Hokusai — At 90: "If Heaven Gave Me Five More Years"

I know no one who kept growing until death like Katsushika Hokusai. The Great Wave — the most famous Japanese image in the world, quoted endlessly in global design to this day — was painted in his seventies.

Across his life he produced some thirty thousand works, moved house ninety-three times, and changed his artist name thirty times, each change discarding accumulated fame to restart as a newcomer.

At seventy-five he wrote that nothing before seventy was worth counting; at seventy-three he had barely begun to grasp the skeleton of birds and beasts; at ninety he would penetrate the secret; at one hundred, the divine. Seventy years in — still a waypoint.

And on his deathbed at ninety, he reportedly said: "If heaven had given me five more years, I could have become a true painter." A ninety-year-old with thirty thousand works, not yet "true." That hunger, I believe, is what talent actually is.

What do you work for?