“You have to do the hard things. The things that no one else is doing. The things that scare you. The things that make you wonder how much longer you can hold on.

Those are the things that define you. Those are the things that make the difference between living a life of mediocrity or outrageous success.”

~ Dan Waldschmidt

This has been a central approach to most of my daily practice.. to challenge myself, often beyond my known skill level… destroying my own comfort zones in the process.. Like I’ve always said, if my first thought is “this will never work”, it often yields some kind of magic if I decide to go all in anyway…killing expectations is a prerequisite. Same concept with traveling to new locations, or considering various international contracts/live performances. If a prospect scares the hell out of me, then it usually demands a higher position on my potential ‘to do’ list. Another good bit of advice along this line of thinking is to start before you’re ready. If all you do is wait until you’re ready, then there’s a good chance that A) you’ll never be READY, and/or B) you will have missed the immediate window of opportunity..

I can attribute a substantial proportion of my past successes to pursuing my curiosity into the unknown. Doing things that scared me shitless. Facing the tasks my logical mind says no to… or “this is impossible”. Each one of these instances has both enriched my skill, overall work, portfolio, heart, mind, and character in some way.

When I first discovered there were other balancers in the world, I absorbed the new knowledge for about a year or so, applying it forward into my own evolution. But I must note that much of my “outrageous success” in recent years has come from doing what no one else was doing at the time.. especially in the realm of extreme balance and challenging the “impossible” as a basic process.. Now it almost seems as thought Gravity Glue has become the general stylistic model or goal for many new school balancers.

This particular balance is among my all time favorites… often signified by taking a self portrait with my creation… but I love the lush Spring foliage as a perfect compliment to the warm skin tones of the Boulder Creek rocks… all the way down to sequence of colors along the spine… These smaller spines are something occurring more frequently in recent work.. i guess it’s an extra improbable challenge to navigate a small combo of rocks lower down in the formation, under relatively massive top weight. Also part of the mood of Spring rain… such a therapeutic sensual experience… the smells, feels, renewal and rain keeps the rocks wet for my pictures. :))

57 Responses
  1. My son in law Seth Anderson Posted the article about Boulder wanted to ban you from your art. I never understood art until I saw yours. You bring a peace to me I have never had. I can no longer travel but if I could have a last wish it would be to see as much of your work as I could. So young man the Montana Mom says”rock On!”

  2. human kind probably has somethg to do, a kind of play role, trying to find out may be already be one role, but what a dramatic situation we don’t know exactly why we are here, what’s for and where we are? sometimes happens some body like this dude who controls gravity it’s rather enthusiastic then we still don’t realize why such thing happens but deep inside we know it’s kind of hum important the word important is weak may be critical is better

    1. i dunnno… just depends on wind… i built this one to completely disappear upon collapse… and left it standing at sunset… and was gone by next morning. :)

  3. I have spent my entire working life this way. I do amazing things, things I never thought I could do. I have expanded my skills. But I am very tired, have never felt good about the price paid to do this. Disability, exhaustion, lonliness, failure. I think it is very good to expand, but sheer hard work is not the way to do it. A job involves meeting the multiple and useless expectations of so many “bosses” many of them unseen, but still in control over your work. True expansion through effort must involve self-direction. Otherwise it is nothing more than slavery.

  4. What happens when you find that you have spent years facing your fears, doing the hard things… Carrying on when you thought you couldn’t… And you wake up and it’s not an outrageous success.. It’s just more of the same, the pit just send deeper…

    1. You take another look in the mirror, the next reflection is never the same. You keep trying, you keep growing…learn to live without expectation. Learn to love without an agenda. Remember you are beautiful. Believing is seeing.

    2. never had any to begin with as far as being a professional artist. it just happened through tons of seemingly aimless hard work/play. partly related to taking huge risks. risks that scared the hell out of me but they felt like the right thing to do. it is what you make of it.

    3. .
      Life is not a struggle to achieve any certain goal…

      Life is a series of struggles, a journey past obstacles, and the process ends only in death… Physical, or mental. People that give up fighting against fears are spiritually dead, or damaged.

      The thing that matters in life is the ATTITUDE we develop, to FACE those struggles. A loving attitude seems to be the best attitude.

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