Overthrow The Tyranny of the First Try
There’s countless stories of people who seemed destined from an early age to do exactly what they spent their life doing. The famous businessperson who had the entrepreneurial instinct to start various money-making schemes throughout their childhood. The celebrated artist who was always drawing and filling sketchbooks. The star athlete who had a perfect golf swing before they were out of diapers. A side effect of these pervasive prodigy stories, George Saunders writes in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, is that “we buy into some version of the intentional fallacy”—the notion that success or skill or satisfaction always begins with a clear-cut intention. Among other consequences, buying into the intentional fallacy tends to come along with getting trapped under “the tyranny of the first draft,” as Saunders calls the self-defeating assumption or expectation that our first try—whether at writing a book, launching a business, playing a sport, or choosing a career—should be great or right or perfect. Along with his own thirty-plus-year publishing career, Saunders has been teaching in the Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University for the last twenty years—the dividing line that separates those who go on to publish from those who don’t, Saunders writes, is the former “overturns the tyranny of the first draft,” realizing, “The first draft doesn’t need to be good, it just needs to be, so you can revise it and make it good.”
Overturning the tyranny of the first draft, the first try, the first job, profession, idea, or attempt—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
You Have It Backwards
As an author, professor, and psychiatrist, Dr. Anna Lembke says, “A lot of people come to me and say, ‘I’m anxious, depressed, and miserable. If I could only find that thing that I was really meant to do, my life would be better.’” They’ve bought into some version of the passion fallacy—the notion that the key to life satisfaction is to figure out what you’re uniquely passionate about, deeply interested in, and naturally good at, and then find a profession that sits perfectly at the intersection of those things. “It’s a big problem,” Dr. Lembke continues. “This very misguided idea about finding your passion. It’s almost as if people are looking to fit the key into the lock of the thing that was meant for them to do. They think they have to find that perfect thing, and then everything will be wonderful and they’ll have all this great success…And my first intervention for the many, many people like that that I see in clinical care is to tell them, ‘You have it backwards.’” Passion is not determined. It’s developed. (File next to: The Three Orientations)
People Have To Be Bad Before They Can Be Good
Colin Jost and Michael Che are the longest-tenured Weekend Update anchors in SNL history. After their third episode in 2014, an NBC executive called a meeting with SNL creator and producer, Lorne Michaels. “Do you think Jost and Che are working?” the exec asked. Michaels replied, “No.” “Oh,” the exec said, “you know?” Yes, Michaels said, he was well aware that his new Weekend Update anchors were not performing all that well. “But it’s a thing,” Michaels told the exec. “People have to be bad before they can be good.” He likes to use the analogy of an ugly baby: “All babies are ugly (unless they’re your baby), but after three months, everyone says, ‘What a beautiful baby.’ You just have to live through that period of people not being good.” (File next to: Force Yourself Through The Hardest Phase)
Many Years, Many Experiments, Many Mistakes, And Many Obstacles
From an early age, Robert Greene was drawn to words and books and writers. When he got older, he decided he wanted to be a writer. But he didn’t know what kind of writing best suited him. So he tried them all. He tried writing novels, plays, short stories, essays, and poetry. He worked for magazines and in journalism. It was while working as a journalist that a boss asked him to lunch just to tell him, “You should seriously consider a different career. You are not writer material. Your work is too undisciplined. Your style is too bizarre. Your ideas—they’re just not relatable to the average reader.” Robert left that job and moved back to Los Angeles, California, where he was born and raised. He got a job in Hollywood, working as an assistant to a director, as a researcher, story developer, and screenwriter. “Working in Hollywood” Robert said, “was just awful. People were so deceptive—they would present themselves to be so saint-like, so virtuous, but behind the scenes, they’d do all kinds of masterful, manipulative maneuvers to get ahead. It really pissed me off.” So he left and moved to Italy where he got a job at an art school. There, he met a book packager named Joost Elffers. While on a walk one day, Joost asked Robert if he had any book ideas. The truth was that Robert did not have any book ideas, “but I improvised one,” he said. “The gods must have been smiling on me. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, all of my pain, all the books I had read, all my experiences in all my different jobs, all the hardcore Machiavellian tactics I saw in Hollywood—it all just welled up and gushed out of me in this book idea.” Essentially, his improvised idea was to use stories from throughout history to illustrate the timeless games people play to covertly manipulate and maneuver others in order to acquire and maintain power. “I want to expose those games,” Robert told Joost, who loved the idea so much that he said he would pay for Robert’s basic living expenses while he wrote the book. “I poured into the book all the lessons I had learned,” Robert writes, “all my training as a writer, all the discipline I’d gained from journalism, all the power-hungry manipulators I saw, all the horrible bosses that I had dealt with.” The years of uncertainty and confusion, working some sixty different jobs, trying every kind of writing possible—it was all part of the process of developing the experiences, the ideas, and the capabilities needed to be able to write what became his first book, The 48 Laws of Power. It was a massive success, selling millions of copies worldwide, “but the real lesson,” Robert writes, “is it took me a long time to get there, with many twists and turns. It took many years, many experiments, many mistakes, and many obstacles.” It took many tries over a long period of not being good.
