Growth

The gap is the thing that will drive you. For the first couple years you make stuff, it's just not that good. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you.

You will eventually use everything you've ever learned.

Never become so enamored of your own smarts that you stop signing up for life's hard classes. Keep your conclusions light and your curiosity ferocious. Keep groping in the darkness with ravenous desire.

The only failure is the failure to rescue something. The difference between triumph and defeat isn't about your willingness to take the risk — it's about mastery of rescue afterwards.

Take your risks now. As you grow older, you become more fearful and less flexible. And I mean that literally — I hurt my knee on the treadmill this week and it wasn't even on.

Your degree will be good for something, just maybe not what you thought originally. If you're open to it, sometimes life presents you with what you're supposed to be.

Stand up for what you believe in. It's okay to be wrong. It's okay to know stuff in your heart and discover that you're wrong, and cop to it. Say, 'You know what, I changed my mind.' This has become a terrible thing to do in this country, and only art can bring it back.

In any given moment, one lives one's life in one of two ways: either under a threat or for a challenge. If imagination will take you everywhere, then living under a threat will take you nowhere.

Get out of your comfort zone — better yet, get comfortable about being out of your comfort zone. Get yourself into the arena. Be a participant and not a spectator.

Life is too short to let the world we experience be restricted by our own limited vision.

There will be many doors along your path, and behind each of those doors will be things that can change you and your lives. But you will recognize them only if you have embraced a philosophy of appreciating everything that happens to you.

You can't do it alone. Be open to collaboration. Other people and other people's ideas are often better than your own. Find a group of people who challenge and inspire you, spend a lot of time with them, and it will change your life.