People who seek to create are fond of describing themselves as ‘driven.’ If you’re one such, I’d recommend reading Hilary Spurling’s masterful biography (The Unknown Matisse: A Life of Henri Matisse: The Early Years, 1869-1908, which I have praised) of Matisse. I was quickly disabused of my own level of commitment compared to Matisse’s. Here is Spurling writing about Matisse at age thirty:
Matisse by the turn of the century was already beginning to baffle and disturb people meeting him for the first time. Younger students who worked alongside him . . . all recalled that impression he gave of banked, smouldering, sometimes barely contained fires. . . . At the time, it was more often demons than dancing girls that rose up to haunt Matisse: demons of rejection, isolation, financial desperation, worst of all the blind demons of custom and familiarity that fought him inch by inch in the long struggle to break through to a new way of seeing nature.