The Vs. Studio Blog

“Success is peace of mind attained only through self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do the best of which you’re capable.” -John Wooden

“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.” -John 14:27

“The ultimate source of my mental happiness is my peace of mind. Nothing can destroy this except my own anger.” -Dalia Lhama

Stop thinking, and end your problems.
What difference between yes and no?
What difference between success and failure?
Must you value what others value,
avoid what others avoid?
How ridiculous! –Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu (Stephen Mitchell translation)

“After enlightenment one is still the same as one was before. One is simply free from unreality and delusion. The ordinary person’s mind is the same as the sage’s, because Original Mind is perfect and complete in itself. After you have had this recognition, please don’t lose it.” -Pai Chang

If you’re trying to cut through all the numerous hopes and dreams and resolutions you might have and just come up with one single goal for 2026, then here’s one for you:

Peace of mind.

What’s great about this one is that it’s not dependent on circumstance or things going your way.

It’s entirely within your control. You can have it anytime.

And when you do, you wouldn’t trade it for anything else in the world.

P.S. – This song.

“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response…Everything can be taken from a person but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” -Viktor Frankl

There is a Buddhist proverb that goes something like this:

The Buddha once asked his student, “If a person is struck by an arrow, is it painful?”

The student nodded, yes.

The Buddha then asked, “If a person is struck by a second arrow, is that even more painful?”

The student again nodded, yes.

The Buddha then explained, “In life, we cannot always control the first arrow. However, the second arrow is our reaction to the first. The second arrow is optional.”

The first arrow is impossible to avoid. As long as we’re alive and walking this earth, we can expect some pain and suffering to enter our lives. Some arrows will come our way and pierce us and it will f-ing hurt.

The second arrow, however is entirely up to us. It reflects our beliefs and thoughts about the injury. We believe we didn’t deserve it. We wish we didn’t get struck by it. We wonder why it ever happened in the first place. We fear another arrow will come our way.

Don’t compound the first arrow with a second arrow. Instead, take a pause, reset and then when you’re ready, choose an empowered response. Lean into your resiliency. You will overcome this arrow and come out that much stronger.

That’s a wrap on 2025 folks. Thank you for reading, for commenting and for sharing. I hope this blog has brought you a little bit of joy and inspiration on your artistic and overall journey through life. May 2026 bring you much love, good health, happiness and creative fulfillment. I’m rooting for you!

Go make your art.

“Every memorable act in the history of the world is a triumph of enthusiasm. Nothing great was ever achieved without it because it gives any challenge or any occupation, no matter how frightening or difficult, a new meaning. Without enthusiasm, I am doomed to a life of mediocrity but with it I can accomplish miracles…Enthusiasm, the love for whatever it is I am doing at the moment, works in marvelous ways I ned not even understand but I do know that it will give additional vitality to my muscles and my mind.” -Og Mandino, The Greatest Salesman In The World, Part 2

“If you don’t do the work when you don’t want to, you’re not going to be able to do the work when you do want to. End of story.” -Twyla Tharp

“Stop using motivation as your only fuel, It’s a short-term fuel source. That’s why the vast majority of people who start anything—diet, fitness, new projects—don’t finish. They run out of gas. The only lasting fuel is routine. And you only get a routine by dragging yourself on the days when you have no motivation. Over and over. I know that’s not the answer anyone wants. I wish I had a magic pill for you. But the only thing that works long term is showing up for yourself even when you don’t want to.” -Arnold Schwarzenegger

No doubt enthusiasm is a powerful fuel. But what to do when it runs low or completely out?

Enter…Discipline.

It’s the fuel source that never runs out. That isn’t dependent on feeling or emotion. It runs solely on commitment. The commitment that you made to yourself and the goal you want to achieve.

But to access and harness this limitless fuel source, you do need to show up and ask for it. Day after day. Especially on the days you don’t feel like it.

“You’re welcome to spend your day with your face buried in your phone. Just don’t expect to also create interesting and meaningful things with that day. Expecting tech companies to quit distracting you is like expecting a dragon to quit spitting fire. That’s what dragons do. Your job is to figure out how to slay the dragon.

Of course it’s hard to turn off your phone for an hour. It’s also hard to start working out, to learn how to cook your own meals, to go on a first date with someone who nmmmakes your heart flutter. Everything worthwhile is hard, at first.” -Paul Shirley

Two questions to ask yourself before giving your attention (your most precious asset) away for free (e.g. picking up your phone, reading a news article, looking at social media post, etc.):

(1) How will this help me make the change I want to make in the world?

(2) How will this make me feel?

Be intentional with your attention.

(If you don’t know the answer to either or both of the above questions, then perhaps you need to spend quality time figuring those out.)

“I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” -from Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

“The quality of your life is a direct reflection of the quality of the questions you are asking yourself.” -Tony Robbins

Answers are boring. Questions are potent.

If you want a better outcome, then ask a better question.

I came across this excellent NYT article which discussed Amanda Seyfried’s new film and how much she loves Donna Tartt’s novel “The Goldfinch.” So much so, she has the last page framed in her house. Here’s that page:

… the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.

