You're Doing It Wrong
EPISODE 070: YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG
For something so rooted in uncertainty, innovation and the discovery of new things, isn't it strange that creative work seems so often to be subject to voices telling us we're doing it wrong? Could it be that hearing, "you're doing it wrong" is a good sign we're on to something? I think there's a better question than "am I doing this right or wrong?" Let's talk about it.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
A few years ago Cynthia and I took a road trip across Canada, piling cameras and laptops and everything we'd need for 3 months of vagabonding into the Jeep. It was the end of August when we left the west coast heading 11,000km towards Newfoundland and Labrador on the far east coast, and though tourist season was winding down in many of the places we passed through, it wasn't infrequently that we'd pass tourists with their cameras and tripods set up on the side of the road, nor was it unusual for one of us, usually me, to yell out the window as we drove by. "You're doing it wrong!" we'd say. Sometimes we just said it to each other, and laugh. It's very possible we're the only people that found this funny, but why it struck my funny bone at all is that the photography world of which I am a part, though I'm sure this happens in other creative circles, seems obsessed with whether we're doing things right or wrong.
Several years ago in Hokkaido, Cynthia would be photographing, and for this to make any sense at all you need to know Cynthia doesn't make many literal photographs. They're usually abstract, very sensual, and impressionistic, and the means of creating these images involves a lot of hand and arm movements, something close to a dance with the camera, while the shutter is open. Sometimes that dance is more like a jig, rapid and kind of all over the place, so it's something to see, though it's usually much more interesting to watch the faces of the people walking or driving past, eyes wide open, bewildered, and with an expression that said, unmistakably, "she’s doing it wrong!"
So that's where it came from, this absurd inside joke between the 2 of us that has since spread to many of my students, all of us aware that unless you know what someone is trying to accomplish you've got nothing to contribute to a conversation about the right or wrong way to do things. And yet still it persists, as it has for what I'm guessing is millennia. I think about the second guy to paint a rhinoceros on the wall of his cave in France, already being ridiculed by the first guy for using a different technique or for trying to paint a mammoth instead: "You're doing it wrong!" echoing off the rocks. And I think about the Impressionists and the reactions of the more traditional painters and art critics at the Paris salon, the whispers all saying: "Vous le fais incorrectement" You're doing it wrong. And I think about you, at some point, taking some risk or trying something new, and hearing these same absurd words, and I wonder how it might affect your creative life, and I thought perhaps we might talk about it. I'm David duChemin and this is episode 70 of A Beautiful Anarchy. Welcome here.
Music / Intro
You don't have to live very long in this world to feel the sting of ridicule from those who lack imagination, and fear or misunderstand what is different. What child hasn't tried something for the first time and felt their cheeks go red while others laugh at their efforts, and so learned that it's better to blend in than to stand out, better to stick to the familiar than try something different?
It would be nice if this were short-lived, a phase we out-grow, replacing that unrestrained suspicion of what is different with a more nuanced way of seeing the world, and growing a thicker skin to the words of those who lack the vision or the grace to see a little further than what they find comfortable and familiar. It would be nice, but I think these impulses have roots that go down deep, and stretch long into our past as a species when our very survival depended on doing what was proven, and avoiding rejection from the tribe. I suspect this is why, as a species, we can be so quick to ridicule and shame, it's an impulse to bring others in the tribe back into conformity and safety. And it's why we respond in such a primal, fight-or-flight kind of way, to the same. These are survival mechanisms, which is all well and good when survival is what's at stake, but while no 4-year-old ever died from painting a purple horse, I bet the pointing and laughing has killed the creativity and imagination of more than a few people that might otherwise have used those same instincts, had they not withered from the ridicule, to innovate and create and diverge from convention.
There's irony aplenty in this if the impulse to survive as a species is what drives the behaviour to discourage the kind of innovation that we need if we're to survive the newer challenges that threatens our species, and if that same scorn for what is new and unfamiliar is what might otherwise have lead to the kind of art that might have opened our eyes and hearts to the value and beauty of divergence, dissent, and the exploration of the kind of ideas that exist just beyond our blind spots. There's another irony, too. On some level isn't the sound of our critics saying "you're doing it wrong" not precisely the sound that assures us we might just be on the right track?
