I've wanted to discuss for a while so I'll jump right to it...
We often mistake talent for creativity, but they are two very different things. There are 3 main factors that determine any artist's success; creativity, talent and hard work... but let's disregard hard work for now because it's not the point of this post... and again, you're going to have to forgive me for the business metaphors I seem to favor more and more as I slide deeper into a career in finance, but bear with me here; a talented person is a person who is able to package their product in an attractive way which appeals to the consumer and makes them "buy" it, regardless of the content... in other words, they are the "Apple" of artists.
Picture an author who can make an international best-seller out of a middle aged housewife's sex dreams (I'm looking at you, Twilight's Stephenie Meyer); or one of the dime-a-dozen "pop-stars" -such as Justin Bieber or Rhianna- who can be reliably counted upon to create hit songs on a regular basis with lyrics a hungover 5 year old could write with their eyes closed and very basic music -if you can even call it that. In such cases, the actual content seems almost irrelevant if it's packaged well enough; Stephenie knew how to write books to appeal to a wide demographic of aging, bored housewives with unfulfilled fantasies, and Bieber's combo of genuine musical talent and boyish good looks won him massive appeal with pubescent teenage girls. However, considering their frankly disproportionate success with such embarrassingly bad content (baby, baby, baby, oh), it's fairly obvious that even though they're talented artists, they are most certainly not creative.
Creativity is completely different; creativity is getting out of bed at 3 in the morning because you just had an amazing idea for a book that you had to write down so you don't forget it come morning; creativity is when you lock yourself at home for days because you have an idea for a song in your head and you physically can't bring yourself to enjoy anything else until you've perfected it; creativity is when you can picture a beautiful scene in your mind's eye and it's all you can do to paint it before it fades away...
But here's the hiccup; talent and creativity don't always overlap. When they do, we get the greats like Jimmi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Van Gogh, J.R.R Tolkien or Steven Spielberg; in all of these examples, the artist is both creative enough to come up with amazing ideas and talented enough to execute them perfectly and present them to us as clearly as if we could see into their mind. In such cases, humanity is blessed that these individuals had both traits aplenty... but can you imagine what would have happened if genre-defining giants like The Beatles weren't very good at playing their music and couldn't get a record deal? Their art might have never reached us and the world would have been that much darker for it.
That might have been how A Song of Ice and Fire ended up (or Game of Thrones as you might know it), if George Martin hadn't been incredibly lucky.
You see, George Martin had amazing content, but he simply isn't that good a writer. The qualities that make him such a brilliant world builder are also the same qualities that make him a mediocre writer; he can't control his thought process or guide it in a certain direction... he simply allows his mind to wander and take him where it would, which results in very vivid descriptions in his books -usually of food and sex scenes, but I digress- and all the intrigues and subplots we've grown to love so much about the series, but it also makes him lose sight of the over-arching story-line and get completely side-tracked, and left unchecked, this has resulted in what was originally supposed to be a trilogy spiraling out of control into a 3000+ page behemoth of a series that intimidates all but the most invested fans.
The point is that George Martin's mediocre talent almost cost us something as wildly popular as A Song of Ice and Fire... and he's an OK writer. What would have happened if the idea for the series had come to a construction worker of no literary talent whatsoever who just shrugged it off or tried to write it down but simply wasn't good enough a writer to do it?
Here I am finally arriving to my key message; it's truly a tragedy when creativity and talent don't coincide. All the artists on the other side of the Justin Bieber coin must endure constant frustration; the feeling of being constrained and chained down when your mind is soaring through colorful skies and realms of surreal beauty is more painful that you might imagine... like being gagged and tied down (and not the sexy kind), or wearing a strait-jacket every day of your life. You're on a boat in a vast ocean of ideas and possibilities in the midst of the raging storm that is your fury at your own limitations.
I count myself among that unlucky number. What small measure of talent I've been blessed with at writing and creating music is not nearly enough to keep up with my creativity, and it can often feel very suffocating as I try to find some way to express a thought or a feeling... and that is precisely what I wanted to direct your attention to; never confuse talent for creativity. A talented artist can swindle your senses and sell you the artistic equivalent of a fish and custard cream pie and have you asking for seconds; while an insufficiently talented creative person could be bursting at the seams with artistic genius... which you and everyone else in the world would appreciate IF ONLY YOU COULD SEE IT TOO... but sadly you never will, because they're unable to express it.
How many Stairways To Heaven and Comfortably Numbs have we lost? How many would-be Mozarts? The answer is too many.
One of humanity's greatest tragic ironies is an untapped creative mind.
