The Groove Issue 92 - The Power of Grit in Creativity
THE POWER OF GRIT IN CREATIVITY
Do you have grit? This is the determination and deep desire to pursue long-term goals.
For people who want to use their creative capabilities to the max to enhance products or services, launch a new business, write a book, and get it published, create art that catches people’s eyes and hearts, or have long-lasting and meaningful careers, grit is almost always universally required.
Wharton professor Angela Duckworth has been studying grit for over 15 years. She developed a simple test that shows your own grit scale.
According to Duckworth, a combination of passion and perseverance for a singularly important goal is the hallmark of high achievers in every domain. She proved in her book that grit is what’s needed to succeed, way beyond talent or (gasp!) luck.
How Grit Determined Edward Hopper’s Success
A young Edward Hopper before his breakthrough.
One of the most famous and celebrated American artists of the 20th century, Edward Hopper, had a career whose slow start didn’t deter him from pushing ahead.
While his first signed oil painting, Rowboat in Rocky Cove, was made in 1895, Hopper was unable to sell any of his paintings until he was 30 years old. Sailing sold for $250 at The Armory Show in 1913.
In that long period of time, Hopper took a job in an advertising agency as an illustrator and continued painting canvas and watercolors on the side, improving his skills and trying to find galleries and collectors who might be interested in his work.
Sailing, 1911 was the first painting that Edward Hopper was able to sell through a gallery that took his work to The Armory Show in 1913. It’s now part of the permanent collection of the Carnegie Museum of Art.
Even after that first sale, things didn’t take off for him. He struggled trying to figure out his style and said, “it's hard for me to decide what I want to paint. I go for months without finding it sometimes. It comes slowly” but he never doubted that he wanted to be a full-time painter, make a living off his art, and maybe even make history as he did.
What it took to succeed was grit.
Hopper didn’t stop painting, but he had to keep taking commercial and advertising projects to pay his bills.
It wasn’t until 1920, when he got a solo show at the Whitney Studio Club (the precursor to the Whitney Museum) that his career started to gain real traction. Eventually Hopper found his style and in 1931, the Whitney and the Metropolitan Museum of Art paid thousands of dollars for his works. He sold 30 paintings that year.
Edward Hopper, Cape Cod Morning, 1950, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum.
After decades working as a full-time painter and having been already celebrated as an artist, when art writer John D. Morse asked him if his 1950 work Cape Cod Morning was “a pleasure to paint”, Hopper answered “Well, [paintings] are a pleasure in a sense, and yet they're all hard work to me. I can't say that it's pure pleasure. There's so much technical concerns involved.”
In these sentences Hopper reaffirmed that while success came and his creativity was recognized, it was a whole lot of grit that got him there.
The Genius Thing Is Not to Give Up
In 2010, Jay Z sat down for a conversation with Warren Buffet and Steve Forbes at Buffet’s office in Omaha, Nebraska. While Jay was extremely successful 12 years ago, it doesn’t even come close to what he has built in the last decade in terms of music, businesses, and personal branding.
In that video, he said he could have ended up dead or perhaps spent years in jail but, “It happened that I had a talent to make music”, adding that “the greatest trick that the music industry played on artists is convincing them that they couldn’t be artists or make money”, telling us that he didn’t just take the dire circumstances of his life as a limitation.
On the contrary, what I considered his best line comes out when reflecting upon the start of his career: “In the beginning, we went to every single label and every single label shut their door on us,” but grit showed its victorious face, so he added: “The genius thing that we did was we didn’t give up. We used that ‘what do they know’ approach. We didn’t give up at that point.”
Instead of thinking that nobody wanted his music, Jay started his own label with friends Damon Dash and Kareem Burk, called Roc-A-Fella Records, in 1994. Jay Z released his debut album “Reasonable Doubt” on Roc-A-Fella in 1996 and I think you already know that the rest is history.
UNLEASH YOUR CREATIVE GENIUS
I’ve put together a free webinar for those of you who are not members of my online course Jumpstart. If you’d like to watch it, please register here.
HOW CREATIVITY RULES THE WORLD
I am super thrilled to announce that my book won the International Book Award in the Business/Entrepreneurship category!
Have you already gotten your copy?
It’s in three formats: hardcover, eBook and audiobook. Get it here.
TEDX TALK
Have you already watched my TEDx Talk: “NFTs, Graffiti and Sedition: How Artists Invent The Future”?
I share three lessons I have learned from artists that always work for anyone in their careers. Watch it here.