Joy Joy Joy

People who share your values are part of your tribe. As a creative, these people are your true audience. I read Seth Godin, Brene Brown, Simon Sinek and Malcolm Gladwell and their wisdom has certainly helped me to streamline my thinking and therefore my actions in my art business.

In thinking about my true values I came across an article by Brene Brown It lists human values and prompts the reader to choose only two, just two that we hold as most important.

I’d first selected authenticity and integrity, but then after researching those found that if one has integrity its not possible to be so, without authenticity. So now I have Integrity and Courage as my most important core values. Are you surprised that Creativity isn’t on my list of two? Well, it is because creativity requires courage, lots of it. So, its there, its just contextual.

I believe all humans have equal value – with equal rights regardless of culture, language, gender, age, income or whatever other “category” humans are put into. That means I strive to treat everyone the same. I say strive because being human I am far from perfect.

Courage has been a personal strength for my entire life. I am not unique in that I’ve faced and continue to face many challenges. Yet, despite set-backs big and small I still start each day moving forward. There’s lots of sayings about courage, “what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger”, “if you couldn’t handle it – it wouldn’t be given to you” I believe courage is essential to living a happy life. Be willing to do that thing that you’ve never done before. And then do it. And even if you hated it be proud of yourself for having the courage to do it. Without courage, fear creeps in. It lies. It holds you still. It strangles. Without courage, we’d all still be drawing in the dark on our cave walls. 

Today, I strive to find the courage to go against the norm and instead of filling my digital feeds with Buy Buy Buy I want to instead bring Joy Joy Joy through the work I create and the ideas I share. Its really tough though simply because we’ve setup the digital world now as a big sales machine. It’s initial intent, at least what was told to me in the 70’s was that it would bring the world together. People could share ideas and grow a global community and we’d all sing as one. That only actually happened in a couple beverage commercials as far as I know. LOL

I don’t know if you share my values. All I can do is express my beliefs through word and action. And perhaps if you see something that resonates you’ll be part of the tribe. Or not. Either way its okay. I have to be me. No one else is doing it. And you should be you too!