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TEDx Talks
Published: 2017-09-08
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McurWL_4llg
okay hello Zach put I am Greg man I graduated from here in twenty fourteen my studies are recording technology at the university of Massachusetts hello and I'm here to talk today about second work day or what I've come to refer to as the artist's work day for myself so when we think about the thing that's most valuable to all of us in twenty seventeen I think
that you'll find that the thing that a lot of people hold dear isn't money or fame or power it's something that you can't buy but it's something that governs every move that we make and I think the thing that we find most valuable to ourselves in twenty seventeen is actually time it never seems like we have enough time in the day it's always running around it's
waking up late hopping in the shower you know skipping breakfast racing down to the high school you know slowing down for the speed bumps and then coming in rushing in you know you have never have enough time your homework didn't get done the night before but I think that when a lot of us think about time a trap ourselves into this cycle up on the board
right now and we compartmentalize our life into two categories which is work which a lot of us see as you know the boring stuff and then life which is everything after extra curricular the things that we like to do whether it be you know sports or even just sitting on the couch and relaxing after a long day but when I got to college I found during
my freshman year I was pretty unsatisfied with house using my time it seemed like I would wake up I'll take the shuttle to classes I go through classes you know in between I would just kind of sit around you know go to the dining hall for like an hour and a half and just do nothing and then I would get off the shuttle and I would
come home and I would just hang out and I would play video games my friends for about six hours I would go to sleep note make up the next day and I would repeat it over and over again and this all seemed fine to me until a point my sophomore year when I approached one of my professors and I said I really don't feel like I'm
getting enough out of my time here I said I feel like I come and putting all the work in my classes but then at the end of the day I just I don't know I go home and I I feel unfulfilled I feel like I still have more that I can be doing with my time here at the university and he said well what do you
do when you go home and I said oh I I don't know I just by just hang out I don't do anything and he said I go right from UMass and I drive into Boston and I do the gig an a pet for an orchestra or I go to dinner and I talk with someone about the work that I'm doing for this nonprofit or I do
something as simple as I I go with my wife and I see a movie but I try to make sure that I use all of this time effectively as I can to better myself as an artist and as a person and so the way that I started thinking about things and something that I realized is that I had the same starting point as my professor as
soon as the clock hit midnight every night I still have all the same twenty four hours that my professor had in his day and it seemed like he was doing so many incredible things with his time and I wanted to aspire to be like that I wanted to aspire to squeeze every last drop of inspiration and passion but I could out of every second of every
minute of the twenty four hours that we all get each day so I developed the concept that I've stars called the artists worked at and so basically at five PM everyday when the sun goes down I walk outside the front door of the music building and the next seven hours are mine their mind to be whatever I want to be and whatever I can dream to
be about a week after I talked with my professor about this this concept his time management I was sitting on the shuttle going back and I I told myself that I would do at least you know at least one creative thing that day but I can figure out what to do yet and I went on Facebook and I saw that one of my friends was actually
selling his old camera and without thinking about it something just clicked right away and I shot a quick message and I said I want your camera like I've I've never taken a photograph in my life I've always seen myself as just musician but I think I'm gonna try this out for myself and then after I bought my camera one of my friends came up to me
and she said Hey I'm looking to do more gigs can you take no photos of me for publicity and I took my first had shot and then eventually that led to me shooting my first concert and then I took head shots for the music department and then I started doing video production for the university and all of this is culminating into next month when actually at
a movie theater in downtown wall a dream of mine is actually coming true and I'm gonna premier my very first documentary that I co directed at it actual movie theater in Lowell something that I absolutely never would have dreamed up freshman year when I was riding on the shuttle to just go back complete video games with all my friends we live in a world with seven
billion people and I think as an artist that used to terrify me I used to think how can I possibly keep up all of these people stretched out across the globe connected by the internet every day it seems like more incredible music passionate films you know amazing photography it's coming out and I never thought but I could keep up with that but as I've started to
maximize my time and as I take time at night really work on what drives me and what motivates me as an artist I found that twenty four hours a day all the time in the world you can stretch all of that time and you can do so many things that you thought that you could never do if you've never the paint brush in your life you
can go buy sketch book and before you know it you might be enrolled in an art class and you might be moving forward in an artistic passion that you never thought that you would ever be able to connect with and that would resonate with you but if you take the time out what motivates you you can find inspiration everywhere and so when I introduced myself I
introduce myself as student but I think the part of my issue was coming from the fact that when I talked about myself I only talked about myself as a student we are all human beings in this room here yet whenever someone asks us you know what do you do we just pick the one thing that we do and our nine to fiver similar time table we
say that's what we do so I would say I was a student you know some of you in this room would say that you were a teacher a lot of you would also say that your students if you're enrolled in the high school here but your potential as a human being goes beyond that and if you allow yourself to connect and put in time to really
find what motivates you not necessarily as an artist or a creative type but as a person in all of this extra time that we have at the end of the day you can move past these simple one word definitions they're up on the screen here you don't have to be just a student you don't have to be just teacher or a photographer you can be so
many things all at once if you just take the time to find what motivates you and you can become what you really are which is a person so if anyone in the audience here tonight is thinking about themselves and thinking about all the things that they have school soccer practice work after school take a look at your calendar and see if there's even one hour every
week that you can squeeze something and it doesn't have to be seven hours a day it can be every Sunday afternoon I'm gonna read a book about photography or every Friday I'm gonna take up horseback riding lessons but I urge everybody in this room try and carve out time for you to be your own boss and find what motivates you as an individual as an artist
and as a person ultimately if I have to some up my idea into one thing it would be that I do what I have to do during the day to do what I want to do at night and explore all of these artistic endeavors and I think that if everyone takes a closer look at their calendar I think that they'll be surprised by all the time
