Are you authentic when it comes to your work or are you a hack?
In the book, The War Of Art, Stephen Pressfield, defines a hack in the following manner
“The hack condescends to his audience. He thinks he’s superior to them. The truth is, he’s scared to death of them… scared of being authentic in front of them… He’s afraid it won’t sell. (Steven Pressfield)”
The hack creates work that they think others will like instead of creating work from the perspective of what they really feel or believe.
If you create work from the perspective of what you really feel or believe, you are creating authentic work.
I think that if you create authentic work, it automatically stands out from the rest.
I think that the irony is that by not creating work based in a mind-set geared toward what we think others will sell, the authenticity of the work makes it valuable because of its uniqueness.