We often mistake talent for creativity, but they are two very different things. There are 3 main factors that determine any artist's success; creativity, talent and hard work... but let's disregard hard work for now because it's not the point of this post... and again, you're going to have to forgive me for the business metaphors I seem to favor more and more as I slide deeper into a career in finance, but bear with me here; a talented person is a person who is able to package their product in an attractive way which appeals to the consumer and makes them "buy" it, regardless of the content... in other words, they are the "Apple" of artists.
Picture an author who can make an international best-seller out of a middle aged housewife's sex dreams (I'm looking at you, Twilight's Stephenie Meyer); or one of the dime-a-dozen "pop-stars" -such as Justin Bieber or Rhianna- who can be reliably counted upon to create hit songs on a regular basis with lyrics a hungover 5 year old could write with their eyes closed and very basic music -if you can even call it that. In such cases, the actual content seems almost irrelevant if it's packaged well enough; Stephenie knew how to write books to appeal to a wide demographic of aging, bored housewives with unfulfilled fantasies, and Bieber's combo of genuine musical talent and boyish good looks won him massive appeal with pubescent teenage girls. However, considering their frankly disproportionate success with such embarrassingly bad content (baby, baby, baby, oh), it's fairly obvious that even though they're talented artists, they are most certainly not creative.
Creativity is completely different; creativity is getting out of bed at 3 in the morning because you just had an amazing idea for a book that you had to write down so you don't forget it come morning; creativity is when you lock yourself at home for days because you have an idea for a song in your head and you physically can't bring yourself to enjoy anything else until you've perfected it; creativity is when you can picture a beautiful scene in your mind's eye and it's all you can do to paint it before it fades away...
But here's the hiccup; talent and creativity don't always overlap. When they do, we get the greats like Jimmi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Van Gogh, J.R.R Tolkien or Steven Spielberg; in all of these examples, the artist is both creative enough to come up with amazing ideas and talented enough to execute them perfectly and present them to us as clearly as if we could see into their mind. In such cases, humanity is blessed that these individuals had both traits aplenty... but can you imagine what would have happened if genre-defining giants like The Beatles weren't very good at playing their music and couldn't get a record deal? Their art might have never reached us and the world would have been that much darker for it.
That might have been how A Song of Ice and Fire ended up (or Game of Thrones as you might know it), if George Martin hadn't been incredibly lucky.
You see, George Martin had amazing content, but he simply isn't that good a writer. The qualities that make him such a brilliant world builder are also the same qualities that make him a mediocre writer; he can't control his thought process or guide it in a certain direction... he simply allows his mind to wander and take him where it would, which results in very vivid descriptions in his books -usually of food and sex scenes, but I digress- and all the intrigues and subplots we've grown to love so much about the series, but it also makes him lose sight of the over-arching story-line and get completely side-tracked, and left unchecked, this has resulted in what was originally supposed to be a trilogy spiraling out of control into a 3000+ page behemoth of a series that intimidates all but the most invested fans.
The point is that George Martin's mediocre talent almost cost us something as wildly popular as A Song of Ice and Fire... and he's an OK writer. What would have happened if the idea for the series had come to a construction worker of no literary talent whatsoever who just shrugged it off or tried to write it down but simply wasn't good enough a writer to do it?
Here I am finally arriving to my key message; it's truly a tragedy when creativity and talent don't coincide. All the artists on the other side of the Justin Bieber coin must endure constant frustration; the feeling of being constrained and chained down when your mind is soaring through colorful skies and realms of surreal beauty is more painful that you might imagine... like being gagged and tied down (and not the sexy kind), or wearing a strait-jacket every day of your life. You're on a boat in a vast ocean of ideas and possibilities in the midst of the raging storm that is your fury at your own limitations.
I count myself among that unlucky number. What small measure of talent I've been blessed with at writing and creating music is not nearly enough to keep up with my creativity, and it can often feel very suffocating as I try to find some way to express a thought or a feeling... and that is precisely what I wanted to direct your attention to; never confuse talent for creativity. A talented artist can swindle your senses and sell you the artistic equivalent of a fish and custard cream pie and have you asking for seconds; while an insufficiently talented creative person could be bursting at the seams with artistic genius... which you and everyone else in the world would appreciate IF ONLY YOU COULD SEE IT TOO... but sadly you never will, because they're unable to express it.
How many Stairways To Heaven and Comfortably Numbs have we lost? How many would-be Mozarts? The answer is too many.
One of humanity's greatest tragic ironies is an untapped creative mind.
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