> Determination is more important then anything. No, it's really not. If what you were saying was true, everyone who wanted to be a financially successful arti

> Determination is more important then anything. No, it's really not. If what you were saying was true, everyone who wanted to be a financially successful artist would be. The truth is there are such things as supply, demand, process, practice, mastery and logistics. To over-anthropomorphize these things based on "determination" is naive and hyperbolic. The truth is that consistency matters a lot more. I stopped listening to people like you who think there's anything wrong with thinking the world is stacked against me, and especially for minorities and women. I stopped listening to people like you, who think we need encouragement, not horror stories. I used to listen to folks like you, but then I stopped. Instead, I listened to those horror stories. Shrank not away from them, held space for them and held fidelity to reality first and foremost. And once I focused on the realism, I began to see things clearly. A lot more clearly than you. That's when my career began to take off and I began to make better art. Isn't that odd? -- The problem is that to you, the youth are vehicle for your own hopes and aspirations. You don't stop and consider what they think from behind their own two eyes, you project your own parochial assumptions unto them. You forget that once upon a time, you were their age, and you would have found it patronizing to be treated with kid gloves. You don't treat them as equals. You treat them like a pet dog. I think that's wrong. Young people these days are a lot more capable than you think. And they face a really challenging world. It's immensely disrespectful to not treat them as equals, to presume they need "encouragement" -- let me ask you this, have you asked them what they need? Maybe you would be surprised. I don't treat any of my friends or colleagues with kid gloves, certainly not the ones younger than me. They tell me about the state of the world and how unfair it is, and I listen. I ask them what /they/ need. Some of them need encouragement, but that's rarer than you'd think. Most of them want information. They want experience. Strategies. They want to be challenged, motivated, given interesting threads to explore and follow, collaborated with. They want to know what I did when I was in their shoes and went through the same pains, even if it's not exactly the same thing. Sometimes they want to work together on something cool so they can see how I operate. Maybe they just want an ear to listen to. But they don't want to be condescended to, or patronizingly told that their problem is that they think the world is stacked against them when they need to think happy thoughts. And of course they wouldn't want that -- because to be told that is something that serves the person doing the telling, not the person who is listening. So if you're saying anything like this to young people, I think you need to take a long hard look in the mirror. You are out of touch.