THE LABEL STICKS
EPISODE 034: THE LABEL STICKS
We love to label things, and to put them in a category. But we’re so often wrong, or biased, and our labels blind us to possibilities and creative thinking. How much more creative would we be if we were more suspicious of the labels, less eager to apply them, and more willing to pull them off when they no longer fit? Let’s talk about it.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
On the long list of things that drive me crazy are the sticky labels that get stuck to things–like book covers–by those that sell them, knowing full well that the first thing those that buy them will want to do is remove them. And it seems like the more expensive the item, the stickier and harder to remove those labels become. In one of our cupboards, we have a whole basket full of things just for removing sticky labels. Razor blades and scrapers, solvents and sprays, all necessary only because some yahoo decided that I could never buy a book without being told with screaming red stickers that it’s a bestseller, or that I’d never buy a chair without a 4inch label describing the many features. It’s a chair! I know the features. You know what feature I want? I want a chair without sticky labels!
No, I want a world without sticky labels. But I’m not holding my breath.
I’m David duChemin and this is A Beautiful Anarchy, a mostly weekly podcast about the everyday creative life and the obstacles we face in living it. What do labels have to do with it? Let’s talk about it.
Intro / Music
We like labels. Labels make thinking easier. They tell us what to think and how. They allow us to put things into neat categories so we don’t have to think about them again. Labels tell us what things are. They help us distinguish between the toothpaste and the tube of rash cream without having to engage our other senses, either intentionally or otherwise, to discover the difference.
They help us know which books are the bestsellers on the table at the bookstore. God forbid we have to choose a book without first knowing what Oprah thinks of it. And they tell us what things cost, which is helpful but for the life of me I will never know why we need a price tag on every damn apple at the grocery store. I was in a store a year or two ago in which an overzealous employee had taken a pricing gun to every single baby potato in a bin that could have fed an army.
If you know me at all by now you’re waiting for the metaphor to drop so let’s stop playing games and get to it. No, real life sticky labels don’t give me the rage that I’ve implied. They bug me. But like I said, I’ve got knives and solvents for that shit and I’m well practiced. But there are labels aplenty yet to peel and they are much harder to get rid of. They are barriers to creative thinking, barriers to compassion, and they should be held in high suspicion by anyone who wants to see themselves, and the world beyond, and not be told what to think about them.
There’s a saying that’s attributed to everyone from the Babylonian Talmud to Immanuel Kant, Anaias Nin, and Stephen Covey, which means it was probably Mark Twain that said it. It goes like this: “we do not see the world as it is, but as we are.” There’s truth to that. I mean, who am I to argue with Anaias Nin? But can I add something? Am I allowed to do that? I think we see the world not only as we are, but as the labels dictate.
This is another case of our brain’s firmware not getting updated recently enough. The ability to categorize and label things quickly seems to be something that would be useful in keeping us alive in the distant past. In another context perhaps it still is. Snakes are venomous. Those animals will eat you, people that don’t look like me are dangerous. The first time we encounter a thing we’re not sure about it, but the moment we have an experience with it, we’re able to categorize it, and label it, and like the sticker on the book I bought last week it’s really frigging hard to remove it.
Our ability to label and categorize might have kept us alive for lo these many years, but I think it’s also the opposite of creative thinking. It recognizes no nuance or difference, assumes we’re always right, and leaves no room for change. Once labeled, always labeled. When you learn dogs fit into the category of best friend, you become a dog person. When you get violently attacked by a dog as a child you learn they fit into the category of those things which are unpredictable and to be feared. Rarely do we switch the boxes. When you are told by word or action as a kid that you’re unloved and belong in the category of unlovable things, you can see yourself that way for the rest of your life. When you’re labeled a loser by others or even yourself, you will see the world through that filter and yourself by that label. Anyone that was told they "weren’t creative" enough times that they started to believe it, will see themselves and their world through that label and it will paralyze them.
We do it to ourselves as well, in other ways, even with good intentions. When I made the change from comedy back to photography in my early thirties the hardest part was changing the labels. I had been a comedian for so long, had worked really hard to BE a comedian. My stage name was The Rubber Chicken Guy, and I didn’t know how to not be him, so sticky was that label. And it’s not that there’s anything wrong with being a comedian, but when we accept that that is the box in which we belong we’re more likely NOT to see ourselves fitting into other boxes, doing other things. We’re much less likely to see the possibilities. And, as if I didn’t learn my lesson that time, once I pried that label loose I adhered the “photographer” label with super-glue, so sure was I that I’d found my one true calling. And now here I am picking at the edges of that label with my thumbnail. It’s not because i no longer want to be a photographer but seeing myself as that one thing has made it harder to also recognize my writing for what it is. I’m not saying I want to swap labels again, but I want to more freely explore the idea of being a writer as well. Which is weird, because I’ve been writing for years.
I’ve been blogging in some form for almost 20 years. When I was in comedy I did a lot of writing. When I switched to photography I started a photography blog and then I wrote books for years before I began to see myself as a writer. Not ONLY a writer, but I know this: if I had done seen beyond the labels sooner I might have done more to hone my craft. I might have asked better questions from people who have been down this road much longer than I. I might not have played so small. I don’t say that with regret. As the label has begun to peel at the corners I’ve caught glimpses of some of what might be and I’m getting out the solvents and the razor blades to get that label off a little quicker.
When we say we are this and not that, I wonder, how much does it blind us to what might be? Or to the ways in which we’ve been changing, even when the label hasn’t. When we say, we’re just an “amateur”, or a “dabbler”, do we prevent ourselves from seeing the possibility of taking things more seriously and, in fact, of being taken more seriously? What creative thinking do we cut off at the source when we apply an unchanging label to our ever-changing selves?
