It is true that doing one thing and doing it well is more likely to bring success than trying a lot of different things. You will hear people in every field say the same thing, just do one thing well, do it every day. This is what I do with Qi Gong and it has been great, though creatively my interests are varied. In a way, I am forfeiting success for my own mental entertainment with my creative pursuits. I must admit though some of these successful people that are lauded are terribly wealthy and terribly boring. There are gimmicks, painfully realistic-looking exercises in tedious detail, fun crappy drawings, modernist rip-offs from a graphically trained hand, also self-conscious trickery in every guise for the populist artist that knows that success is only another social media post away.

You need the right attitude and the right marketing, if the message is confusing people won’t know how to play their part in making your crappy boring art successful. At least my art is crappy and boring without the success. Why would anyone become an artist to make money? Frank Stella made money but it all went back into growing his practice and making it bigger and bigger. The work he made became bigger and bigger until he needed an entire warehouse for all of his work. Some of his sculptural works could survive a thousand years or more and have been fabricated in aluminium and steel. His success is not centred around populist ideas of success made for the social media age.