The Joe DiMaggio Principle
At a restaurant called Coco Pazzo in New York City, Tom Hanks was eating dinner with his wife, his mother-in-law, and a few others when the maître d’ interrupted: “Excuse me Mr. Hanks. Joe DiMaggio is dining with us tonight and he wondered if you might come by so he could introduce himself.” A lifelong baseball fan, Hanks said, “I leapt up from the table and said, ‘Take me to him.’” Some years earlier, Hanks read in a review of one of his movies, “like Joe DiMaggio in centerfield, Hanks makes it look easy.” There in Coco Pazzo, he told DiMaggio, one of the greatest baseball players of all time, “there has never been a greater compliment that I’ve received than saying that like Joe DiMaggio, I made my job look easy.” “And he said to me, ‘Yeah it looks easy, but’—then he held his hand over his heart—and he said, ‘but it never was in here.’ And I understood exactly what he was saying…Dude, I worked my freaking ass off in order to make it look easy. And this—this I understood.” Through collecting the stories below—and many others not included below—I’ve come to think of this as The Joe DiMaggio Principle (or sometimes, The Joe DiMaggio Illusion): those who make it look easy, intuitive, sudden, impromptu or off the cuff worked their freaking ass off in order to make it look easy intuitive, sudden, impromptu or off the cuff…
A Complete False Assessment
When an actor makes their job look easy, they’re praised as intuitive, instinctual, naturals. It’s implied and inferred that they don’t do much prep work—that they simply show up and let their natural talent carry the performance. This is held up by aspiring actors who either a) get discouraged, doubting whether they possess the same natural ability, or b) internalize the misguided idea that greatness can be effortless, causing them to not do the work it takes to make it look easy. “I think it’s the biggest load of shit,” the great actor Edward Norton said of the tendency to glorify effortlessness. “It’s a complete false assessment of what has actually gone into the work of many great actors who people point at and say, ‘they’re a natural.’” Norton has worked with and-or gotten to know many of those great actors who make it look easy. “If you think that Daniel Day-Lewis or Robert De Niro or Joaquin Phoenix—anyone who’s good or who you think is good—if you think they don’t do a whole lot of work,” Norton said, “if you think they don’t do the analytical work, the dramaturgical work, the work to understand the piece, to understand the work of the director, to understand the styles of their cast mates, to understand how their role fits within the piece, you’re out of your mind. If you think they don’t do a whole lot of research, literally, before they even attempt to get inside their character, you’re out of your mind.”
Write Long And Publish Short
In 1961, Joan Didion wrote her famous “On Self-Respect” essay as the magazine was going to press. Vogue assigned the topic to another writer, who failed to deliver. The title for a self-respect piece irretrievably engraved on the cover, Didion wrote not to a word count or a line count, but to an exact character count. “I improvised a replacement in 2 sittings,” Didion said. Didion started working at Vogue in 1956. For the 5 years before writing “On Self-Respect,” her first bylined piece for the magazine, Didion worked as an assistant, quietly developing her craft through various behind-the-scenes writing tasks: ad copy, photo captions, and other short-form textual elements. “It was in these anonymous, minimal spaces,” writes biographer Evelyn McDonnell in The World According to Joan Didion, “that Didion learned how to master Hemingwayesque brevity, to use every word necessary—and not a single word more.” During those years, Didion got to work under Allene Talmey, associate editor and columnist at Vogue. At the time, Talmey was 20-plus years into her career. Sensing Didion’s eagerness to learn, she would give Didion practice exercises. Among them, Talmey would assign her to write a 300-word story, and when Didion submitted her 300 words, Talmey would tell her to pare it down to 50 words. “We wrote long and published short,” Talmey said, “and by doing that Joan learned to write.” Didion would recall Talmey telling her, “Run it through again, sweetie.” “Prune it out, clean it up, make the point.” And so—on that day in 1961 when the “real writer,” as Didion called him, wasn’t able to complete the piece in time, Didion improvised her famous “On Self-Respect” essay, seemingly, right there on the spot. But actually, she’d been working her freaking ass off for five years, practicing the very task of writing to an assigned count—and not a single character more. “That,” she said, “was what writing seemed to me then: a job of work done under pressure, a craft, but a craft that gave me inexplicable pleasure.”
A Cinderella Story
In 2016, Pharrell Williams visited an N.Y.U. music production class to critique student songs. After he listened to a song called “Alaska” by a student named Maggie Rogers, Pharrell said, “Wow. I have zero, zero, zero notes for that.” “And I’ll tell you why,” he said. “Because you’re doing your own thing. It’s singular. It’s like when the Wu-Tang Clan came out—no one could really judge it. You either liked it or you didn’t, but you couldn’t compare it to anything else. And that is such a special quality, and all of us possess that ability.” The video with Pharrell went viral and Maggie Rogers, seemingly overnight, was a pop star. But…Rogers started playing music when she was 7. She started songwriting a few years later. In high school, she attended courses at the Berklee College of Music. During her senior year, she recorded her first album, which is what got her accepted to the N.Y.U. music school and the opportunity to play one of her songs in front of Pharrell. As Rogers later said of the viral video, “My many, many years of focus and hard work got kind of packaged into a Cinderella story.”
The Highest Quality Has The Most Drafts
Shortly after the release of Miracle and Wonder: Conversations with Paul Simon, Malcolm Gladwell talked about the many lessons learned through the deep exploration of Simon’s creative process. Simon, Gladwell said, believed that creativity is built on top of craftsmanship. That creative work is a culmination of hours and hours of working, studying, learning, practicing, and revising. “I responded to that,” Gladwell said, “because writing—to my mind—if you sit around waiting for inspiration, you will wait for your entire life. It’s not what you do. You have to put in the work.” That reminded him—“one of my favorite things I used to do,” Gladwell said, “is whenever I read something I really loved, I would ask the person who wrote it, how many drafts did you do? What you would discover is the stuff that you like the most, that you think is of the highest quality, has the most drafts.” (File next to or below: Robert Greene’s definition of creativity—“creativity is a function of the previous work you put in.”)
The Richard Pryor Illusion
In an interview with Jerry Seinfeld, the actor Dax Shepard talked at length about his favorite comedian, Richard Pryor, describing Pryor as a master of improvisation and off-the-cuff humor. “It wasn’t super mapped out,” Shepard said of Pryor’s stand-up performances. “It was just getting beamed into his mouth.” Given that Seinfeld is “a very methodical comedian,” Shepard said, he wondered if Seinfeld could appreciate Pryor’s seemingly opposite, improvisational style of comedy. “It’s an illusion,” Seinfeld said. “I watched him put these things together in the ‘70s. Every line, every beat, every move, the physical part, the facial part, the vocal part—he assembled it meticulously.” “It appeared,” Shepard replied, “to have this looseness and this fluidity to it.” Seinfeld said, “There was a tremendous amount of work done under the surface to make it appear that way.”