Just the Right Amount

I love me a hot chocolate, but just like anything else I must practice moderation. My love for my art must be balanced the same was as my favorite high calorie beverages. I have to love my work or it just wouldn't be worth doing. I have to have passion for what I do or doing it will become a chore and I will eventually lose any motivation for working on it and it will eventually land in my pile of unfinished projects, and well that would just make it a waste of time. 

On the other end of the scale is loving my work too much. It is like having an ugly kid. I know this is probably a really inappropriate comparison, but I have already started with so I may as well finish explaining. You love your child, and as it is right to do, you can see past any flaws in their appearance. To you they are  beautiful, but sadly there are attributes that make a person appealing to the eye. Not to say that is the way we should judge people, but there are features that make a person pleasing in appearance. Though there are these common standards of beauty, your child will more common than not, be beautiful to you know matter what. It is after all the product of your labor and love. Just like your child your view of your work can be clouded by your love for it. I am always reminded of what Tim Gunn from Project Runway calls the monkey pen experience. When you first walk into the monkey pen you can smell the stink of their feces, but after twenty minutes you grow used to it. It takes someone to come in with a fresh perspective to tell you it stinks. 

Seeing through the smell of our own love for our work takes a fresh perspective. We have to be willing to love our work to have the passion to do it, but if we love it too much we cannot see the flaws in it. We have to be willing to take a critique, and we have to be willing to see it clearly enough to make it better. If we cannot see what is wrong with our work because we love it too much, we will never see it clearly enough to improve it. Our work will never reach its true potential because we have blinded ourselves to the flaws. 

Everything in life needs moderation. There is no exception. You can over do the good things just as easily as the bad. When we have proper perspective we, and moderation in our life we give our selves the greatest chance of improvement and success.