult an artist creatively and financially

Last year I interviewed an artist named Ricky Lee Gordon who had achieved what many people would have deemed a hugely successful career by the time he was 30. Born in South Africa, Gordon followed an impulse at 16 years old to paint a mural publicly on a grocer’s wall in Alexandra Township, one of the poorest urban areas in the country. “I wanted to bridge the gap using culture,” Gordon, 41, told me.

At 18 he launched a clothing line aimed at building community through hip-hop. He threw thousand-person events and used the money he raised to open a gallery in Cape Town when he was 22. By 25 he launched an agency with clients that included Levi’s and Adidas, all while continuing to work on his own art. Then, at 27, he quit everything to study Buddhism, deepen his voice as an artist, and travel the world painting large-scale public murals for three years straight—leading him to be recognized as one of “street art’s 11 greats” by National Geographic. 

Gordon had money, talent, recognition, the time and space to do what he wanted. Yet in the midst of all that success, he decided to enroll in art school.  

His work and our conversation came to mind as I was writing this week’s post, so I’m including an excerpt of the transcript here for some extra inspiration:

What made you go back to art school at 30 years old?
Picasso said, “Learn the rules so you can break them.” He studied classical drawing and painting, and by 13 had already mastered it. I don’t like Picasso, he was an awful person. But this rigidness of understanding the rules is very important and that’s why I went to school at 30. I knew how to paint. I had always been painting. I’d self-taught, but I had formulated so many bad habits. 

Within three to six months of going to school, I understood there’s a science behind drawing and painting . . . it’s like the science behind everything in nature. There’s form, structure, weight, volume, balance, composition. Once you understand that and it’s ingrained in you, you can break it . . . it’s kind of like freeform dancing.

You eventually dropped out. Was there a moment when you realized: “I’m done here”?
Within weeks of being at school I was learning so much, so quickly. But I kind of realized that the school had designed itself to give you the curriculum over three years and I’m pretty sure they could have given it to me within six months. It was designed as a business.

So there I am, 30 years old and my professors were maybe 40—and I was asking them about conceptual ideas or philosophy but was getting nothing back because they hadn’t pursued their goals. I was doing 50-hour drawings for weeks everyday in class. Sitting there drawing the same thing, same thing, same thing. I was like: “This is my penance, this is my penance, this is my penance” [laughs]. It was very technical, and that’s what I signed up for.

But eventually I realized: No, this is not right. There’s a foundation and there are rules, but there’s a point where you can lose your Peter Pan belief that there’s another way and you can just conform and get bored and get sad in a machine-like way.

From there you moved to Sri Lanka, and built a home / artist residency on the ocean. Is that why you started painting the ocean?
The ocean basically came out of super stress. COVID hit and a few months into it I was having a panic attack like everyone else. “What am I going to do to survive for money?”

I’d basically spent everything I had building the house and moving myself to the end of the world, and I thought: “No one is going to buy art, it’s the last commodity anyone would want in this pandemic. I’ve made the worst decision and I’m stuck.” 

Then a friend said to me: “No. Remember why you came here and remember how lucky you are. You have the ocean in front of you. You can go surfing everyday, you can paint everyday. What a dream.”

It got me out of my slump and I committed to making one piece of art every single day. I was like: “Let’s keep it simple, I’m gonna just do the same subject matter.” I picked the ocean view outside of my window and went back to that school training of 50 hours, the same thing, same thing, same thing.

I started to post the work on Instagram and sold everything that I made. It was like the whole journey paid off. I followed the intention, I followed the work, and people resonated with it. It was really affordable art. Then I just carried on painting the ocean, it became like muscle memory.

There’s a feeling of freedom and fluidity in your movement. 
I’ve done it everyday for so many years now that I have this fearlessness to just go for it and attack a canvas with confidence knowing that there will be no mistake. All the fear goes away, and then comes pure joy, and pure joy becomes flow state, and flow state results in harmony within the composition. 

On the best days it’s like the first time I found my rhythm. I was 21 when I danced in tune for the first time. I always thought I had no rhythm growing up and then all of a sudden one night, I was dancing all night and I was like: “Oh my god! That feels so good.” You get to a point where intuition takes over and all of your worries go away, all of your stress goes away. It’s not a sense of escapism, it’s a sense of fully present awareness.

That’s the action. But then there’s the result, and the result of creating something or achieving something is just so important . . . . putting in effort and then there’s a result. It’s like cooking food and then getting to taste it or experience your friends enjoy it. The feedback loop, for me, is why I work so hard. I know that the more I work the field and the better I turn the soil, the better the yield will be . . . you know? It’s up to you. 

You’re pivoting now and your materials are broadening. Why?
I’m using beeswax, rock pigment, dirt, rust. My whole palette is now a mix of nature so I want my subject matter to also be a mix of nature.  Each one of these materials has a different energetic resonance and I’m playing with that as a very naive alchemist—not knowing how any of these things combine. I’m only at the beginning of my journey now. 

What comes next?
I created Sun Contemporary Gallery here in Bali. Now I’m going to build my house with a big studio—the dream studio. If Sri Lanka was the machine, this is the factory. This is taking everything I ever learned and being able to scale it up so that I can make bigger paintings and have a station for everything. A station for mixing colors, a station for testing, a drawing area, a library area, a reference area, an exhibition area, a wood-carving shed. I’m also sharing the property with three other inspiring artists, so everyone is going to contribute. It’s going to be a kind of artist village. A place to be able to make . . . anything, really.