Let It Happen As An Unintended Side-Effect
Viktor Frankl, the renowned psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, developed a therapeutic technique known as “paradoxical intention.” Based on “the fact that hyper-intention makes impossible what one wishes,” Frankl writes, this approach encourages patients to do the opposite of their hyper-intended goal. A patient who struggles to fall asleep, for instance, would be advised “to try to stay awake as long as possible.” The hyper-intention to stay awake counteracts the “anticipatory anxiety” of not being able to sleep that keeps one awake. Frankl’s own appreciation for this principle was shaped by an unexpected turn in his writing career. Frankl authored dozens of books with the hyper-intention to write something widely impactful. They all fell short of his ambitions and so he eventually gave up that goal. Later, he wrote a book in nine days about his experiences in Nazi concentration camps and some of the psychological techniques that helped him survive. Not thinking much of it, he published it anonymously with the title Man’s Search For Meaning. It went on to sell over 10 million copies in his lifetime and is considered one of the most influential books ever. “Success,” Frankl said of the unexpected impact of Man’s Search for Meaning, “cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as an unintended side-effect…You have to let it happen by not caring about it…[It] is a side-effect or by-product, and is destroyed and spoiled to the degree to which it is made a goal in itself.” Things happening as an unintended side-effect—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
The Big Things Accidentally Take Care Of Themselves
After a string of successful films early in his career, director Paul Thomas Anderson became hyper-aware of expectations to outdo his previous work. This awareness led him into a cycle of writing scripts that he increasingly despised. ”I got really sick of the way I was writing,” he said, “and that was a horrible feeling.” Feeling particularly down one day, Andersen went for a walk around London and wandered into a used bookstore. There, a book caught his eye. ”It was hard to miss,” he said. “It said ‘Oil’ in huge red letters with an exclamation mark. And it had a beautiful painting of California, which is where I’m from.” Anderson bought the book, Oil! by Upton Sinclair, and soon became captivated by the story of a ruthless oilman’s relentless pursuit of wealth in the early 20th century. “And honestly, out of kind of boredom one day,” Anderson said, “I just started sort of taking pieces from the book and writing them as my own, writing them as a script. I wasn’t thinking I was adapting it into a screenplay. But the words just started to stick. They looked really good. They looked really, really good. And it was really inspiring.” Without fully realizing he was writing a screenplay, Anderson wrote what is widely praised as his masterpiece, There Will Be Blood. “One thing just sort of led to another, and the next thing I knew, it was a year later, and I had adapted parts of the book, wondered where half the other shit came from, and was getting ready to shoot a film.” Reflecting on the unintentional way the film emerged, Anderson said, “When we just sort of focus on the small things, the big things often accidentally end up taking care of themselves.”
I Didn’t Mean To Do This
Zach Bryan wrote poems until the age of caring about other people’s opinions. Everyone he knew thought poetry was lame, so he learned to play the guitar and began disguising his poems as songs. In 2013, at the age of 17, he enlisted in the Navy. He worked 12-hour days, five days a week, and wrote songs in his off-hours. Behind the barracks, he propped up an iPhone and recorded himself performing his songs on an acoustic guitar. He posted these videos on social media, where for a couple of years, they usually got three or four views. You can tell he didn’t imagine even that few people would watch because those early videos are crooked and blurry. “I don’t know even know why I started posting the videos,” Zach said. “I kept doing it and doing it and doing it—I don’t know why.” On September 7, 2019, he posted a video of his song Heading South. A few days later, after a 12-hour work day, Zach returned to find his phone flooded with missed calls and texts. A random person stumbled across the Heading South video and shared it on Reddit. It quickly went viral and sent people to discover his other videos, which too were getting shared around the internet. With the help of some buddies, Zach set up a makeshift studio and recorded two albums. On October 14, 2021, after eight years of service, he was honorably discharged by the Navy to pursue music full-time. He signed with a major label, and five months after he was discharged, he released his debut single “Something in the Orange,” the first of many chart-topping hits. He’s still adjusting to the surreal contrast between the structured, anonymous life of the Navy and the chaotic, intensely public existence of a famous musician. “It’s crazy,” he said. “People come up to me in diners. And they ask to take a picture with me. And they sing words I wrote. And they send me messages about how much my songs matter to them. It’s just crazy because, man, I didn’t fucking mean to do this. It’s amazing and cool, but I never in my life envisioned being a musician, ever. Period. My old man was in the Navy. My mom was in the Navy. My grandpa was in the Navy. I was going to be in the Navy until the day I die—that was it. That was going to be my life. And if this had never happened, I would still be the same guy with the same guitar playing these same songs to myself in the same room.”
Go For The Moon, Miss, And Discover A New Planet
Before John Mayer joined Dead & Company, he held a false assumption about The Grateful Dead. “I always thought the unique Grateful Dead sound was an intentional invention,” Mayer said. But as he spent more and more time with the original Grateful Dead members, he learned, the unique Grateful Dead was an unexpected by-product of striving for something else. “The sound of the Grateful Dead,” Mayer explains, “is a misinterpretation in the attempt to sound exactly like their musical heroes. Their aspiration has always been to be on the same level as every artist they’ve ever looked up to. It’s like, they went for the moon, missed, and discovered a new planet,” Mayer said. Which, he adds, is also a wonderful technique for discovering yourself. “Failing to be like the artists you look up to is a wonderful technique for being yourself. I did it for a lot of years. Stevie Ray Vaughan, Robert Cray, Eric Clapton, B.B. King, Buddy Guy, Hubert Sumlin—I looked up to these guys as like references. They were like baseball cards. They were like if you’re into the NBA and you wear different jerseys and pretend you’re a different player in the driveway—that’s what I was doing. I wanted to sound just like them, and then in the way that I naturally couldn’t—that’s my personality…You try to sound like who you want to sound like, but you just will always end up sounding like you.”
I’m A Great Believer In Accidents
In 1927, a freelance artist named Theodor Geisel created a cartoon for Judge magazine. It caught the attention of a Standard Oil executive, leading to a lucrative contract producing Flit insect spray ads. Which got monotonous. “For seventeen years,” Geisel explained, “[I used] exactly the same caption by drawing a different picture each time.” So eventually, “I was really wanting something more to do.” As he sought other creative outlets, he learned that his Standard Oil contract “forbade me from doing an awful lot of stuff.” Writing and illustrating children’s books, however, wasn’t forbidden. “I would like to say I went into children’s book work because of my great understanding of children,” he’d later say. “I went in because it wasn’t excluded by my Standard Oil contract.” Anticipating his children’s books could be embarrassingly bad, to avoid staining his real name and his reputation in advertising, Geisel decided to publish under the pen name, Dr. Seuss. Against his anticipatory anxieties, Geisel went on to be the bestselling children’s book author ever. “I’m a great believer in accidents,” he said. “Everybody gets into things accidentally.”
Expect Nothing. Accept Anything
After he read a book about the world of stand-up comedy then watched a movie about the life of a stand-up comedian, Jerry Seinfeld decided he wanted to be a stand-up comedian in 1974. “But—” he realized, “What if I can’t? What if I’m not funny?” He imagined the life of a “not-that-funny comedian”—a “not-that-funny comedian” probably makes enough money to buy a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter each week, he thought. “I could easily survive on that. It was all I ate in my parents’ house, anyway.” So, Seinfeld decided to devote his life to being a not-that-funny comedian. “Without realizing it,” he writes, “this is the exact right way to start out in the world of comedy. Expect nothing. Accept anything.”