Sale on canvas prints! Use code ABCXYZ at checkout for a special discount!

You Can NOT Always Get what You Want

Blogs: #2 of 2

Previous Next View All
You Can NOT Always Get what You Want

… but if you try sometimes, really, really hard, you get what you need. This, of course, is not always the case, or the sane way of going about it. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. Persistence. It does pay off.

Growing up as a child and continuing through my college years, I was always told that the more you put into a task, job or project, the more you would get out of it. It certainly holds true if you are true to yourself. If you’ve been brought up to strive for perfection at the cost of your sanity, it usually turns out to be a case of setting yourself up for failure. No more!

Five A’s and a B. What’s up with this B? That’s not an easy thing to live with for 37 years. Trying to satisfy the intellectual, scholarly and creative needs of others all of my life has led me down a road of loss of self. No more!

Since then, I have learned to work with people and clients, rather than trying to satisfy them. The key to creative success when beginning with a blank slate is getting quality input and direction first … this almost always leads to a better result. Although I may still have my "people-pleasing" moments, and do so because it gives me great personal satisfaction to know that the creative abilities I have, and the DIRE need to share them with others in hopes of producing a great outcome, still prevail.

What I should have been doing all this time is to satisfy my own creative and self-rewarding needs … not those of others, whom by doing so might have paid me more, thought better of me as an artist, or even as a person.

Design Professional. I’m not sure which word is more provocative. That is the title I’ve come to know myself as for the last 30 years. This is where I do it. I’m currently working very hard to change how I see and value myself, my role in life, and working to sell myself on me. So far, it’s coming along really well. Positive mindset brings positive outcomes.

Talent … yeah, I have talent. Trust and belief in myself … that’s a work-in-progress. Drive, ambition, goals, and spending long, sleepless days and nights at the computer monitor surrounded by people who could put a man on the moon if they set their mind to it.

Me, the man of many talents and the master of some. It’s amazing how one is almost always in awe of the talents of others, yet fails to see the shining example of one’s own abilities. All it takes is a long, hard look in the mirror. That is the only person I have come to realize I need to impress. Everything else is just eye candy.

My main goal in life from here on out is to be happy with my Self. My heart, my soul, my ability to take a blank screen or canvas and pull rabbits out of my CS6 hat or artistic paint bucket at the drop of a “I-needed-it-yesterday” e-mail. That’s my job.

I thought I used to thrive on that kind of request. Try telling that to the nurse who took my blood pressure the other day. Oh it was still just 120/80 … great by today’s standards … but in order to take it, she had to pull me from out from in front of the mirror. I was just admiring the new Craig Burgwardt.

Words to chew on … make it a great day!

Follow me on Twitter: @BurgwardtDesign
Like me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/craig.burgwardt