"the blank canvas is afraid of the truly passionate painter"

Leonard Sweet pointed this out yesterday and quoted a part the seventh (of nine!) postscripts in a letter that Van Gogh wrote to his brother. It's true for painters, preachers, and entrepreneurs (and everyone else)

"You don’t know how paralyzing it is, that start from a blank canvas that says to the painter 'You can't  do anything'. The canvas has an idiotic stare and mesmerizes some painters so that they turn into idiots themselves.

Many painters are afraid of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the truly passionate painter who dares—-and who has once broken the spell of ‘you can’t.'

Life itself likewise always turns towards one an infinitely meaningless, discouraging, dispiriting blank side on which there is nothing, any more than on a blank canvas. But however meaningless and vain, however dead life appears, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth, and who knows something, doesn’t let himself be fobbed off like that. He steps in and does something, and hangs onto that, in short, breaks, ‘violates’—they say."

Get skin in the game, make that mark.
Pierre

PS: Painting above is Prisoners Exercising (1890), Vincent van Gogh. © The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow