Name: 理想與現實，該如何平衡？► 這會對你有所啟發 - Neil Gaiman 尼爾．蓋曼（中英字幕）
Uploaded: 2025-07-21T04:52:44.000Z
Duration: 4 min 40 s
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And when things get tough, this is what you should do.

First of all, when you start out on a career in the arts, you have no idea what you're doing.

People who know what they're doing know the rules, and they know what is possible and what is impossible.

The rules on what is possible and impossible in the arts were made by people who had not tested the bounds of the possible by going beyond them, and you can.

If you don't know it's impossible, it's easier to do.

And because nobody's done it before, they haven't made up rules to stop anyone doing that particular thing again.

Secondly, if you have an idea of what you want to make, what you were put here to do, then just go and do that.

And that's much harder than it sounds, and sometimes in the end so much easier than you might imagine.

Because normally there are things you have to do before you can get to the place you want to be.

Sometimes the way to do what you hope to do will be clear-cut, and sometimes it'll be almost impossible to decide whether or not you're doing the correct thing, because you'll have to balance your goals and hopes with feeding yourself, paying debts, finding work, settling for what you can get.

Something that worked for me was imagining that where I wanted to be.

Imagining that was a mountain, a distant mountain, my goal.

And I knew that as long as I kept walking towards the mountain, I'd be all right.

And when I truly was not sure what to do, I could stop and think about whether it was taking me towards or away from the mountain.

I tended to do anything as long as it felt like an adventure, and to stop when it felt like work, which meant that life did not feel like work.

Thirdly, when you start out, you have to deal with the problems of failure.

You need to be thick-skinned to learn that not every project will survive.

My first book, a piece of journalism I'd done only for the money, and which had already bought me an electric typewriter from the advance, should have been a bestseller.

It should have paid me a lot of money if the publisher hadn't gone into involuntary liquidation between the first print run selling out and the second print run never happening, and before any royalties could be paid.

And I shrugged, and I still had my electric typewriter, and enough money to pay the rent for a couple of months, and I decided that I'd do my best in future not to write books just for the money.

If you didn't get the money, then you didn't have anything, and if I did work I was proud of, and I didn't get the money, at least I'd have the work.

What is the best piece of advice I was ever given, and I realized that it was actually a piece of advice that I had failed to follow, and it came from Stephen King.

It was 20 years ago, at the height of the success, the initial success of Sandman, the comic I was writing.

I was writing a comic people loved, and they were taking it seriously, and Stephen King liked Sandman, and my novel with Terry Pratchett, Good Omens, and he saw the madness that was going on, the long signing lines, all of that stuff, and his advice to me was this.

I worried about the next deadline, the next idea, the next story.

There wasn't a moment for the next 14 or 15 years that I wasn't writing something in my head or wondering about it, and I didn't stop and look around and go, this is really fun.

It's been an amazing ride, but there were parts of the ride I missed because I was too worried about things going wrong, about what came next to enjoy the bit that I was on.

That was the hardest lesson for me, I think, to let go and enjoy the ride.