remember reading about this artist. A sculptor. A crazy, beautiful bastard who would just sit there, in a cold studio, staring at a giant, rough block of white marble for forty-two hours straight. Not moving. Not eating. Just staring.
And then, like a man possessed, he’d jump up. He’d grab a sander and work on a corner. Then he’d sit back down. Then he’d grab a chisel and a hammer and start hacking away at a vein, sending chips of stone flying across the room like shrapnel.
And the people watching him, the critics, the “experts” with their clipboards and their theories, they’d ask him, “What’s the plan? What are you making? Where’s the blueprint?”
And he’d look at them with his wild, dusty eyes and say, “I don’t have a goddamn plan. What’s the fun in that?”
See, a plan is just a cage someone else built for you. It’s the world telling you what shape you’re supposed to be. It’s the teacher, the priest, the boss, telling you to carve a nice, respectable garden gnome when you know, deep down, there’s a goddamn lion inside that rock.
He said, “I just chisel away the parts that aren’t the statue.”
And that, right there, is the whole goddamn secret to life.
You spend your twenties and your thirties adding things. You add a degree. You add a job title. You add a wife. You add a mortgage. You add layers and layers of responsibility and expectations, plastering them onto your soul like cheap stucco.
But the real work? The work of a master? It’s about subtraction.
You have to pick up the chisel. And you have to look at that block of marble—which is you—and you have to start hacking away everything that isn’t honest.
You chip away the “Project Manager.” You chip away the “Mormon.” You chip away the “Husband who stays for the kids.” You chip away the “Good American Consumer.” You sand down the rough edges of your own fear. You hammer off the heavy, ugly chunks of other people’s expectations.
It’s messy work. It’s loud. It hurts. You’re going to lose friends. You’re going to lose lovers. You’re going to look down at the floor and see piles of rubble that used to be your life.
But you keep chiseling. You work on the top, you work on the bottom. Sometimes you step back, pour a drink, and just look at it. Sometimes you get right up close and work on the details.
And when you’re done? When you’ve removed everything that you felt forced to be, everything that was a lie, everything that was just a costume you wore to please a crowd that didn’t give a shit about you anyway?
What’s left is the Masterpiece.
And the masterpiece is You.
Not the son. Not the daughter. Not the employee. Just the raw, beautiful, ugly, and completely honest human animal that was hiding inside that rock the whole time.
And let me tell you something about the end. When you’re old, when the dust settles, nobody is going to care about the chips on the floor. Nobody is going to put your bank account on the mantelpiece.
The only thing that matters is the statue. The finished product. The energy you leave behind. The memories of a man who had the balls to carve his own goddamn face out of the stone.
And here’s the tragedy. The quiet, ugly, and completely heartbreaking truth.
Ninety percent of the people walking around out there? They haven’t even picked up the chisel.
They’re letting other people do the carving. They’re letting their wives chip away at their balls. They’re letting their bosses sand down their spines. They’re letting society hammer them into a shape that fits in a cubicle. They’re dying as rough blocks of stone, never knowing what they could have been.
Don’t be one of those poor bastards.
If you’re going to do it, do it. Go all the way.
Like the poet said, it might mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives, jobs. It might mean sleeping on a park bench. It might mean jail. It might mean mockery, isolation.
Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it.
And if you do it, if you pick up that hammer and you swing it with everything you’ve got, despite the fear, despite the pain…
The gods will be waiting to delight in you. The nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter.
It’s the only good fight there is.
So pick up the goddamn chisel. And start swinging.
