This quote from New York painter and printmaker Chuck Close has been pinned to my desktop for years.

I use it as a direct challenge to push myself forward every day, and, at times, to kick myself when I simply can’t get into gear.

Screen Shot 2014-02-28 at 6.45.22 AMChuck is one of my personal heroes. His wall-sized, haunting self-portrait is front and center as you walk in my apartment.

The back-story about him is key to the intent behind the phrase.

He was a well-known abstract painter in SoHo who, 20 years ago, had a stroke, almost died, and became paralyzed. In the aftermath of recovery, he redefined artistic expression in a format that was not restricted by, but freed by his physical limitations. And elevated himself to the very top of critical and popular success in the art world.

I keep churning on this fact.

Most of us get a cold, grab our cat and go to bed, get better, then lament lost time.

Chuck was struck down in his late 40s, confined to a wheel chair with only limited hand movement on one side, and simply went to work, strapping a paintbrush to his hand and creating a new genre of art.

His quote is surprisingly polarizing to most everyone I’ve shared it with. And invariably misunderstood.

People decry and lash out at it as an attempt to demystify inspiration. I get that.

We all hold on tightly to our need to be struck by inspiration as the driver behind our labors. But even more so, I think we hold to our right to disclaim inactivity because we are not inspired or blocked.

There are many lists of how to get over creativity blocks and inactivity. Far fewer on how to spur it forward without stoppage.

Chuck believes that:

“things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will – through work – bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never have dreamt of if you were just sitting around looking for a great ‘art [idea].”

This is a truth to live life by for me.

It touches on the dynamics of discovery that I constantly search for, not in artistic expression as I’m not an artist, but in my work–ferreting out new markets, trying untested solutions for building communities and stumbling forward making products and brands on ever new ground with constantly evolving consumer behaviors.

In my own work, like the semi-blank canvas of an artist, the answers and grids of yesterday’s solutions provide guidance, direction and assurity, but in actuality, it’s a new world each and every time.

Screen Shot 2014-02-28 at 6.53.38 AMChuck’s artistic pragmatism and impatience with whining maps to my long held belief that, in marketing and life, the best and truest strategy is a smart and flexible execution. Most everything is in the doing, not the plan. And doing itself is most often its own motivation and momentum.

Strangely, his quote is connected to another ongoing meme that I just can’t shrug off.

The rallying calls of ‘Do what you love’ and ‘Follow your passions’ are now acculturated from the tech entrepreneurial niche into our broader society. A transformative and positive behavioral trend of today’s world.

Recently though I’ve realized that for me, they are too pat an answer and not quite true.

I believe there’s a continuum in our lives and careers that evolves over time. It impacts how we view our work, how we continue to build our skills, how we maintain momentum over time and how inspiration is harnessed for productivity and invention on both personal and professional levels.

At one end, it certainly starts with embracing what we love and the passions we swim in that define ourselves. But it travels far to the right over time, across the timeline of our experience being driven even more so by what we just become great at doing. And that excellence at doing is who we really are.

I see this evolution a lot working with young, brilliant entrepreneurs that are red-eyed with talent and conviction, supercharged with passion towards their projects, but without the experience to be self cognizant of how they navigate decisions and their own strengths. They are natural talents, who have yet to learn how to replicate their successes in new environments and rechannel their developing instincts.

I’m no less clear on my passions than when I walked into Atari to build their enthusiasts community twenty five years ago. But I wake to work every day now, grab my toolbox of skills and expertise, and tackle new projects and ideas as a matter of intent and discovery, more than a push from burning uncertainty behind me. More a plunge into just figuring it out and doing it. It’s a process–muscle memory if you will, that can be called up to flex in new situations over and over again. And no less exciting, imaginative, or flexible, just different and more measured.

Screen Shot 2014-02-27 at 5.23.23 PMI think that this is what Chuck is implying as well.

It’s not only about artistic creation. Few of us are visionaries, geniuses, or artists.

But we all discover genius in our work, just nail it in spite of odds, find focus and drive to do impossible unchartered and seemingly unconnected stuff at times.

Friends have told me that I’m simply rebranding the power of focus with this train of thought.

I don’t think so.

We are all bombarded by information, by limitless interesting mini-interruptions incessantly. Focus is a way of shutting things out.

To me, it is a matter of filtering the world to the purpose at hand. It’s less conscious than ingrained, more about sifting through what I need with intent rather than unplugging and drawing the blinds to avert distraction.

Chuck’s phrase is connected to who he is and his accomplishments obviously.

But I’ve adopted it to my own needs on my own continuum.

Screen Shot 2014-02-28 at 6.53.05 AMMy interpretation is that inspiration is the abstraction, inspiring work is itself both the driver and the result. And the process of discovery is the real pace of work itself.

Most everything we do is an infinite map of little pieces that we tackle one at a time, on an ever developing grid of direction.

We have intent, a framework of experience and belief to guide us, but we are literally connecting the dots in real time as we push forward. Flexibility alongside determination and experience is the toolbox for creating something new and larger than the sum of all the parts.

This is true for a marketplace, a cross network application–true for an artistic creation possibly as well

Not unlike one of Chuck’s giant, super realistic, room-size canvases, made up of hundreds of one-two inch laboriously painted squares that are the limit of his physical mobility, each tackled separately on a giant matrix over a year’s time.

As a whole, it seems perfect and connected into one coherent, brilliant, and planned out forward looking image. In reality it was the intersection of maniacal planning, creativity, skill and pure creative happenstance.

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Thanks to Gianfranco Gorgoni for his photo of Chuck.