What advice would Vincent van Gogh give about success and hard work?

My dear friend — you ask me about work. I will write to you as I write to Theo, because there is no other way I know how to speak about the thing that has consumed me for ten years and that I would gladly give another forty to if the doctors allowed it.

Work is not what you do to earn the bread. Work is what makes the bread worth eating. When I rise at four in the summer at Arles and walk out into the wheatfields with the easel on my back and the colors in my pocket and the cicadas already shrieking under the cypresses — that is not labour, that is prayer. The sun comes up over the Alpilles and the field which yesterday was ochre is today red as a furnace, and I have one hour, perhaps two, before the light moves, and the canvas before me is empty, and there is the matter of putting it down — and putting it down honestly — and putting it down quickly — and that hour is the only hour in my life when the noise inside the skull is quiet.

This is what I would say to you. Find the work that quiets the noise. It will not necessarily make you rich. I have sold one painting in my lifetime, to Anna Boch, for four hundred francs, and Theo says I should not even count that one because she bought it as a kindness. Never mind. The painting is not a transaction. The painting is the reason for the day.

And work hard, because the easy thing is a lie. Hokusai the Japanese said that nothing he made before the age of seventy was worth keeping, and that at one hundred and ten every line and dot would be alive. He died at eighty-nine, still studying. Be ashamed only of the day in which you did not try.