The Delineation Between The Correct Way And Whether You Like It Or Not
When he was 13 years old, the future multi-Grammy-winning music producer Finneas O’Connell called his friend’s dad, who worked professionally in music production. Finneas had just discovered a tool called a limiter—something music producers use to help control the volume of sound—and after some experimentation, he wanted to know, “Am I using it correctly?” “Finneas,” his friend’s dad told him, “listen, it’s really important that you understand the delineation between the correct way to do something and whether you like it or not. There’s always going to be someone in the music world to tell you why you did something incorrectly, why this is too that or that is too this. So it’s really important to like something or not like it…If somebody tells you, ‘That vocal is too compressed,’ that might be true. If they don’t like the song, the compressed vocal might be the reason. But if you say, ‘No, no, no, I compressed it that way on purpose. I like it,’—if you like how it sounds, then it’s the correct way.” The delineation between the correct way to do something and whether you like it or not—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
Guess What? I Want To See It
Shortly after James Cameron submitted a cut of Avatar to 20th Century Fox, he met with the studio execs. (At one point, there’s a 3-minute flying scene). “Why is the flying scene so long?” one executive asked. “It doesn’t advance the narrative or the character.” “You’re right on every count,” Cameron replied. “You’ve ticked every box, like a good studio executive…But guess what? I want to see it.” (In several interviews, I’ve heard Cameron say some version of, “The way I write is I work backwards from the shit I want to see.”) “And if I want to see it, my cognitive leap is there are going to be other people that want to see it.” “Well,” Cameron said in a later interview, “it turned out that the flying is what the audience loved the most, in terms of our exit polling and data gathering.”
Pure Primitive Orange Insanity
When he first watched The Muppet Show at the age of four, Travis Barker became obsessed with the character Animal, the frenetic drummer of the fictional band Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem. “He was my hero,” Barker writes in his autobiography Can I Say. “He would go buck wild, play an awesome drum solo, and then eat his cymbals. The first time I saw Animal…I wanted to be a drummer.” Barker’s parents got him a drum kit and signed him up for drum lessons, where Barker learned the correct way to set up his drum kit, the correct way to hold his drumsticks, and the correct way to hit his drums. Quickly, Barker sensed a delineation between the correct ways he was being taught to do things and the way his hero Animal played. “Animal was pure primitive orange insanity,” Barker writes. “He always looked like he was having fun.” Conversely, while he was learning to be technically correct and proficient, Barker felt bored, and, “there’s nothing worse than a drummer who looks bored.” So Barker began to play more like Animal and developed an unorthodox style. “I know I’m doing things that I’m not supposed to when I’m drumming,” he writes. “I flail my arms when I play, I hit the drums way too hard, and the proper technique is to keep the sticks lower than I do. I could sit behind the kit and play like the biggest technique monster you’ve ever seen. But it would bore you, and it would bore me. Playing the way I do makes it more exciting and, most importantly, more fun…I never forgot how much I loved Animal when I was a kid. He never played anything difficult—he’s a puppet!—but he was always exciting to watch.”
This Is A Really Fundamental Idea
The chess prodigy Josh Waitzkin quit playing chess around the age of 18. “I was a naturally creative, aggressive chess player,” Waitzkin explained. “My style was to create chaos on the chessboard, and my strength lay in finding hidden harmonies.” With this style, Waitzkin won the U.S. Junior Chess Championship at the age of 11 and became an International Master at age 16. Then, Waitzkin got a coach who forced him to play like the world champions, Anatoly Karpov and Tigran Petrosian—“the most positional, conservative chess players.” When he was forced to stop playing the way he liked to play, Waitzkin said, “I lost my love for the game.” So Waitzkin quit playing chess, and shortly after, he took up martial arts. He trained for just two years before he won his first national championship in martial arts. Asked if he took anything from chess into the martial arts, Waitzkin said, in the learning process, he followed his unique proclivities and leaned into his unique physical and mental traits. “And in my observation of competitors in any discipline, this is a really fundamental idea,” he said. “Those who succeed at the highest level, I think, basically manifest their unique character through their discipline.”
People Who Are INTO It
Jerry Seinfeld was asked if there are any comedic traits or techniques that have helped achieve more than less successful comedians. “No,” he said. “I am just completely obsessed. That’s what the audience wants. They pay for that. I don’t want to see someone who’s kind of into it.” Have you ever had the experience, Jerry asks, where you look at something and go, ‘Wow, whoever made that—they were INTO it!’? “That’s what I care about. That’s all I care about. I don’t care about traits or techniques, I don’t care what you do or how you do it—I just want to see people and talk to people and be around people who are INTO it.”
There Isn’t Any Book
During casting for a movie, a TV show, or a play, the playwright and filmmaker David Mamet said actors commonly make the same mistake: “They think, ‘We have to do things by the book.’ But there isn’t any book.” He quotes the Dr. Dealgood line in Mad Max: Beyond the Thunderdome, “I know you won’t break the rules. There aren’t any.” There often isn’t a way that is definitively correct. If you like how it sounds, if you want to see it, if you find it exciting and fun, if you are INTO it—then it’s the correct way.