The Shadow
In his book, in interviews, and in the documentary “Stutz,” the psychiatrist Phil Stutz talks about the Shadow. ”The easiest way to say it,” Stutz explains, “is that the Shadow is the part of yourself that you’re ashamed of…It’s a flawed part of yourself that you feel you have to hide and once you start to hide things, you become very sensitive to whether other people can see them or not. It becomes an obsession—How do they see me, what do they think of me, do they like me, love me?” The paradox is the more you try to hide what you’re ashamed of, the more ashamed you feel. “But the beauty is,” Stutz continues, “once you stop hiding it, you can relax and then you get flow. If you stop hiding your Shadow, if you stop hiding the human part of yourself, you get flow. and that’s what everybody wants.” Stories of people getting flow once they stopped hiding—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
Catastrophe Strikes At The French Open
When he was 19, Andre Agassi started losing his hair. Deeply ashamed of his receding hairline, to hide it, he started wearing a hairpiece. Not long after, at the 1990 French Open, Agassi made it to his first Grand Slam final. “The night before the final,” Agassi writes, “Catastrophe strikes.” As he was taking a shower, he felt the hairpiece disintegrate in his hands. After he realized he had used the wrong conditioner, he summoned his brother, who was able to clip the hairpiece back together with twenty bobby pins. The next morning, Agassi writes, “warming up before the match, I prayed. Not for a win, but for my hairpiece to stay on. Under normal circumstances, playing in my first final of a slam, I’d be tense. But my tenuous hairpiece has me catatonic. Whether or not it’s slipping, I imagine that it’s slipping. With every lunge, every leap, I picture it landing on the clay. I can hear a gasp going up from the crowd. I can picture millions of people suddenly leaning closer to their TVs, turning to each other and in dozens of languages and dialects saying some version of: Did Andre Agassi’s hair just fall off?” At times, he looks into the stands and sees fans sporting hairdos just like his. This only exacerbates his sense of shame. “I can’t imagine all these people trying to be like Andre Agassi,” he writes, “since I don’t want to be Andre Agassi.” So fixated on his Shadow, though he was the heavy favorite, Agassi lost three sets to one. Shortly thereafter, his girlfriend, aware of the hairpiece catastrophe, says, “I think you should just get rid of that hairpiece.” “Impossible,” Agassi replies, “I’d feel naked.” “You’d feel liberated,” she says. He thought it over for a few days: “I thought about the pain my hair has caused me, the inconvenience of the hairpieces, the hypocrisy and the pretending and the lying.” And then he went back to his girlfriend, “Let’s do it…Let’s cut it all off.” His first tournament with a shaved head was another Grand Slam, the Australian Open, and, “I come out like the Incredible Hulk. I don’t drop one set in a take-no-prisoners blitz to the final.” You were right, he told his girlfriend before the final, “my hairpiece was a shackle.” Unshackled from hiding his Shadow, he got flow. In the final, he won three sets to one. “Everyone says it’s my best performance yet, because it’s my first victory over Pete [Sampras]. But I think twenty years from now I’ll remember it as my first bald victory.”
I Gotta Be Me, Baby
In 1997, the actor Rainn Wilson got cast as the lead role in his first Broadway play, London Assurance. In his head, Wilson had this preconceived notion that a Broadway actor must be “some formal ‘classical actor-man,’” he writes in The Bassoon King: My Life in Art, Faith, and Idiocy. So, “I hid my quirkiness and weirdness.” As a result, “I was stiff and disconnected. All my choices were broad, fake, and strangely puppetlike.” He got destroyed in reviews of the show. One critic wrote, “As the young lovers, all that is required of Kathryn Meisle [who played the lead opposite Wilson] and Rainn Wilson is that they be good looking and charming. At least Meisle is good looking.” Another said, “Wilson pushes too hard for comic effect.” In the aftermath of his Broadway bombing, Wilson said, “I said, ‘Never again. Never again am I going to hide. I’m odd, I’m weird—I’m going to embrace that. I’m not going to try to be something else to please someone else. I gotta be me, baby.’” This decision to stop hiding his uniqueness, Wilson writes, “led to the defining role of my career, [the odd, quirky, and weird] Dwight Schrute in The Office.” “Finding Dwight was all about embracing my nerdy weirdness. If I hadn’t totally embraced that, I never would have gotten the role of Dwight,” for which Wilson received three nominations for the Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series.
Manifest Your Unique Character Through Your Discipline
The chess prodigy Josh Waitzkin quit playing chess around the age of 18. “I was a naturally creative, aggressive chess player,” Waitzkin explained. “My style was to create chaos on the chessboard, and my strength lay in finding hidden harmonies.” With this style, Waitzkin won the U.S. Junior Chess Championship at the age of 11 and became an International Master at age 16. Then, Waitzkin got a coach who forced him to play like the world champions, Anatoly Karpov and Tigran Petrosian—“the most positional, conservative chess players.” When he was forced to hide the style that matched his natural proclivities, Waitzkin said, “I lost my love for the game.” So Waitzkin quit playing chess, and shortly after, he took up martial arts. He trained for just two years before he won his first national championship in martial arts. Asked if he took anything from chess into the martial arts, Waitzkin said he didn’t hide his unique physical and mental traits. “And in my observation of competitors in any discipline, this is a really fundamental idea,” he said. “Those who succeed at the highest level, I think, basically manifest their unique character through their discipline.” You gotta be you, baby.
Say It Out Loud
Jason Segel made his directorial debut with the show, “Dispatches from Elsewhere.” Leading up to the start of filming, he was overwhelmed with anxiety and a sense of imposter syndrome, or as he described it, “the feeling that you were invited by mistake.” To get rid of his anxiety about directing for the first time, he told everyone he was having anxiety about directing for the first time. Instead of hiding it, he said, “I just owned it, ‘this is my first time directing—if I do anything that bugs you, let me know. It is not intentional, I’m doing this for the first time.’ I had many discussions like that. And that was freeing—you say it out loud, and it breaks the ice.”
The Essence of Our Art
“It seems to me,” the puppeteer Jim Henson (The Muppets, Sesame Street, Fraggle Rock, etc.) said, “that each of us expressing our own originality is the essence of our art and professionalism.” Don’t hide it. Embrace it. Express it. Manifest it through your discipline. Say it out loud.