The Craft Comes First

Before you were good at it, you were drawn to it. That drawing is a fact. Something reached toward you and you moved toward it, and that movement was the beginning of everything else that followed.

The prize is real. The recognition is earned. I am not asking you to be indifferent to either.

I am asking: when did you last let the work be the only thing in the room?

Not the resume implication of the work. Not the market value of the work. Not the applause the work has earned. Just the work, in itself, asking something of you that you are capable of answering.

That conversation was there before the prizes. It will be there after them. Find it again this week. Not at length, not with ceremony. Just a few minutes where it is only the work and only you, with no audience.

What you discover in those minutes is what the work has been trying to show you all along.

— Job