The Bottomless and the Easel: Applying Ultra-High Output Ethics to the Artist’s Studio
In the quiet and turpentine-scented air of my studio in Dallas, the frenetic world of Silicon Valley often feels like a different planet. We tend to romanticize the artist as a creature of pure intuition. We imagine the painter waiting for the muse to strike. In contrast, we view tech CEOs like Elon Musk as machines of cold and calculated efficiency.
Recently I dove deep into the mechanics of how Musk manages to run Tesla, SpaceX, X (formerly Twitter), xAI, and Neuralink simultaneously. I recognized a pattern that felt uncomfortably familiar.
The chaos of the art world requires more than just creativity. It requires a system. Balancing the solitary struggle of painting, the editorial rigor of running Execute Magazine, and the educational demands of Art Be You is a massive logistical challenge.
Musk is famous for his extreme productivity. While I am not trying to send rockets to Mars, the act of bringing a painting into existence from nothing is its own form of defying gravity. I have spent years refining how I navigate the chaos and order of my abstract-figurative work.
Here is how I interpret Musk’s seven core work ethics through the lens of a contemporary artist. This is how I apply them to survive the reality of a creative career.
1. Sequential Focus: The Anti-Multitask
There is a myth that to be a successful modern artist you must do everything at once. You are told to paint while answering emails. You must post on Instagram while varnishing. You have to teach while planning an exhibition.
Musk proves this is a lie. He utilizes something called Sequential Focus.
Musk doesn’t multitask. He compartmentalizes. He focuses his entire being on SpaceX for a day or a few hours. Then he mentally closes that drawer to open the Tesla drawer.
How I Use This in the Studio
In my practice, I have to manage different versions of myself. There is Bartosz Beda the Artist. There is Bartosz the Editor. There is Bartosz the Educator. If I let them bleed into each other, the work suffers. You cannot edit an article for Execute Magazine with the same part of your brain that decides where to place a violent stroke of oil paint on a canvas.
I have learned to treat my roles as separate rooms. When I am painting, my phone is often away. I am not an editor in that moment. I am not a teacher. I am purely engaging in the physical struggle of the medium.
When I step out of the studio to work on Execute Magazine, I close the painter drawer. I stop worrying about the drying time of a glaze. I shift entirely to the logic of text and layout.
If you are an artist, you must stop trying to be everything at once. Give your painting 100% of your soul for four hours. Then you can close that drawer. Give your marketing or administration 100% of your logic for the next two hours.
2. The Brush Cleaner (The Palate Cleanser)
To make Sequential Focus work, Musk uses a palate cleanser. He might play a strategy game like Polytopia or fire off tweets. This resets his brain between intense sessions of engineering. It isn’t wasting time. It is a necessary cognitive reset.
My Analogy: Cleaning the Brush
I don’t play video games in the studio. However, the concept is vital. Think of it like mixing colors.
Imagine I have a brush loaded with dark and heavy umber. I suddenly want to paint a vibrant and clean yellow. I cannot just dip the dirty brush into the yellow paint. I will destroy the color. I have to stop. I dip the brush in solvent. I wipe it clean. I reset the tool.
My brush cleaner usually involves a physical shift. A heavy session of painting often leaves me physically exhausted. I feel like I have been biking uphill while wrestling with a canvas. I cannot immediately sit down and write a curriculum for Art Be You after that. I need a solvent.
For me, this is often driving through Dallas. I might listen to a podcast that has nothing to do with art. Sometimes I engage in a mundane physical task like stretching canvas. It wipes the mental slate clean. This allows me to approach the next task without the mud of the previous one.
3. Attack the Bottlenecks
Musk doesn’t ask how he can work harder. He asks a specific question. “What is the one thing that moves us fastest toward the goal if solved?”
This is the theory of constraints. At Tesla, he once ripped out a slow-moving robot that was stalling the entire Model 3 production line. He replaced it with humans. This instantly fixed the flow.
The Studio Bottleneck
In the studio, we often busy ourselves with things that feel like work but are actually procrastination. We reorganize our brushes. We scroll for inspiration. We rarely ask what the actual bottleneck is.
The Studio Anchor
We artists are excellent at being busy without being productive. We reorganize our supplies. We build new playlists. We scroll through other artists’ work. We rarely ask what the single Anchor dragging on our progress is.
My understanding of how to remove this anchor didn’t come from an art book. It came from my time at the Manchester School of Art. I worked part-time on weekends at a large industrial bakery.
My task was grueling. I had exactly eight hours to strip down a massive manufacturing machine. I had to wash every component and reassemble it perfectly for the quality check. There was no time for sleeping. There was no time for hesitation. I had to be hyper-organized. I had to follow a strict system. If I fell back even slightly, the machine wouldn’t be ready.
I applied this same blue-collar discipline to my painting during my BA and MA. I realized that if I had six or eight hours in the studio, that was my shift. I wasn’t there to wait for inspiration. I was there to execute a system.
I treated the canvas exactly like that bakery machine. I had to come in, apply the method, and finish the job before the time was up. This approach allowed me to complete one painting a day. The anchor wasn’t the difficulty of the art. The anchor was a lack of systematic urgency. Once I treated the studio like a factory floor, the output exploded.
With Execute Magazine, the bottleneck is often the coordination of schedules. Instead of emailing back and forth for weeks, I learned that a single decisive phone call could remove the blockage.
You must identify what is actually stopping your art from reaching the audience. Is it your lack of a website? Is it your fear of finishing? Identify the bottleneck and rip it out.
4. Create Pressure (Maniacal Urgency)
Musk operates with a maniacal sense of urgency. He utilizes Parkinson’s Law. This law states that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. If you give yourself a year to finish a painting series, it will take a year. If you give yourself three months, you will find a way to do it in three.
The Exhibition Deadline
I have always worked best under the guillotine of a deadline. When I was moving from the UK to the US, I didn’t wait until I was ready to book a show. I booked the show first. Then I did the work.
For Execute Magazine, we set launch dates before the issue is fully compiled. This pressure forces decision-making. In the studio, urgency is the antidote to overthinking. If I know I have to finish a piece by Friday, I stop fussing over minor details. The viewer won’t even notice those details. I make bold choices. I execute.
Musk admires the toy industry because they have a hard deadline. They must be ready for Christmas. If the toy isn’t on the shelf by December 25th, they fail. As artists, we need to create our own Christmases. Without them, we drift.
5. Never Satisfied (The “Hardcore” Culture)
When Musk took over Twitter, he recoiled at the phrase “psychological safety.” He viewed it as the enemy of progress. He prefers a hardcore culture where discomfort is a weapon against complacency.
The Struggle of the Canvas
This resonates deeply with my philosophy of painting. I have said in interviews that painting is a constant struggle. It is physical labor. If painting feels too easy or too safe, I know I am doing something wrong. I am falling into a pattern.
In my “Echoes of Seasons” series, I am looking for that friction. I often distrust a painting if I finish it and feel completely satisfied. I will sometimes scrape it down or rework it until it fights back.
In managing Execute Magazine, we don’t just want to publish nice art. We want to feature work that challenges and provokes. Comfort is the death of art. If you are comfortable in your studio, you are not growing. You are manufacturing instead of creating. You must adopt a hardcore mindset where you are willing to destroy your darlings to make something true.
6. The 24/7 Work Ethic
Musk believes that most people don’t have a success problem. They have a work ethic problem. He does the math. If you work 100 hours a week and your competitor works 50, you will achieve in four months what takes them a year.
The Immigrant Hustle
I was born in Poland in 1984. I moved to the UK and then to the US. My background is one of migration and adaptation. I realized early on that talent is only a multiplier. Effort is the base number. If the base number is zero, the talent doesn’t matter.
When I started Execute Magazine, it was during the Christmas of 2016. My daughter had just turned one. I was tired. I had every excuse to rest. But I worked while others slept. I maintain a studio practice, run a publication, and teach because I view my career as a life’s work.
This doesn’t mean you must sleep on the floor of your studio. However, you must realize that the muse usually shows up during the eleventh hour of work. She rarely shows up during the first. You have to put in the volume to find the quality.
7. Twice as Great or as Numerous Vision
Great leaders see only two things. They see the Immediate Next Step and the Grand Vision. They ignore the ambiguous middle. Musk sees humans on Mars as the Grand Vision. He sees fixing an engine valve as the Next Step. He doesn’t get bogged down worrying about the cafeteria menu on the Mars colony yet.
The Mark and The Career
In my art, I have a Grand Vision. I want to create a body of work that explores the psychological landscape of the human condition. I want to bridge the abstract and the figurative in a way that enters the global consciousness. That is the mountain peak.
But if I stare at the peak, I will freeze. So I focus on the Immediate Next Step. I focus on the specific texture of the paint I am mixing right now. I focus on the email I need to send to a curator today. I focus on the lesson plan for Art Be You tomorrow.
Many artists fail because they get lost in the middle. They worry about how they will get a museum retrospective in ten years. They should be worrying about how to make the painting in front of them better. Be like Caesar or Musk. Know exactly where you are marching. But keep your eyes on the ground beneath your feet.
Bonus: The Hardship
Musk famously said that starting a company is like staring into the abyss and eating glass.
Every time I start a new canvas, I stare into the abyss. There is a white void staring back at me. There is a very real possibility that I will fail to articulate the vision in my head. Painting is eating glass. It is scraping off expensive paint because it didn’t work. It is rejection letters. It is the silence of an empty studio.
But you must learn to enjoy the taste of the glass. You must find peace in the abyss. That resilience is what separates the professional artist from the hobbyist.
We’re Not Elon Musk
I am not Elon Musk. I do not run a trillion-dollar company. But the physics of productivity are universal. Whether you are building rockets or building a body of work, the principles remain the same.
You need focus. You need intensity. You need urgency. You need a refusal to be satisfied with “good enough.”
At Bartosz Beda Studio, Execute Magazine, and Art Be You, I try to embody this. We execute. We struggle. We clean the brush. And we start again.
