What's worthy of our time and attention

Several Circles by Vasily Kandinsky

From Rick Rubin's The Creative Act

49 Submerge (The Great Works). Broadening our practice of awareness is a choice we can make at any moment. It is not a search, though it is stoked by a curiosity or hunger. A hunger to see beautiful things, hear beautiful sounds, feel deeper sensations. To learn, and to be fascinated and surprised on a continual basis.  In service of this robust instinct, consider submerging yourself in the canon of great works. Read the finest literature...

50 If you make the choice of reading classic literature every day for a year, rather than reading the news, by the end of that time period you'll have a more honed sensitivity for recognizing greatness from the books than from the media.

This applies to every choice we make. Not just with art, but with the friends we choose, the conversations we have, even the thoughts we reflect on. All of these aspects affect our ability to distinguish good from very good, very good from great. They help us determine what's worthy of our time and attention. 

Because there's an endless amount of data available to us and we have a limited bandwidth to conserve, we might consider carefully curating the quality of what we allow in....

The objective is not to learn to mimic greatness, but to calibrate our internal meter for greatness. So we can better make the thousands of choices that might ultimately lead to our own great work.