You know you’ve done your masterwork or a heavyweight project when you have nothing left to give. Your job, when it comes to your craft, be so invested in what you are putting out into the world so that it’s a masterwork. You have nothing left, intellectually and cognitively, emotionally and spiritually. If you look at the great artists, they all worked in cycles. They work really hard when they work. They bring to bear the full resources of all their capacities, and then they’re exhausted because they’ve created a masterwork. And then, they spend sometimes a month, sometimes a year in the wilderness, and they’re pondering and they’re having long meals with people they love and they’re reading books and they’re renewing. And you might think, and society would say they’re resting and wasting time. I would say to you with great respect, or anyone who would laugh at what they do and call it wasting time, I would say, first of all, John Lennon said it well, “Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.” But secondly, that is actually the period of incubation for their next masterwork.
