@ PixelPileDriver: "Attempt to balance the rest of your life.
And then it will be easier to place importance on each part of it."
That was really well put. In general, of course, not just in regards to sports, exercise or isolation. And as I asked Cyangmou, do you personally have the same mindset that you're advocating? Also, what do you mean that bad competition can be healthy?
@ Joe: This is something I often wonder about when I see athletes. Now, athletes are different from artists. Most sports are in fact a zero sum game, you can't have multiple winners. Never the less, you can say there is some competition among artists as well, so maybe a comparison can be somewhat useful. Some athletes seem to be driven more by external goals than others. It's almost like they don't enjoy their sport at all, unless they're the best. And while we teach our children that internal motivation is what really drives people to excellence, I'm not sure if that's strictly true.
Now, I only follow one sport, and that's MMA. If you look at the greatest fighters of all time, one name that inevitably is considered as a candidate for the greatest is GSP, Georges St Pierre. He left the sport while he was the champion for several reasons, but one reason was because he was so consumed by the pursuit of excellence that it basically made him unhappy. He wasn't able to relax and appreciate his accomplishments as much as he would have wanted. He trained himself to exhaustion because he was constantly feeling inadequate. But there's no denying that his extreme work ethic helped him be perhaps the greatest fighter of all time. You can say "Perhaps he could have been the greatest of all time even without putting that extreme pressure on himself". And that may be right. But it may also be wrong. Maybe torturing himself was the reason he made it that far.
I'm playing devil's advocate here. I don't intend to torture myself to perfection. I rack disciprine.
@Probo: Oh, kudos isn't my main goal at all. Otherwise I would only be pixelling Super Mario clones, RPG items, and chibi / anime characters, or whatever else gets the most attention in the pixel art community. So I'm definitely trying to pixel the stuff I like and follow my own dreams. But I also have this competitive focus that comes along with it.
How about you? How do you approach pixel art, or art in general, in terms of competition and rewards?
@Friend: Very interesting statistic about "kudos-tracking", if true.
@Kasumi: How can you expect to reach people and hear random people talk about your art, if you don't even publish your best work? And could you tell me what the game is, or PM it to me?
@Helm: Do you mean that you look to influence and inspire people in a profound manner? In other words, are you talking about art that carries a certain depth and touches people more deeply than, say, a bunch of 16x16 pixel RPG icons? Or is private kindness just an arbitrary metric you've set for yourself, without any consideration in regards to whether the art is profound or banale? I don't mean to sound critical, I'm just not sure I understand you correctly.
@ Friend:
" if we go back a little more than a decade ago before the world of likes and statuses, what else would have inspired an artist to continue, or even to create? money or fame does not inspire what i would consider an artist. i think this new world has messed up some things, such as skewing how we view self worth based on number of llikes etc."
I think you have to go back centuries or millennia if you want to remove this element. Technology has made it a lot easier to track and measure, but the principle is older than that. Of course, the pursuit of art in the modern sense of the word isn't something mankind has done forever, perhaps, so it's hard to discuss what is 'natural' and what is 'new'. Even if you read Plato's dialogues, you'll read about famous artists in Ancient Greece. I imagine fame was an important factor, even when it was harder to measure in numbers.
Jerry Seinfeld had some nice jokes about popularity, and the significance of the blinking light on the tape recorder receiving messages from his phone. "It's important for us to be liked by a large group of people we don't really care for", I believe he said. I always found that kind of funny, and true.
