The journey from childhood authenticity to adult self-discovery: reclaiming personal taste, creative confidence, and the courage to define meaning for yourself

I sometimes think about it in terms of entertaining. I don't know how much entertaining you do. When people say, I'm going to give a dinner party, I'm going to invite some friends for dinner, they get into such a mess thinking, how am I gonna organize this dinner? They go, oh, I must have a starter and maybe it's a melon and or maybe it I don know prawns or something And then and they must have this thing called a main course which might be chicken or something And then they got to have dessert etc And they just you know they overflowing with anxiety etc And if you said to them, what do you actually enjoy? You know, if it's supper time, what do you... And they might go, well, I like opening, you know, a can of tuna, putting it on the table, getting some hummus, dipping that, putting my feet up, etc. And you thought, okay, why don't you just do that with your mates? Why don't you just drop the pretense? Have the courage to think what's touching me might touch another person. and your dinner party is going to be a lot more fun. This is ultimately, of course, what great artists do. Great artists have a sense that what's fun for them, what's meaningful for them, will probably be meaningful for other people, even though right now there's quite a lot of silence about that area. So they're kind of, they're taking, they've got a faith that, we started talking about self-esteem, they've got a faith that the things that turn them on are likely to turn other people on as well. And that's a beautiful confidence. And that's what leads to great art. Great art is really the courage to define the pleasure for yourself. It's a lovely quote from Emerson. He says, in the minds of geniuses, we find our own neglected thoughts. In the minds of geniuses, we find...