If doing it "right" - and here it would help if you could see me making air quotes and rolling my eyes - if doing it right means doing what has been done and proven, if we only know it's "right" because it fits the existing template, then why bother to begin with? If "you're doing it wrong" is just code for "you're not doing it the way I would do it, the way it's been done by others, or the way that is accepted and acceptable" then is that not a sign that we're on the right track, if not in the specifics, then at least in the willingness to risk and explore and find our own way of doing things?
Let's keep in mind here that this is a podcast about creativity. I'm not suggesting there aren't truly right and wrong ways of doing some things. Clearly there are arenas in life where doing it right is important, and doing it wrong has repercussions. Heart surgery comes to mind and I'm hoping the next plane I get on is piloted by someone with a less speculative approach to flying than the one I'm suggesting has such value in the creative arts. There are some contexts in which innovation is less immediately valuable than, for example, not dying. But even in these fields, surely there is a place for learning, the changing of ideas, and progress. If there weren't we'd still be launching our planes off the bluff at Kitty Hawk and we'd never have transplanted a human heart.
And so I wonder, with all the baggage that ideas like right and wrong come with, not the least of which are guilt and shame—neither of which tend to lead to a blossoming of the human spirit or the courage that creativity needs to flourish—what if we stopped asking the question. What if "am I doing it right?" or "am I doing it wrong?" were flushed from our systems and replaced with something a little less weighed down by ethical or moral baggage and we were a little more concerned with a better question, specifically: "does it work?"
The Persian poet Rumi said "Out beyond ideas of right or wrong is a field. I'll meet you there." That field is a place beyond the rigidity of the calcified thinking so perfectly expressed by the words "we've always done it this way." It is a place of possibility and creativity. A place of innovation and purple horses. It's a place where we match our methods not to what's been done, but to what has been dreamed. It's a place where the imagination soars, and finds the courage to take risks, because it's safe from shame and ridicule. And I think it's a place where we learn more effectively—when we try one thing or another and it simply doesn't work, we're free to discard it, and we're not pressured into making it fit because our belief that it is, or should be, "right" obliges us to. Nor does a better possible idea get overlooked or prematurely discarded just because it's "wrong."
There's a scene in the 1987 John Candy and Steve Martin movie, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles , in which John Candy accidentally gets into the wrong lane while driving onto a divided highway. Another vehicle, driving parallel to them in the lane they should be in, honks their horn desperately to get their attention, yelling "You're going the wrong way!" Steve Martin says "they say we're going the wrong way" to which Candy replies, "Oh he's drunk, how would he know where we're going?"
Of course, it's not the perfect analogy, and it's true: Candy and Martin barely make it out alive, but still, wouldn't it feel good to more often reply to all the voices that presume to weigh-in on what you do and how you do it, and say, "how do you know where I'm going or what I'm trying to accomplish?" Hell, half the time I don't even know where my own work is heading, which brings to mind the conversation in Alice in Wonderland in which Alice asks the Cheshire Cat: "Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?" to which the cat replies, "That depends a good deal on where you want to get to." Alice says, "I don't much care where," and the cat sagely answers her: "then it doesn't much matter which way you go."
The creative life is surrounded by enough wonder and mystery—it happens within so much uncertainty, and is almost always so disinterested in what has already been done—that it just might be that we need to spend more time out in that field beyond right and wrong, a field more concerned with what might be, with asking "does it work?" and having the courage to answer that question for ourselves. That's the field in which I want to spend my time, and though I don't always know where it is, I'll meet you there.
Thank so much for being here, for letting me be part of your creative life, and for being such a loved and needed part of mine. If this podcast makes a difference for you, I'd be so grateful if you would share it with others. And if this podcast is new to you, you'll find it takes a short break every 4 weeks when I send out a new issue of On The Make, which is like a written episode of this podcast, sent to your inbox every fourth Sunday morning. If you're not already getting it but you'd like to, just go to StartUglyBook.com, scroll to the bottom, and let me know where to send it. Once a month I'll draw the name of one listener to whom I'll send a signed copy of A Beautiful Anarchy, the book that started all this, as a thanks for listening. Our times together each week are a little too one sided to be a real conversation, but if you ever want to change that, you can get me anytime at talkback@aBeautifulAnarchy.com. Thank you again for being here. We'll talk soon. In the mean time, go make something beautiful.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0