Attend to your influences.
I suppose this is the ur-message - to be more aware of what’s influencing you and how. Acknowledge just how much of what you think, feel and do is picked up from others, consciously and unconsciously, and try to become more conscious of more of them. Artists pay attention to this because they love their influences, while at the same time recognising the need to separate themselves from them.

Recognise that ‘you’ are made up of influences.
One of Harold Bloom’s insights is that there is no such thing as originality. There are just poets adopting, assimilating and messing around with other poets. There is nothing more anxiety-inducing than the injunction to ‘be yourself’. It implies that there is some authentic ‘you’, unsullied by influence, which must be discovered or revealed. I think this where a lot of the current anxieties over identity stem from. People feel like they have be an authentic individual, and this leads them to say ‘I am X’ or ‘I am a Y’ - which actually means adopting a group identity. But you don’t have think in those terms. Artists generally don’t, even if they get venerated for being original. Once you see yourself as merely a junction point for a whole set of influences, from your parents to your teachers to the feeds you follow and the articles and books you read, you can relax about being ‘you’. You can focus, instead, on making your influence-set as unique, layered and rich as possible. Nobody else will be at your junction point.

Curate your influences.
Which leads to this principle - always be thinking about your portfolio of influences and influencers. At work or at school, are you surrounding yourselves with people who will bring out the best in you, stretch your imagination, deepen your empathy, etc? (The old parental warning to ‘stay from him, he’s a bad influence’ contains wisdom, even if parents aren’t always the best judge of who’s bad or good). Are your media feeds designed to stimulate, surprise and nourish or just to create anxiety and reinforce bad habits?

source: unknown

Here for the Wrong Reasons — Are.na

Rabbit Holes 🕳 #17

Are.na