Whatever teaches us to talk to ourselves is important: whatever teaches us to sing ourselves out of despair. But the painting has also taught me that we can speak to each other across time. And I feel I have something very serious and urgent to say to you, my nonexistent reader, and I feel I should say it as urgently as if I were standing in the room with you. That life — whatever else it is — is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch. For if disaster and oblivion have followed this painting down through time — so too has love. Insofar as it is immortal (and it is) I have a small, bright, immutable part in that immortality. It exists; and it keeps on existing. And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand-to-hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.

Christmas Poem by Mary Oliver

Says a country legend told every year:
Go to the barn on Christmas Eve and see
what the creatures do as that long night tips over.
Down on their knees they will go, the fire
of an old memory whistling through their minds!

I went. Wrapped to my eyes against the cold
I creaked back the barn door and peered in.
From town the church bells spilled their midnight music,
And the beasts listened — yet they lay in their stalls like stone.

Oh the heretics!
Not to remember Bethlehem,
or the star as bright as the sun,
or the child born on a bed of straw!
To know only of the dissolving Now!
Still they drowsed on —
Citizens of the pure, the physical world,
They loomed in the dark: powerful
of body, peaceful of mind,
innocent of history.

Brothers! I whispered. It is Christmas!
And you are no heretics, but a miracle,
immaculate still as when you were thundered forth
on the morning of creation!

As for Bethlehem, that blazing star
still sailed the dark, but only looked for me.
Caught in its light, listening again to its story,
I curled against some sleepy beast, who nuzzled
my hair as though I were a child, and warmed me
the best it could all night.

P.S. – Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays everyone! H/t to Poetic Outlaws for the beautiful Mary Oliver poem and check out this “Christmas Exhibition” of paintings from George Bothamley’s Art Every Day Substack.

Silent night, holy night.

All is calm, all is bright
Round yon Virgin, Mother and Child
Holy Infant so tender and mild
Sleep in heavenly peace
Sleep in heavenly peace -song “Silent Night” by Franz Xaver Gruber

“The three worst things in life are to try to please and not be able to. To lie in bed to sleep and not be able to. To wait for someone who does not come.” -F. Scott Fitzgerald

I’ve been waiting for a girl like you
To come into my life
I’ve been waiting for a girl like you
A love that will survive
I’ve been waiting for someone new
To make me feel alive
Yeah, waiting for a girl like you
To come into my life

I’ve been waiting
waiting for you
I’ve been waiting
I’ve been waiting
come into my life -song “I’ve Been Waiting For A Girl Like You” by Foreigner

“Don’t worry, or do. But realize that worrying is about as effective as solving a math equation by chewing bubble gum.” -Baz Lurhmann

“Worry is like a rocking chair. It will give you something to do, but it won’t get you anywhere.” -Vance Havner

It is estimated that the average person spends several years of their lives waiting (in line, on hold, in traffic, etc.). So it stands to reason that we should examine the quality of our waiting. Ask yourself the following:

(1) What exactly are you waiting for?

(2) Is what you are waiting for still worth it?

(3) What do you while you wait? Do you wait with expectation and excitement that it will happen? Or with distraction and anxiety that it will not?

And whatever you do, while you wait, don’t worry. Worrying gets you nowhere.

More often than not, the things we are waiting for do in fact come true. Just not on our timeframes and in ways we never could have imagined possible.

“All I’m saying is I want to look back and say that I did the best I could while I was stuck in this place.” -Don Dawson from the film Dazed and Confused

While Wooderson’s “Just Keep Livin'” is the most famous line and has gotten all the glory over the years, Dawson droppin’ some knowledge at the end of this scene is not to be ignored.

If you’re looking for an epitaph, look no further than Dawson’s wisdom.

Definition of Assertion (noun)

a : insistent and positive affirming, maintaining, or defending (as of a right or attribute)
b : a declaration that something is the case

“The cost of being wrong is less than the cost of doing nothing…My biggest success and my biggest failures have in common: They began with an assertion.” -Seth Godin

Making assertions are a lot like making art.

You have to make a bold choice (even though you don’t have and will never have all the data you wish).

You have to risk being wrong (and looking foolish).

It might not work out.

So given this, why not make assertions that help and inspire people, rather than divide and make them fearful.

My assertion: I believe in the transformative power of art and community. I believe in the human spirit. I believe that deep down we do want the best for one another. Even though these are difficult times and have been for a while, we will eventually get through it. We will heal. We will learn. We will solve our toughest problems. We will come out much stronger and more together than ever.

“We really need to normalize boredom. Some of your most creative moments come during periods of boredom. In the shower, on a walk, at a dinner by yourself. You’re bored, your mind wanders, your thoughts mingle. Bam! Creative insight strikes. Schedule boredom into your weeks.” -Sahil Bloom

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” -Blaise Pascal

“Doing nothing is better than being busy doing nothing…Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself? -Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

Perhaps the breakthrough you seek will come from doing nothing.

And I mean nothing.

No.

Thing.

Whatsoever.

Just sit and think.

Can you do it?

How long can you embrace boredom?

It’s your new superpower.

P.S. – This Billy Oppenheimer newsletter on boredom.