The Power of Delusion

A painting of my friends Trevor and Zeno in Sicily (still in progress)

My friend Rachel is staying with me for the next few weeks which is fantastic because living by myself sometimes gets lonely. Also, what could possibly be more fun than three weeks of sleepovers, girl talk, pizza & campari?

In a taxi going to Bar Nico the other night, as I was probably describing some crazy future goal of mine, she said, “This is going to sound like an insult but I swear to god I mean it as such a compliment…

…you’re kind of delusional.”

And honestly, she’s not wrong.

The definition of delusion is “A belief or altered reality that is persistently held despite evidence or agreement to the contrary.”

It made me think of Apples “Think Different” campaign. Jobs said the following in 1994:

When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your job is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money.

That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is - everything around you that you call life, was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.

The minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will, you know if you push in, something will pop out the other side, that you can change it, you can mold it. That's maybe the most important thing. It's to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you're just gonna live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.

I think that's very important and however you learn that, once you learn it, you'll want to change life and make it better, cause it's kind of messed up, in a lot of ways. Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again.

My newest painting, finished last week.

If you’ve been with me for awhile then you know that over the past two years I’ve been rebuilding my life here in Italy. If you know that, then you also know that there have been really challenging times and equally great moments. I think everything had to happen in order for me to grow this much.