Expeditions On False Trails
In 1926, the great psychoanalyst and writer Marion Milner made herself the subject of an experiment to determine what actually made her happy. The method was simply to go about her life as usual, pay a little closer attention to the moments and experiences in which she felt particularly happy, record them at the end of the day, and then later analyze the accumulated observations “to see whether I could discover any rules about the conditions in which happiness occurred.” The investigation would ultimately take seven years. Reflecting on those seven years in the preface to A Life of One’s Own—the book that emerged from the experiment—Milner described it as “an exploration which involved doubts, delays, and expeditions on false trails.” I especially like the phrase expeditions on false trails—it got me thinking about the distintictive relationship expeditionists have to things not going as planned, expected, or hoped. Going down paths that lead nowhere, pursuing hypotheses that don’t hold up, pouring enormous amounts of time and effort into possibilities that ultimately turn out to be complete duds—these are not just inevitable, but valuable to the expeditionist.
The inevitability and value of “false trails”—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
None of It is Wasteful
Early in his songwriting career, if he sat down at the writing table and walked away hours later without a song, John Mayer felt like he had wasted his time. And when a song occasionally flowed out of him, he felt like it came out of nowhere. So he looked for ways to eliminate the wasted efforts and increase those spontaneous bursts of creativity. What he found was that he was wrong on all counts: the wasteful efforts were not wasteful, and the spontaneous bursts were not spontaneous. “When you’re writing and you think you’re not getting anything good,” Mayer said, “what you’re actually doing is you’re assembling firewood for the moments where that second thing happens. You’re assembling firewood for the moment when the truth is ready to come out. And so none of it is wasteful. Nothing ever happens on the spot.”
Learn Things To Rule Out Things
A little over four years ago, I met Rick Rubin in person for the first time to begin talking about a project that is still making its way toward wherever it ultimately ends up. After some small talk that first day, he said, “Maybe it would be helpful if I told you the story of a past project from start to finish, so you can get a sense of my approach to a creative project.” He told me this great story, much of which was about a long period spent trying to figure out what the project was actually going to be. He had set out with only a vague idea of what he wanted to make. So he started reading things, watching things, talking to people, following leads. Something would seem promising for a while, then come to nothing. An idea would seem like it was going to be central to the whole thing, then turn out to be irrelevant. As I was thinking about how frustrated and restless I would have gotten, doing so much to get so little of the project figured out, Rick said what struck me as a much better way of accounting for all that time and effort: “In the early stages of every project, it’s very important to learn things to rule out things.”
Every Single Thing Has Paid Off
James Cameron has written and directed 3 of the top 4 highest-grossing movies of all time (Avatar, Avatar: The Way of Water, and Titanic). Long before he made movies, after he dropped out of community college, Cameron spent about ten years working low-wage manual labor jobs. He was a truck driver, a school bus mechanic, a high school janitor, a precision tool and die machinist, and so on. “It was a long period of frustration for me in this kind of blue-collar life,” he said. “I was frustrated because I just kind of didn’t know what I was here for.” At some point, he started spending his weekends in the University of Southern California library, where he discovered a deep fascination with filmmaking. He printed every film-related thesis and dissertation he could find, filed them in big binders, and “gave myself a full graduate course on film technology,” he said. In 1979, he got an entry level assistant job at a small independent film company. He quickly developed a reputation for being able to figure out how to do pretty much anything, and in 1982, he was hired to direct his first major film. “I found that everything I had been doing before all flowed perfectly to that moment of film directing,” he said. “Now I look back on it, and every single thing that I learned at those blue-collar jobs has paid off for me. How to drive a truck. How to be a machinist. Even being a high school janitor and scraping the gum off the bottom of the desks—even that is something that I value now as something that I needed to go through.”
In The Excursion, You Learn To Know Yourself
For years, William James loved the idea of being a naturalist. He loved reading about the great naturalists throughout history. He traveled to attend lectures by the great naturalists of his time. And he idolized the internationally celebrated naturalist Louis Agassiz. But then, in 1865, James went on his first excursion. Agassiz was recruiting volunteers to join him on an expedition to Brazil. James was selected to go on an expedition with the greatest living naturalist—it was the opportunity of his lifetime. “W.J.” James wrote in his journal, “in this excursion, you will learn to know yourself and your resources more intimately than you do now, and will come back with your character considerably evolved and established.” Twelve days later, James was with Agassiz somewhere in the Brazilian wild. “My coming was a mistake,” James wrote to his family a few days later. Fleas, mosquitoes, ringworm, violent itching, uncomfortable sleeping quarters, and tasks that seemed meaningless—“I am now certain that my forte is not to go on exploring expeditions,” he wrote. “I am convinced now, for good, that I am cut out for a speculative rather than an active life…When I get home I’m going to study philosophy all my days.”
The Vein Running Through All That Is Worthwhile
In his book Consolations, 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…Any endeavor achieved without delay, wrong turnings, occasional blank walls and a vein of self-doubt running through it is a bagatelle”—things of little importance or consequence. “What is worthwhile,” on the other hand, always involves doubts, delays, and many expeditions on false trails.