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I’ve always been a bit of a philistine when it comes to art. Try as I might, I can’t see the appeal of those undisputed masterpieces. The Mona Lisa, the collected works of Shakespeare, Michaelangelo’s David, all of them leave me a little cold.
But while I’m not a huge fan of the work itself, I’ve always loved how Michelangelo’s supposedly responded when the pope asked him about the process of creating something so beautiful from a single block of marble. “It’s simple”, Michelangelo replied, “I just chip away all of the parts that don’t look like David.”
The art of self improvement.
My lack of taste in art is just one of the many things I spent my twenties trying to improve about myself. Not only because I wanted to understand what everyone was seeing that I wasn’t, but because I was beginning to notice that I wasn't the person I wanted to be.
My path to self improvent began with me visualising a “better” version of myself and aiming towards it. A person who didn’t typically think the worst of people (as I had begun to do), a person who was open with people (while I had become steadily more closed off and unfriendly), a person who was confident and comfortable around people (instead of finding them more and more difficult to be around).
