WHERE IS YOUR HALL PASS?
EPISODE 013: WHERE'S YOUR HALL PASS?
The second of two conversations about self-confidence and creativity, episode 13 is about the expectations we have of ourselves and the permission so many of us feel we need in order to do our work and do it our way. You don’t need a hall pass to do your best work. Life hasn’t only already given you permission but a mandate. Let’s talk about it.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
While I was a comedian I would start my hour-long stage show by introducing myself and telling my audience, in no uncertain terms that while I understood their very high expectations for the show, things would go better for all of us if they brought their expectations down to a reasonable level, at which point I’d gesture to a spot somewhere closer to the floor. It was tongue-in-cheek and the it got a good laugh, but the principle is a good one.
We judge the success of something relative to our expectations for it. Go watch a movie for which you have low expectations and it might surprise you. It might not be amazing but your own reaction is likely to be, “hey, that wasn’t so bad!” But go into a movie, like I did with Elton John’s Rocketman recently, with high expectations after waiting for 6 months for it to come out, only to feel like it was two movies mashed together with sentimental drivel and a cheesy ending, and you’re mostly like to come out of that experience more disappointed than you might have been otherwise.
The creative life is full of expectations. If you do any client work at all you’re probably familiar with the idea of expectation management, knowing that keeping the hopes of the client realistic and on track means greater perceived success for the project and a better working relationship. This is Episode 13 of A Beautiful Anarchy and I want to pick up where I left off after Episode 12 and complete the conversation we started about creative confidence, by looking at our expectations. Let’s talk about it.
Music / Intro
Expectations, the things we hope for and the outcomes we believe likely in our creative work can be tremendously dangerous mental artifacts. I’m not sure what else to call them. As a photographer Ive taught often about the way that expectations can blind us to what really is or might be. If you go to a place looking for a specific thing, the intensity of your looking for, or hoping for that thing, will blind you to the presence of what is right there, and right then. Expectations are often very specific, they don’t tend to be vague. And that’s the problem with them - their very specificity excludes all the many other possibilities that are out there, and for the creative person trading in divergent ideas and unexpected possibilities, anything that prevents us from seeing those should be held in suspicion.
This is true of the direction of our work, it’s true of what we believe about our ability to do that work and it’s true of the reception to our work. Our belief that our work will or will not be well-received, the expectation that no one wants to see it and that it’s therefore not worth the doing, is not only toxic but sabotaging and self-fulfilling.
It’s heartbreaking how often I hear the words, always spoken in resignation, “Who wants to hear what I have to say?” Other versions include such hits as “It’s all been done, why try?”, “What have I got to offer?” and that timeless ballad “Who am I to put my stuff out there?” The expected answer, the assumed answers to all of these are, “No one.” and “Nothing”. And because we’ve set our expectation, we’ve answered our own questions already with our assumptions, and we stall right there.
If the last episode was an attempt to address the question “Can I do it?” this episode is an attempt to answer “Why should I?”
I’m not alone in thinking that the school systems in which many of us grew up did a great deal of damage to us. Sure, we all know the basics about the World Wars, we can place Australia on a map, and you probably know some of the names of the long succession of dead guys who once presided over whatever nation in which you grew up, or at least you did. You might remember what an isosceles triangle is. The contents they tried so hard to beat into my brain are mostly gone now, though I can still draw a wicked cover page for any project I do. That was the part I did best. I always wished there was a class just for cover pages or that every test I did had a cover page requirement. But the things, the details, they’re mostly gone. What is not gone are the deeper lessons. I learned it’s important to fit in, to give the right answer, and for anything at all, to ask permission.
Most of us have learned that anything in life requires permission of some kind or another, though as we get older it’s less about hall passes to go to the toilet and more about the implied permission we would need to do things our way, to be different, to try some hair-brained idea that just kind of came to us and which we can not shake and if I could reach into your brains and extract all those expectations and replace them with one unlimited, sky-blue, cart-blanche permission-slip, I’d give the world to do that.
You do not need permission. The questions I asked a couple minutes ago, you need no permission to find an answer to them. Except perhaps from yourself because if you’re asking yourself “Who wants to hear what I have to say?” it’s because you’re not out there trying to answer the question. You’re asking, but it's only rhetorical. I hate rhetorical questions, don’t you? You already think you know the answer. And you know what? At the beginning, the answer is, well, no one. I know, you thought I was going to tell you the world is just waiting to hear from you. They aren’t. In the same way that before the guy that invented pizzas with the cheese baked into the crust, there was no one sitting around thinking, "you know what I want, one of those cheesy-crust pizzas!”
As far as creating metaphors, the cheese-crust pizza metaphor marks a new low point for me, but try to stay focused on the point: no one wants to hear from you until you give them a reason. I didn’t know I wanted to hear David Bowie until I heard Absolute Beginners and had to hear more. I didn’t know I wanted to read Hemingway until I read Farewell to Arms. I didn’t know I liked avocado toast until I tried it. I didn’t know I loved my wife and wanted to be with her until she smiled at me.
Who wants your art? No one. Until they do. And neither they nor you will ever know that until you make it, and share it in some way. I know, I know, it’s easy for me to say that. I’ve already got books. I’ve already got blog readers. Bullshit. We all start somewhere and the only reason I have blog readers now is because 15 years ago I started my first blog with none. Not one single reader. And I was asking the same question we all do: who wants to read what I have to say? The difference is, I wasn’t asking rhetorically. I was genuinely curious and willing to find out, even if, as I suspected, the answer was: no one. David Bowie started at some point, with not a single fan. And then he gave us, those of us that love his music but before we knew we would, something we loved. Something we resonated with.
