#01 Creative Discipline
I write this newsletter to structure my experiences and ideas around creativity. It’s mainly a personal exercise in writing, but I’m sure there is something for you as well.
My name is Juho Vesanen and I’m a co-founder of Veli Studio. I’m also editing the studio’s annual passion project Attraction Magazine – a printed and online exploration dedicated to the appreciation of visual curiosity.
#01 Creative Discipline
I was in Berlin recently and while having dinner with some friends we talked about how difficult it is to get a rental apartment from the city. One English guy told me how lucky he was when he managed to get one through a friend and went on to explain how it happened. A couple years ago, he was at a cafe and saw a girl sitting there. He didn’t want to distract her, so he wrote a note on paper and slipped it to her – asking if she’d be interested in going for drinks someday. She texted him the day after, saying that she had a boyfriend but that it would be nice to meet up anyways. They became good friends and stayed in touch. A couple years later, when he was about to move to Berlin and was looking for an apartment – lo and behold that girl was just moving out and he got the apartment.
I’m sure we all have similar stories of how we got lucky, but it rarely is random. Luck is almost always a result of previous actions – be it good or bad. The same goes with creativity and art. The creation of something spectacular is rarely an isolated moment of individual brilliance. It takes time and discipline to create a fertile ground for great things to blossom.
It’s so easy, and sometimes justified, to judge people who have ”made it” – artists, athletes, scientists etc. – and complain how much money they make. But most of those people are not succesful by accident. They have dedicated their lives to their craft and put on the hours way before they’ve been introduced to the spotlight. We can take a look at Mike Winkelmann, aka Beeple, as a somewhat controversial example. He has recently sold his works as NFTs for tens of millions of dollars. The whole topic of NFTs is of course very saturated at the moment and people are riding the wave of ”easy money”. Still, you can’t be selling your work for those astronomical prices without having built your style and community for years. Beeple has published an artwork each day for the last 12 years, without missing a day. That is creative discipline that most of us couldn’t commit to.
It’s very hopeful and assuring to realize that if you are passionate about your craft and have the discipline to show up everyday – some kind of success will come your way. You don’t have to be a genious to be succesfull. This newsletter is a way for me to practice the discipline of writing down the things that run through my head. It’s a way for me to mainfest things into existence. I hope that you can also find inspiration in this journey.
CURRENT INSPIRATION
Creative Theories of (Just About) Everything by Jeroen Lutters
If the world has a logical order, every effect has a cause, and in this bigger mathematical whole, it is no longer justified to assume that things happen without reason. Looking from this angle to the world as it is, there seems to be nothing that can be called mere bad luck, a mere coincidence, that one way or the other can be organized out of the system. I realized that this might be an interesting standpoint for living, once you start working with this formula. Nothing is in fact a coincidence: so every simple fact of life, no matter how inconsequential, has its place in the bigger story, the bigger perspective, and must be respected the way it is. The fact that you know or do not know the reason why something is hap- pening is not enough to think that same reason does not exist.
Yves Saint Laurent Museum Marrakech by Studio KO
A facinating book about the process of designing and building the iconic museum in Marrakech. Written in a form of a diary that starts 1423 days before the opening, this book is a perfect example of bringing light to the normally unseen part of the creative process and discipline.
THE STUDIO
Veli Studio is a full service creative studio based in Helsinki and London.
Website – Instagram – Behance – Linkedin – Attraction Magazine
LET’S CONNECT
Thank you for reading this far. If you found something worth sharing with others, please do so!
If you feel like we should talk, hit me an email – I promise to get back to you.