Dear Young Artist,

The world changes every day, but one thing ought to remain the same. You are called or you called yourself to enrich the world, to question it, to redream it, to challenge it and to lift it. Sometimes you have to tear down to renew. You have chosen the most challenging and the most blessed path of all—challenging because the way of art, like the way of the warrior, is a rigorous one. You are either upholding what has gone before or you are expanding the possibilities of your art. To uphold is to surrender to the laws that make that art, and this requires constant discipline. And to expand the possibilities of art calls for courage, imagination, a classical spirit and a profound respect for what is great that has gone before. Either way, much study, much mastery is required.

And it is a blessed path because what you do, if you do it well, will enlighten and enrich, console and educate, delight and refresh, amuse and renew the human spirit for decades and even centuries to come.

One may be a billionaire and not bring that much joy or enlightenment to the world. The gifts of the artist’s spirit are eternal and democratic and they bless the poor and the rich in the way they infiltrate the world and are easy to encounter. They are for the world.

I think we despair sometimes because we lose sight of why we do what we do. But we can have no idea of the destiny of our works. It may fail in our time and yet be the light of ages to come. It may have a small audience now but will speak to the whole world in the centuries to come.

Therefore do not measure the value of what you do by contemporary measures of success. In fact, success should not be your goal. Only mastery and the joy of the doing, the challenge and the surprise and the growth of the spirit during the long development of the life’s work. Your pleasures should be close to hand, and you should love the boredom and the patience and the slowness and the silence. The best and truest success is always internal. It is within. It is between you and the work done and the secret pleasure of those who resonate with it now or in the future.

There are many paths that bring you money and success and parties and fame, but there are very few that deepen the light of the jewel of the spirit, very few that pass the light on, and enlighten. It is a tight tough light, but it is authentic and it grows. One can live by it and find a secret happiness.