LEARNING TO DROP
EPISODE 012: LEARNING TO DROP
This is the first of two conversations about self-confidence and creativity. Everyone I know wrestles with the voices in their heads and gets held back at times with the ongoing chatter that says “I can’t do this” or “who am I to put my stuff out there?” Learning to believe that we can do this, whatever it is, is a matter of small wins and being open to exceeding our expectations for ourselves. Let’s talk about it.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
Creating anything is an audacious act. It feels wildly presumptuous of us to put ourselves out there into the world while the voice in the back of the head is saying, “I can’t do this! Or who am I to do or say this thing? Who wants to hear what I have to say?” Over and over again in conversations with creative people and those that could be so much more wildly creative, I hear some version of this lament: I’m just not confident enough. And like so many of the traits we value in the creative process, we seem to believe this is a state of being over which we have no control. We’re either born with it, or we aren’t. I feel like, ever so gently, I need to call bullshit on this.
I’m David duChemin, and this is A Beautiful Anarchy, a podcast for those who’ve realized that the creative life is more about what we do with our hands in the muck than with our heads in the clouds. This is Episode 12, Learning to Drop, the first of two discussions about creative confidence. Let’s talk about it.
Music / intro
This is a tough one for me. I want to have a conversation about the problem of confidence and the creative spirit, but I’m not sure I’m the guy to have it. Sure I’ve got ideas about the subject, but who am I to put them out there? I can’t even talk about confidence without second-guessing myself, which I suppose, at least, makes me familiar enough with the subject to discuss it experientially. I know what it feels like to lack confidence in my self, my work, and the ideas my work represents.
Like many of you I think I live with a tension created by voices in my life, many of them from the past, just echoes that seem to have become louder as we’ve aged, rather than disappearing the way an echo is meant to do. I’ve grown up with conflicting voices - my mother telling me over and over that I could do just about anything I set my mind to while the voice of my father, a man I saw very little, seemed to be on a loop. I still hear him saying “How could you be so stupid? What were you thinking?” What was I thinking? I was 6 years old, I was thinking six-year old thoughts. Aren’t they kind of meant to be stupid? Add to this the voices of kids in school, the teachers, total strangers, and eventually, the inevitable critics of whatever it is we make, and it’s a wonder any of us has the confidence to sign our own names without second-guessing ourselves.
I want to say we’re caught between external voices and the ones that come from the inside, but I’m not sure that’s true. When I hear the voice of my dad chastising me as a child it’s not really his voice I hear. It’s my own re-telling of the story. As I’ve re-told it over and over, along with all the other voices, past and present, it has become a different voice. A voice that comes from me, from a reluctant belief about myself that I reinforce each time I let it run through uninvited loops in my head.
And because humans are so prone to confirmation bias, we seize on any evidence that supports our existing beliefs. If we believe that we’re not as creative as other people, not as naturally gifted, have fewer talents or whatever other bullshit we’ve been ruminating on for lo these many years, we’re going to see our initial failures at any activity as confirmation that in fact, that belief is well-justified. “See?" we say to ourselves, “I tried it, it didn’t work, I’m not good at this.” The problem, and it’s a big one, is that for any creative effort we need those failures. We need, often, many of them.
Creativity is about change, about the kind of mutation that happens when we try things, they don’t quite work but they lead us to new solutions that DO work, and then slowly, one tweak at a time, one new line in the novel, one new change to our technique as a photographer, whatever it is, we change it and the results slowly refine. That’s how it always works. Unless you give up after the very first failure, convinced yet again that the voices are right.
But which voices are right? Surely for most of us there are the good voices, the ones that have led you to believe that there is some valuable creative spark in you, the spark that expresses itself as hope, or desire. Maybe even a wish, as in “I wish I were more creative.”
It’s there, I know it is. You wouldn’t be listening to this if it weren’t. So why is that voice so much quieter, so uncertain? Why is that cautiously-held belief so precarious in our hands? I think it’s because we fail much, much more than we succeed in the creative life, and our final successes are so relatively few.
So for every win in the creative life that confirms the belief that, yes, I can do this shit, this is what I was born to do, there are 10 chances to reinforce the reluctant but more established belief that we can’t. That we’re clearly not cut out for this. And over time the so-called failures stack up, and it feels more and more like those voices were right all along. I can’t do this…
I’m not a psychologist. I went to theology school for God’s sake. And I didn’t do that very well either. I bailed on Greek class to learn to juggle. So I’m not exactly approaching this scientifically. But hear me out because everything I just said and everything we believe about, well, what we believe about ourselves, might come down to a juggling lesson.
When I learned to juggle I was given 3 balls. Two in the left hand, one in the right. I was told to throw one ball from the left in an arc toward the right. Then one from the right to the left. Then one from the left to the right. Each ball thrown before the other lands. Counter-intuitively I was told not to catch them. Just let them fall to your feet and do that a while. Throw, throw, throw. And they’d fall to the ground.
Now, if this is how I had juggled for what eventually became a 12-year career in comedy, you’d be right in thinking I was a pretty lousy juggler. The seasoned performer that can’t catch his juggling balls should probably move on to magic tricks. But at the beginning, dropping them wasn’t failure. It was necessary. I needed to learn the pattern, build some muscle memory. It was baby steps. And once I was really good at the rhythm of throwing and dropping, I tried one round of catching. Seen really slowly juggling three balls looks pretty simple and boring, just a repeating pattern of throw throw, throw, catch, catch. You just have to trust me on this.
