Lay Another Brick

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FULL TRANSCRIPT

In his 2021 autobiography, WILL, the actor and musician Will Smith tells a story about an early lesson he learned from his father. I'll try to keep the re-telling brief, but Will's Dad needed a brick wall built and Will and his brother, just young kids at the time, were tasked with building it. Not surprisingly, the wall took forever to build. Every weekend. Every day after school. Every holiday, and every vacation. No eleven-year old I know would get excited about that, much less know how to do it. Will didn't either and one day he and his brother, Harry, were in a dark mood, bitching and complaining about how they were never going to finish the wall. It was, they moaned, impossible.

Overhearing them, their father set his tools down, walked over to them, grabbed a brick and said, "Stop thinking about the damn wall! There is no wall! There are only bricks. Your job is to lay this brick perfectly. Then move on to the next brick. Then lay that brick perfectly. Then the next one. Don't be worrying about no wall. Your only concern is one brick."

Later, Will says this: "For my entire career, I have been absolutely relentless. I've been committed to a work ethic of uncompromising intensity. And the secret to my success is as boring as it is unsurprising: you show up and you lay another brick. Pissed off? Lay another brick. Bad opening weekend? Lay another brick. Album sales dropping? Get up and lay another brick. Marriage failing? Lay another brick."

So, what do Will Smith and brick-laying have to do with you and your creative life? I’m David duChemin and this is episode 80 of A Beautiful Anarchy, let’s talk about it.

I started writing this episode over a month ago while I was in Kenya, and I got as far as writing the word TRACTION at the top of the page, followed by the question, "how long do you keep at it while the wheels just seem to spin?" And then I closed the laptop and didn't write another word until now because, well, the wheel's were still spinning—I couldn't seem to even get traction on an episode that was meant to be about traction—and I didn't have an answer. I'm not sure there is an answer to that question, certainly not an answer that's a one-size fits all. I suspect it's always going to be a gut thing, or at very least it's going to depend on looking around—at your work, your audience, your resources, and maybe a dozen other things—before you can know if it's time to give up or keep ploughing forward with whatever it is in your creative life about which you're asking the question.

I do know this: everything I've ever done creatively has a period in the beginning, often also in the middle and then sometimes towards the end as well, when the wheels feel like they're spinning and I'm going nowhere. And I know that not everything catches quickly, or gets the kind of traction we hope for within the kind of timelines we dream of. I know Vincent van Gogh didn't ever really see his work get traction, in terms of his ideas or his techniques, while he was still alive to see it happen. I'm glad he didn't give up, though I'm not sure what kind of vision, resolve, or internal resources he was drawing upon that kept him going. Whatever it is I'm not sure I've got it.

What I have got that's similar to what van Gogh had, , at least on the surface, is the ability to lay another brick. Just one more. And to do it well. To do it with soul. That I can do, though I've never thought to put it in the kind of words that Will Smith's father did.

We have this tendency to look and dream in larger pictures, don't we? The idea of a 5 or 10 year plan isn't an uncommon one. We think in terms of the results of the things we're building - the career, the audience, the album, the book. It can be smaller things too, like the new website we keep planning to build—I've found the size of the project doesn't necessarily correspond to how overwhelmed I feel when I'm looking at it closely and it's filling up my field of view. Like a reversal of the writing on the bottom of our side mirrors, we need a reminder that objects are probably smaller than they appear. Or they can be, if we focus not on the wall but on laying another brick.

Will's dad was right. There is no wall. Not yet there isn't. The wall isn't what we do, it's what remains after the doing. The wall is the sexy part, it's the "look what I made!" and it's the thing that'll get the reviews and accolades if and when they come. But the wall isn't what fills our days. Our days are filled with bricks and mortar, and I think how long we can keep at it often depends on how much focus and care we can bring to bear on laying each brick.

When the arts or anything to which we apply our creativity become too precious, too white collar, I begin to worry about how good the resulting wall might become. More personally, when I find myself fretting too much about what my wall looks like compared to the walls others are making—whether those metaphorical walls are their careers, their latest bodies of work, their audience or social following, or whatever outward thing has arisen because of their own daily efforts to lay another brick—when I find myself staring for too long at their walls and not my own bricks, I find myself losing traction and second guessing the effort, and I've been thinking I can't be the only one who feels like this, and neither are you.

What is astonishing about this, and at 50 years old I like to think I'm self-aware enough that it really shouldn't be surprising at all, is that I didn't get into this to build walls. I didn't start writing to be a writer. I didn't start photographing to "be a photographer." It was never, at the beginning, about the career or any single thing I might look back upon in hindsight and say, "well, I finally did it! Thank God that's over!" In fact the things in which I have always taken the greatest joy and in which I have found the most challenge and meaning, have been projects or tasks I never wanted to end. I didn't want the wall to be finished because laying another brick was just too damn interesting and enjoyable. It has been immensely freeing to realize that being a writer is not actually my goal. To write is where I find joy. I'm not actually that interested in being a photographer, so much as I love making photographs. I may, one day, look back and realize that over my life I have, in fact built walls, even many of them, but that's only because I've found such joy in being a brick layer.

I know that's not where Will Smith's father was aiming his advice. There's probably more pleasure to be found in the analogy I'm laying down here than in actual bricks. When I was 18 I spent a summer in Peru building a school and I have some unique insights into how poorly chosen this metaphor truly is if what you're hearing is not only "lay another brick," but "laying bricks is fun!" Laying bricks is not fun. Laying bricks is hard work, especially if you're just learning, like Will was at 11 years old in Philadelphia, or as I was at 18 in the heat of an Amazon summer. But I'm hoping you've been listening to this podcast long enough to see the twist coming, or even get there ahead of me: where there is challenge there is the possibility of narrowing our focus and getting into the kind of flow in which we do our best work. Where there is challenge and focus we learn, we grow. In Will's case, the kid that laid the first brick wasn't the same kid that, finally, when the last brick was laid, built the wall.

As I'm recording this it's close enough to the beginning of 2022 to still call it a new year. When you're listening is almost irrelevant because looking at whatever wall you're hoping to build isn't limited to the first months of the year, though we tend to be a little more big picture at this time of year, don't we? Big goals. Ambitious resolutions. Somehow January swings around and out of nowhere there are new and impossibly large walls to build or we become aware once again how little progress we've made over 365 days on last year's wall. Maybe all you're seeing is the space where the wall is meant to be and you have no sense at all of what it's meant to look like, not the foggiest idea—which is usually the excuse we give to hold off on laying the first brick and instead do...nothing at all. But what if, instead, that lack of direction gives us the freedom to lay that first brick any damn way we want? What if we're taking this wall business just way too seriously?

Will Smith, in opening his autobiography the way he did, is not saying don't dream big. He's saying do what's in front of you. Do it with soul. And if it's not in front of you, look around and find another brick, but lay it well. That brick, whatever it is beyond a rapidly thinning metaphor, is not a means to an end, it's not merely a repeatable task we mail in while our mind is on other things, like the big fancy wall we're going to build or what others will think about it, and about us, when it's done—that brick is our work. And it's the simple—if not easy—answer to the otherwise unanswerable doubts and fears, the comparisons, and the worries about traction and whether what we are making will ever go anywhere or become anything. Don't be worrying about no wall. Your only concern is one brick.

Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0

life creativeDavid DucheminFebruary 19, 2022Episode 080