A friend of mine handed me a pair of needle-nose pliers. He's a painter here in Omaha. His name is Bob Donlan and he's a really talented painter. He said to me, "Do a wire sculpture. You draw in never-ending lines. I'm watching you do these wire sculptures on paper." I said "You're crazy. I could never do a wire sculpture even if I tried." I laughed at him for a while and he kept asking me and I said no. Then he walked out of the room to make a phone call and I picked up the wire and the pliers and I made a nine or 10 inch sculpture of the crucifixion of Jesus on the cross. That was the first thing that came out. It was the weirdest thing. It was really strange because it was the first thing I remember drawing as a child. I pulled out a Bible and found this abstract picture of Jesus on the cross. It was the weirdest thing because I was raised with no faith whatsoever. Bob came back into the room, looked down, and said, "You're a genius at this. You should be doing this for a living."

Less than two weeks later I was down here in the Old Market (in Omaha, NE) at a coffee shop and out front I was making a three-dimensional sculpture of a dolphin. A gallery owner walked by and said hello. She asked if I sold my work and I said, "Yeah, I guess so." So we set up an appointment and I was making a living that month. It started out as piecemeal but soon I was rockin' and rollin'. I was doing sculpture all the time. I couldn't stop doing it. I brought it everywhere I went. I was doing sculpture on the street. I've been in recovery for five and a half years and I took it to 12-step meetings. Everywhere people were buying it and it was incredible. I get chills even thinking about it.

Now here I am I shown and sold my work in nine different states. I sell on a web site now. Now I'm doing large steelwork. I have a welder and a plasma cutter to cut large steel. I do life-sized people, abstracts, things that have sold for thousands of dollars a piece. I sculpt for three companies in town and this has happened in the last two years and two months of never ever doing a sculpture. So it's really been an amazing trip and it just keeps getting better.

[Growing up] I had a huge fear of it [artistic talent]. I was always filled with fear - fear of failure, fear of success. If I were to start succeeding, I might fail so I never started in the first place. So my art was only used to try to grab other people's attention to gain acceptance from other people. I used to do caricatures of people and I was very good. I was good at grasping a feature in a person and exaggerating it, like a principal or teacher so I could gain negative attention. And boy did it work. I got kicked out of school several times. So the art was like a joke. I never saw it for the gift that it is. Now I'm using it to make other people happy and to make God happy and to make a living. When I get selfish with my work or when I do it just for the money is when I succeed the least. It's amazing how that works. It's beyond me why it works that way. It seems when people do things selflessly and not for selfish purposes they can succeed much more greatly and they have an inner contentment and peace. At least I do.

Fear of failure usually comes from parents instilling a lot of perfectionist expectations on you, that you needed to do everything to perfection, whether it was wrestling or football or art or anything else. Their kid had to be the best. That of course led to failure in my life. I would never feel good enough, you never feel good enough. And when you don't feel good about yourself, you do things to try to cover up the way you feel. My art got lost there somewhere in the middle.

But somehow I was unable to unravel that ball and was able to get over those fears and get back into it. I never ever thought I'd be doing this for a living , ever! EVER! Even two years and three months ago - because I started doing this two years and two months ago- it's scary. In fact I was telling a friend on the phone this morning that last night I felt like just running away. I felt like selling everything I have, all my equipment, and just running. I was so afraid of success. I basically took an inventory in my head and asked myself "what am I afraid of?" I'm afraid of success. I'm afraid I'm going to fail if I start to succeed. And what I know today is that failure is not a person, failure is an event in a person's life. And those events will happen your whole life. They happen less and less as I take more action, but they will happen.

Success for me is not financial, I think there is a piece of that in there. The world expects financial success for you to be a success. For me it's being content with my life today, being happy with who I am and what I have. And that's hard enough to grasp. I'm pretty darn happy with who I am and pretty darn happy with what I have, materially and things like that. Of course I want a little more. Success for me is being closer to God as I understand him, being spiritual. It's looking for that strength and guidance. I think success comes from within, it's not an outside thing. You can look successful, but I know people who look very successful and driver $100,000 cars and their lives are a mess inside. And today I have this inside job of success, of being at peace in my heart and content with where I'm at and knowing that my life isn't totally unmanageable and I'm just hiding it from everybody.

When I took the control out of my hands and asked other people and asked God as I understand him for help, it's when all this happened. It's when everything seemed to fall into place exactly the opposite of the way I thought it would. God put all these billions of people on this earth for a reason. It's to help each other. And I never wanted that, I always had to do it on my own power and with my own self-will. The only thing that ever worked for me is when I reached out to God and other people and said what do I do? I'm kinda lost here. Instead of being all prideful and standing by yourself and never succeeding, or feeling truly at peace with what you're doing. I could have just kept going on and on and on working at Kellogg's and doing the things I didn't want to do. There're days when I don't want to do this, this sculpture. That's just me getting in the way [laughs]. I know I love it. I wouldn't trade it for the world. The only time that things started to work for me is when I prayed and when I looked up for help. That is the foundation of it and if I continue to do that, it continues to grow. It continues to build. It continues to work. And it's a fact that it works in my life. I'm an example of that spiritual aspect working.

When I get up everyday I try to get up with a different attitude. That's one of the most important things in my life today, my attitude. I have the choice to have a good or bad attitude today. It's like a friend of mine always says "Have a good day unless you've already made other plans." And that's so true, because you can make a plan to have a bad day the moment you get up. It doesn't matter what happened the day before to me, I have a choice on a daily basis. And today because I have a real hope and a real God to serve and real friends and real people to make happy with my artwork, I can go and enjoy the day and actually stop and smell a flower or look how people built this building or whatever. It's amazing. It's not all about me any more. It's about other people and how I can help them and how I can serve them. That's what drives me on a daily basis. It's life itself. I can live life on life's terms today. I can enjoy the beauty in life today, for the most part everyday. It's not all about self-seeking anymore. That's why I never succeeded in the past. It was all about me, all about David Belitz, and how he's going to get what he wants. That never got me anywhere. Today I guess living for other people and for God is what gives me my daily drive to do what I do and do my work today.

Something I'm famous for is that I can think my way into something. It's like thinking myself into going and starting my car. I can think about it all day, but if I don't take the action, if I don't take my keys out and start the car, I'm never going to go anywhere. And it's the same thing with anything I do in my life, it doesn't matter if it's my art or my laundry, or anything. I have to constantly take action. You can sit there and think about anything you want but it will never get you anywhere unless you take the action to back it up. And that's integrity. I have integrity today in what I do and I'm always taking action. Or I'm trying to. Believe me they're days when I'm frozen in my apartment and I can't leave [laughs]! If I'm always taking action in my art I'm going to make a living.