The Briefcase Syndrome
At a time when the popular image of artists and innovators was “the emotionally unstable, sloppy, loose-jointed Bohemian,” the psychologist Dr. D.W. MacKinnon began studying the most creative people of the twentieth century. After a five-year research program focused on forty of the era’s greatest architects, MacKinnon and his team spent over three decades studying the characteristics of a range of creative types: writers, mathematicians, scientists, Air Force officers, managers, and others. “One of the most striking observations we have made is that the creative person seldom fits the layman’s stereotype,” MacKinnon wrote. He and his team referred to the “cluster of traits characteristic of the creative person as the briefcase syndrome of creativity—closer, if you will, to the notion of professional responsibility than to the Greenwich Village Bohemian or to the North Beach Beatnik.” Like the briefcase-carrying professional who shows up at the office every day whether or not they’re “in the mood,” “our creative subjects [experience] periods of frustration and depression when blocked in their creative striving, but…overriding these moods has been an unquestioning commitment to their creative endeavor.” Overriding a down mood and staying committed to one’s endeavors during periods of frustration, depression, and creative blocks—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
Every Day Is All There Is
The great writer Joan Didion said she never felt confident when she sat down to write. Instead of confidence, Didion said, she had “blind faith that if you go in and work every day it will get better. Three days will go by and you will be in that office and you will think every day is terrible. But on the fourth day, if you do go in, if you don’t go into town or out in the garden, something usually will break through.” When the interviewer asked how she felt when she woke up and in the hours before heading to her office, Didion replied, “Oh, I don’t want to go in there at all,” Didion said. “It’s low dread, every morning. That dread goes away after you’ve been in there an hour. I keep saying ‘in there’ as if it’s some kind of chamber, a different atmosphere. It is, in a way. There’s almost a psychic wall. The air changes. I mean you don’t want to go through that door. But once you’re in there, you’re there, and it’s hard to go out.” As Didion talked about her commitment to writing every day, whether or not she was in the mood, the interviewer recalled hearing Didion once talk about using her good silver at the table every day. “Well,” Didion replied, “every day is all there is.”
I’ve Gotten Comfortable With That Anxiety
Bruce Springsteen is one of the most prolific songwriters in modern music, with 21 studio albums, 121 live albums, and 66 music videos spanning over six decades. He’s famous for writing far more songs than he releases, like the 70-plus songs he wrote for Born in the U.S.A., of which only 12 made it onto the album. He has also written hits for other artists, like Patti Smith’s Because the Night and the Pointer Sisters’ Fire. Asked about his extraordinary output and if he’s ever experienced a period of anxiety, worrying that his creative well has dried up, that he’ll never be able to write another song, Springsteen said, “Of course, I have that all the time.” He repeated, “I have that all the time. I’ve gotten used to that being part of the natural state of the artist’s consciousness.” He analogized going to the writing desk every day like going to start an old, beat-up car: “Some mornings, you try to start the car, and it runs—great…Most times, you start the car, it runs for a half an hour, breaks down, won’t start up for two weeks. You try to start it—[makes sputtering sound of an engine failing to turn over]—nothing. Again, [makes sputtering sound of an engine failing to turn over]—nothing. Records are made like that. You know? I’ve written six songs that I think are record-worthy in six days and then spent an entire year trying to write six more. It’s simply not predictable. You have to get used to withstanding that anxiety, you have to get comfortable with it…I’ve gotten comfortable with that anxiety.”
Hello Darkness, My Old Friend
For his first 6 years as a songwriter, Paul Simon wrote terrible songs. “They were all terrible,” Simon’s biographer Robert Hilburn said. “I found his old demos—there’s about 50 of them—and it’s unbelievable: there isn’t one good song.” The years of producing terrible songs made Simon increasingly frustrated and depressed. “Indeed,” Hillburn writes, “Simon’s first great song was born during a period of trauma when he was in need of comfort.” To try to comfort himself, Simon developed a nightly ritual. “I’d go off in the bathroom in the dark,” Simon explains, “and I’d turn on the faucet so that water would run—I like that sound, it’s very soothing to me.” Night after night, he’d sit alone in the bathroom with the lights off and the water running from the faucet, strumming his guitar and improvising lyrics. Sometime in late November of 1963, he went to the bathroom for his nightly session, and before he started strumming his guitar, these words came out of him,
Hello darkness, my old friend
I’ve come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains within the sound of silence
That became the opening verse of The Sound of Silence, a song that led to a record deal with Columbia Records, then a spot at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for the week ending January 1, 1966, and eventually a spot at No. 156 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.
Years later, Simon reflected on how those words seemed to mysteriously come out of nowhere: “It really was this phenomenon—you can call it different things: being in flow, being in the zone—where you become a conduit and the words just come through you…There’s something a little mystical about it.” It made me think of Steven Pressfield, who talks about how “the mundane takes you to the mystical.” The common misconception, Pressfield says, is that flashes of creative genius come from somewhere up above, from some heavenly source, from an out-of-body moment in some higher realm. The reality is, he says, “the mundane takes you to the mystical. There is a Muse, but she comes up from the depths of discipline, of commitment, of ritual…The showing up every day, the habits and rituals that reinforce what you’re doing, the integrity of working hour after hour—that’s what gets rewarded.”
Focus On What You Can Control
During his first two years at Michigan, Tom Brady was frustrated. He wasn’t playing in games, and in practice, Brady didn’t get many chances to show what he could do. He was buried so far down the roster, with so many other quarterbacks above him on the depth chart that he only got two reps each practice. After two years of this, Brady decided that he wanted to transfer. He met with his coach to express his frustration: “The other quarterbacks get all the reps.” Coach replied, “Brady, I want you to stop worrying about what all the other players on our team are doing. All you do is worry about what the starter is doing, what the second guy is doing, what everyone else is doing. You don’t worry about what you’re doing.” Coach reminded him, “You came here to be the best. If you’re going to be the best, you have to beat out the best.” And then he recommended that Brady start meeting with Greg Harden, a counselor who worked in Michigan’s athletic department. Brady went to Harden’s office and complained, “I’m never going to get my chance. They’re only giving me 2 reps.” Harden said, “Just go out there and focus on doing the best you can with those 2 reps. Make them as perfect as you possibly can.” “So that’s what I did,” Brady said. “They’d put me in for those 2 reps—man, I’d sprint out there like it was Super Bowl 39. ‘Let’s go boys! Here we go! What play we got?’” “And I started to do really well with those 2 reps. Because I brought enthusiasm, I brought energy.” Impressed by Brady’s unquestioning commitment to those 2 reps, Coach soon gave him 4 reps each practice. Then 10. “And before you knew it,” Brady said, “with this new mindset that Greg instilled in me—to focus on what you can control, to focus on what you’re getting, not what anyone else is getting, to treat every rep like it’s the Super Bowl—eventually, I became the starter.”
“This Is Good”
In front of large audience of people “considering some kind of life or career in the world of ideas,” as he put it, the economist Tyler Cowen asked Camille Paglia to offer a piece of advice based on her many years of soldiering through adversity, rejection, and failure before eventually emerging in her mid-40s as a successful and influential writer and thinker. “Every time you have frustrations,” Paglia said, “say, ‘This is good.’ ‘This is good, because this is reality. This is reality as everybody lives it. There’s something meaningful here.’ The desire to withdraw from the world to be a writer or whatever, I think, is a terrible mistake.”