
If you’ve ever seen a video of the art prodigy ZhaoXiaoli, a Beijing-based painter who turns trash into her canvas and tools, it’s pretty clear there’s an incredible amount of creativity not only in her work, but in how she presents it:
If you scroll through a profile of hers on social media, you’ll get a strange aesthetic of a rebel who wears a beret while dipping roses into paint and splattering it across a canvas– and turning it into something brilliant. I’m pretty sure they don’t teach you that in art school.
Back when I used to host open mic nights in Los Angeles pre-pandemic, there was an energy about the musicians and storytellers who took the stage and moved the audience. While their performances came across as effortless, fellow creatives know how many hundreds of hours of practice and experimentation goes into achieving a high level of talent and quality of creative output.
Great Writers and Creatives Have Different Motivations

When you come across a once-in-a-lifetime creative, you feel it. The way that person talks and shapes their life around their art is not of desperation of fame or of winning, it stems from the pure passion of making something incredible that comes from within.
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