In the history of “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” this one is easy to answer. It’s always the artist, never the audience, that comes first. Sure, they might be out there, but they don’t know it yet. You have to show us. You have to put the work out there in one cataclysmic first act of traumatic self-destruction. It won’t be. But it’ll feel like it.
Here’s what you need to know: you are experiencing things as a human being that you alone can convey in, well, the way that you alone can convey. You are one among billions, it’s true. But as unique as your story, thoughts, feelings, and questions might be, we all experience similar things. It’s the combination of those things, and - this is the important part - that you are willing to share them in precisely your own way, that will make some of us sit up, your words or art vibrating through every part of us as we see something of our own experience and we suddenly feel less alone and think, “You too?” It is your courage that will give us ours.
Your work will not appeal to everyone. It doesn’t need to. It needs to appeal to it’s own audience, an audience that the work itself will find as people resonate with it, as people see some reflection of themselves in it, as you give them courage to ask the same questions you do, or admit to the same feelings or experiences they’ve had. You don’t have customize it for them. You don’t have to ask “what does my audience want?” Your art, whatever it is, will find its own audience. Who wants to hear what you have to say? They do! But they don’t know it until you put it out there and one person finds it and shows it to another and another and another. It has never been so easy for our work to answer that question for us, but we’ve got to put it out there. Not because it’s “good” whatever that means, but because it’s yours.
We gain creative confidence as we take baby steps and give ourselves the chance for our work to answer those haunting questions for us, one at a time. But the expectation that you will launch the blog, the podcast, the new book or album, to an instant audience, the expectation that only a large audience means your work is worth the making, will stop you in your tracks. Who are you to put your work out there into the world? You’re the same one-of-a-kind-yet-just-like-the-rest-of-us person that David Bowie was. Or Hemingway. Or Picasso. Pick whatever artist that haunts your thoughts and reminds you that no, you will never be like them, and remember this: they once were nothing but a snotty-nosed kid with nothing but rough ideas, picking their way through music lessons, wondering if they’d ever figure that shit out. They wrote crappy first stories, got rejection letters, and at some point probably wondered, who am I to put my stuff out there? The only difference between them and those of us still in the wings, is that they didn’t ask that question rhetorically, they asked it and then said, “Let’s find out.”
You do not need a hall pass for this life. You need no one’s permission to be who you are, to do and say and make what you long for. The fact of your birth and this one short, astonishing life, full of possibilities, that is your permission. To do it. Say it. Make it. And to do so your way. To let your art BE the question, the invitation: who wants to hear what I have to say?
But it’s more than that. There’s a good chance, if you’re asking the question, that you need to say, make, or do those things for the only audience that really matters, and that’s you. When you are stopped by the expectation that no one wants to hear or see or read or listen to what you create, you miss the chance to make that thing, to be surprised by it, to learn from it, to experience the joy and the growth that comes from the making itself. You miss the chance to become the person that art-making always creates. Sure, we make the art, but the art also makes us. In a very real way, without resorting to another dodgy metaphor, David Bowie, to fully exhaust my use of him as an example, became David Bowie by making his art, singing his songs, slowly mutating, transforming, because of the art-making, into the person he became. That’s how life works. And that’s my way of reminding you that as much as the world needs your art, you need it more. And to abandon the making because you’re not sure who else might want it, is like refusing to cook and eat food because it might not be to someone else’s taste. Make your art for you, first. You need it to express yourself, to explore who you are and the story you are living, to sort through the raw materials and become the person that art-making alone can create. You haven’t only been given permission to do that, but a mandate.
There’s a great line in a Paul Simon song that goes: He says there's no doubt about it It was the myth of fingerprints I've seen them all and man They're all the same
Of course we’re all different. But we’re also all so much the same. You are not the only one to look for permission to create your work and put it out there. But we are all the same. We all wonder who we are to do things our way, to be ourselves, and do our work. But some of us let the question hang in the air, we let it call us forward into discovering the many possible, and different, answers we’ll find as we do the work. It’s time to hold those expectations a little more openly, to stop assuming we know the answers to these questions, stop looking for that god-damn hall-pass. Who needs what you have to make? You do. You need it more than you will ever know. And we do, we just don’t know it yet. Please don’t rob us of the chance to find out.
Thank you for joining me. If you’re enjoying A Beautiful Anarchy I’d be so grateful if you’d leave a review on iTunes or where you choose to listen. If you’ve got comments or questions I’d love to hear them, you can get in touch by sending an email to talkback@abeautifulanarchy.com.
I publish A Beautiful Anarchy 3 weeks out of 4, but you can get your fix on those 4th weeks by subscribing to On The Make, a monthly kick in the creative pants sent straight to your inbox. You can subscribe by going to ABeatifulAnarchy.com, scrolling to the bottom of the page and telling me where to send it. I’ll also send you a copy of my short eBook, Escape Your Creative Rut, 5 Ways to Get Your Groove Back, and every month I’ll draw the name of one subscriber to whom I’ll send a signed copy of my book, A Beautiful Anarchy. Thanks so much for being part of this. Until next time, go make something beautiful.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0