“Make the bike shop and then go to the art shows after”

I love Tyler, the Creator’s very matter-of-fact approach to creativity. He’s very candid about removing pretense and mystique from the process. (He hates the word, “Inspiration,” for example.)

Even when he was a relatively new artist, he tweets about betting Will.i.am a million bucks that he’d be doing what he loved in a decade, not what made the most money. It’s simple: Tyler will never makes things he hates, no matter how much money he needs to make. Tyler doesn’t move from a place of fear.

During a recent event with Converse, a person in the audience named Rocco identifies himself as a bike shop owner and says to Tyler, the Creator, “It’s not necessarily what I call my passion because I prefer art, but I feel like it’s a freedom that I can give to other people. But I don’t know how to make it, so it doesn’t define me as, “Oh, yeah, that’s Rocco a mechanic… I be riding bikes, so people just think, like, ‘Oh, he’s a bike kid.’” How can he make it so that people won’t identify him as the bike guy?

Tyler responds, “Make the bike shop and then go to the art shows after. It’s easy.”

See also Tyler, the Creator on figuring out creative projects on low budgets, and on promoting your work. See also multi-hyphenates.

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