Over 12 years there was only a handful of people to whom I could not teach a simple juggling pattern within a few minutes. But the few that couldn’t do so were always the ones that paid more attention to the so-called failures than they did to the task of just learning the rhythm, accepting that balls were going to fall all over the place. They were the ones that saw the first balls land on the floor - “See?" They would say, “I told you I can’t do this.” And they’d quit. Everyone else understood that dropping was not failure. It was necessary. I told them to do it and they did.
I think we need to re-define failure. If we can flip the script and see these first efforts not as failure, nor as needing anything that looks like success, then we stop giving our brains the chance to confirm our bias that says we can’t do this, and reinforce the voices that say we can. We give ourselves small wins.
Go back to juggling. The first task was to throw and drop. Dropping was the success. That was the task. You did it. I told you to throw the ball and drop it. Well done. And you thought, "well that was easy. I can do this.
Look at me throwing and dropping!”
And you did it again and again. And then when it was time for catching I took 2 of the balls away and had you throw one ball from hand to hand over and over. I know very few people who can’t do that. "Yeah, but I’m not juggling," you say. Nope. You’re not. That is not the task. The task is to throw one ball back and forth. And then when that’s smooth I gave you a second ball. Throw, throw, catch, catch.
"This is easy!”
Yes it is.
"I can do this!”
Yup.
And eventually I gave you three. And yes, you dropped a few of them, but by then the damage was done. I’d already given you enough wins that you believed you could do this, and displaced the belief that you couldn’t. No you weren’t the smoothest juggler. But you could do a round of three. And when that got smooth, look at you doing 2 rounds, 3 rounds, 4 rounds, then reaching for the kerosene and the flaming torches.
The basis of self-confidence is the belief that we can do it, whatever the task is. When we mis-identify the task, as in “I’m going to write a best-selling song” or “I’m going to make a brilliant photograph” we set ourselves up to re-enforce our belief that we can’t do it, because no one writes the song, makes the masterpiece, or juggles 3 balls, straight out of the gate without a lot of so-called failure. That’s not how it works.
But when we identify the task as “I’m going to write the first line of a song and see where if it leads anywhere interesting” then all we have to do is sit down and write that one line. And it can be crap. Mission accomplished. I discovered it didn’t lead anywhere. See, you can do this. Now do it again. And again. And you will find that eventually it does lead somewhere, because this is how it works and mutation comes from mistakes & missteps, and is never what we expect.
We must re-define failure in the creative life. In fact I think we must eradicate the notion entirely and replace it with words like exploration, discovery, and experimentation. Words that assume no one specific result. Tell yourself your task is to make a masterpiece and you will, most likely, truly fail. But tell yourself your task is to see where your idea leads, to experiment, to write a shitty first draft, or a shitty first sentence, and you’ll succeed, because I don’t know anyone who can’t write something shitty on their first try.
The creative life is one of failed first efforts. You’re meant to drop the ball so you can concentrate on what it feels like to throw it. Catching isn’t the point. Not yet. And don’t you dare look over your shoulder at the guy who has been juggling for a year. He has a different task than you right now but he learned the same way you’re learning. I know, he makes it look easy, we all secretly hate him, but he started just as ugly. And what he’s doing now is what you’ll be doing in a year. And what you don’t see is that when no one is looking he’s learning to juggle a 5-ball pattern and he’s back to throwing and dropping. Throwing and dropping. Over and over. And he thinks he’ll never be able to juggle 5. But that’s not his worry right now. His task is throwing and dropping and he’s nailing it.
I’m not suggesting that our struggle with self-confidence is an easy one to over-come. I’m just hoping that with some small re-alignments we can make it easier to self-correct, to re-enforce the needed belief, or just the suspicion that, I think I might be able to do this. Of course you can. The creative life is not a rhythm of success leading to success. It’s a rhythm of exploration and so-called failures, of needed mis-steps and detours, of wild-haired ideas that lead nowhere but to other crazy notions and every now and then, to something that, to our eternal delight, feels right. Feels like the obvious destination all those so-called mistakes were leading to. We do that a few times and we begin to believe that we’re pretty good at making mistakes. But not just making mistakes, because anyone can do that and never create magic. The magic comes in making mistakes and being open to seeing where they lead, not being sidelined by them and believing that lie that we are the sum of our failures and mistakes. We are not. But our work often is, because that’s how mutation works.
We’ve made such an unforgiving god of art and creativity, one that demands we neither sin nor fail. But art isn’t in the hands of the gods, it's with us. It’s made of ashes and dust and the best of it is the best of us, an accumulation of all the efforts and life experiences that make you uniquely you. I’ve only covered half of what I wanted to say in this episode so I’m going to spread it into 2, because I think in addition to believing, mostly mistakenly, that we can’t do this or that and that our failures are an obstacle rather than a path to be celebrated, we also too often believe we need permission, asking ourselves what makes us think anyone wants to hear what we have to say, and I think it might help to talk about that too, if only to remember we all feel that way at some point, and you’re not alone.
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Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0