And it’s not just how we see ourselves. Tell yourself an activity is really hard and you’ll treat it that way. That might have some advantages but it might also make you give up before you even try. “Why bother? I can’t do that”. Tell yourself something can’t be done and you won’t. Put a label on that new project you’re working on, one that says “this failed on the first try, so it must be a failure” and you’ll see it that way. Believe others when they tell you it’s stupid or ugly and the label sticks. When we decide we don’t like something, or someone, we rarely pull the label off to give them another try.
Labels blind us to possibilities. When we decide an idea is bad we don’t bother exploring it further for other possibilities. When we decide our first efforts are perfect, we don’t keep trying to refine them. When we decide that no one wants it and we chuck it in the bin, we don’t often go back, dust it off, and try to see if from another angle. We do this with ideas, with things we create, and we do it with people.
I’m not saying we can live in a world entirely without labels. What a pain in the ass it would be to have to sniff every jar in the fridge to see what was what. But you’d sure learn to question everything, wouldn’t you? You’d make fewer assumptions and snap judgements. You’d pick up those jars and look at them from every angle; you’d open them and smell them, you’d give the contents a cautious taste. But you sure wouldn’t assume, not after the first couple mistakes.
Creative thinking eyes labels with suspicion and assumes nothing. It follows its curiosity which is one of the first things we abandon when we trust the labels.
I sometimes feel like I’ve got an insane monkey living in one half of my brain and he’s wildly slapping labels on everything he can find, and the other part of my brain which is now a little more aware of this is busy second guessing everything. A new idea comes into my head and sticker-monkey slaps a label on it that says “Good Idea!” and because I no longer trust the monkey I’m forced to look at this idea more than once, and turn it over in my hands, see it from other angles, test it out, and give it a chance to be more than the label either promises or threatens. When we apply labels to things we’re usually so sure about them. But how often are we wrong? How often is our assessment biased or based only on partial evidence? Honestly, most of the time that monkey is a moron.
In 1968 Dr. Spencer Silver, a scientist at 3M developed a reusable adhesive for which no one could find a use. It was like glue that just didn’t try very hard and could be stuck to things, and removed, without effort or residue. If you were looking to invent a new kind of glue you’d probably have seen this as an underwhelming discovery, if not a total failure. While everyone else was making glue that could bond things together in an instant and for all eternity, Spencer Silver had invented a glue that was weak, without ambition, and anaemic. It was the kind of adhesive that Woody Allen would play in the movie about glue. And for years it was a solution to a problem that didn’t exist. Until 1974 when Dr. Arthur Fry, also from 3M, got frustrated with the bookmarks falling out of his hymnal at choir practice and, to shorten this epic tale, invented the Post-it Note.
There are two lessons in here, two shining new metaphors for me to bash into the shape I need them to be to fit my point. The first is that labeling a re-useable adhesive as glue probably prevents or delays you seeing its other uses. I don’t know if that’s what took them 6 years to find a use for it, but I suspect it had something to do with it. But, surprisingly, that’s not why I brought it up to begin with. There is a middle ground between a world with no labels at all and one in which we are ever blinded by them, and in my wildest dreams that world is covered in yellow Post-it Notes.
It’s not realistic to suggest that we don’t have thoughts and opinions about things, that we don’t try to find categories for them. We’d lose all ability to think critically and creatively. But if those thoughts were fundamentally tentative, if we wrote them down on Post-Its and stuck them on the things about which we have thoughts and apply our labels, and we did so knowing we’d be pulling them up again and moving them around, chucking them in the bin when it longer applies or we discover we were wrong; if we were always just a little bit unsure how long that label had been there and whether it even applied any longer, would we make fewer assumptions, and engage that part of the brain that those assumptions tend to lull to sleep? Would we look at things more carefully, open to them being more than they appear? Would we be more willing to see change when it happens and not fight to keep things matching the labels?
I don’t know what labels you are straining against, or for that matter which ones you don’t even know you’ve applied to yourself, your work, or others. But I do know that most things in life change faster than the labels, and creative thinking depends on seeing those changes, and the possibilities they represent.
We don’t only see the world as it is, nor only as we are, but also as we label it. That lunatic sticker monkey isn’t slowing down anytime soon. But I’ve slipped him a box of Post-Its and it’s becoming easier to pull them off, to put them – for now – where I think they might actually belong, and when it turns out I’m wrong, it’s less work to remove them and put them somewhere else. And to stack them and put them in new combinations as well, because rarely in life is anything defined by that one label, but by many of them, changing frequently. And when you find that thing off which the post-it note has fallen, it’s gift; a chance to let wonder and curiosity take their turn, a chance to question things, and to see things with new and more creative eyes.
Thanks so much for being part of this and for the steady stream of humbling reviews and emails. My big goal is to serve you and help you move the needle on the real issues that affect our creative lives and it means the world to hear from you and to know I’m doing that. To that end I’ve got not one but 2 new books for you and if everything goes well over the coming days I’ll be releasing them next Sunday and if you subscribe to On The Make, you’ll be the first to know.
The first is called Start Ugly, The Unexpected Path to Everyday Creativity and it tackles one of the biggest issues we face in making anything - the starting. The second is called The Problem with Muses and it’s basically a book version of 28 of the best of episodes of A Beautiful Anarchy for those that have been asking me when I’m going to put them in a book and for those who prefer the written word or want to enjoy these episodes without the need to listen to my voice. They go together beautifully and they’ll be out next weekend.
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Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0