The Seeds of The Grapes of Wrath
In August of 1936, John Steinbeck was approached by the chief editor from the San Francisco News. News wanted Steinbeck to report on the mass migration of poor farm people to California. Steinbeck bought an old bakery truck—the “pie wagon,” he called it—filled it with blankets, food, and cooking equipment, then drove down to the San Joaquin Valley. The migrant farmers lived in camps provided by the government. Steinbeck stopped at several camps. The poverty and the filth of these camps was shocking. A man, his wife, and their children slept together under dirty old carpets. Children wore coarse hemp sacks for clothing. From malnutrition, people’s reactions were slow. Instead of making eye contact, Steinbeck wrote, “eyes have the glazed, faraway look of a sleepwalker’s eyes.” Steinbeck was appalled. He decided he would write a “big book” on the migrants’ problems. After a second month-long trip in the camps, in late 1937, Steinbeck began writing the big book. The working title was “The Oklahomans,” and its focus was on the irrepressible character of the migrants. But in late January or early February of 1938, Steinbeck destroyed the manuscript because it sucked. Next, instead of a book about the migrants, he considered a book about those doing injustices to the migrants. In February of 1938, he began writing “L’Affaire Lettuceberg” about a wealthy family that owned a lettuce farm and exploited migrant farmers. Three months later, Steinbeck showed a 60,000-word draft of “L’Affaire Lettuceberg” to his wife Carol. Carol thought it was terrible. So Steinbeck burned the manuscript of “L’Affaire Lettuceberg.” In a letter to his publisher, Steinbeck wrote, “this book is finished and it is a bad book and I must get rid of it. It can’t be printed.” In May of 1938, Steinbeck returned to focusing on the migrants but this time, on one family in particular. And in six months, Steinbeck finished a 200,000-word novel, The Grapes of Wrath, about the Joad’s, a family of tenant farmers forced to migrate from Oklahoma’s dying Dust Bowl to California’s corrupt Promised Land. In 1939, the year of its release, The Grapes of Wrath was the best-selling book in the world. In 1940, it won the National Book Award then the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. To date, it has sold more than 14 million copies. It’s often referred to as “The Great American Novel.”
A Thing Of The Moment, A Bagatelle
In his book Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment, and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words, the author and poet David Whyte writes, “before a book can be written, most of the ways it cannot be written must be tried first – in our minds, on the blank screen, on the empty page, or staring at the bedroom ceiling at four in the morning.” No one gets it great or right or perfect on the first try. “Any endeavor achieved without delay,” Whyte continues, “wrong turnings, occasional blank walls and a vein of self-doubt running through all is a thing of the moment, a bagatelle [”a thing of little importance; a very easy task”]. What is worthwhile always carries the struggle of the maker written within it.” The first try doesn’t need to be good, it just needs to be, so you can try again and again, for before anything worthwhile can be good, most of the ways it is bad must be tried first.