One Of The Best Strategies
When an artist is stuck, Rick Rubin writes in The Creative Act, “one of the best strategies is to lower the stakes.” He explains, “We tend to think that what we’re making is the most important thing in our lives and that it’s going to define us for all eternity. Consider moving forward with the more accurate point of view that it’s a small work.” Rubin references Oscar Wilde, who famously said that some things are too important to be taken seriously. “Art is one of those things,” Rubin writes. “Setting the bar low, especially to get started, frees you play, explore, and test without attachment to results.”
Lowering the stakes, setting the bar low, thinking of what we’re doing as small, inconsequential, not a big deal—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
If You Can’t Write Good Songs, Try Writing Bad Poems
After retiring from comedy, Steve Martin started trying to make music. He struggled to write songs for a while, constantly frustrated by the thought that his songwriting didn’t match the quality of his comedy writing. One day, while reading The Stuffed Owl—a book full of “bad poetry”—Martin said, “I thought, just as a joke, ‘I’m going to write some bad poetry!’ … So I wrote some bad poetry.” The stakes lowered, Martin easily wrote a bunch of bad poems. “And I eventually looked at them,” he said, “and thought, ‘this is some bad poetry, but they might make some good country songs.’” The “bad poems” became songs on his album, The Crow: New Songs for the Five-String Banjo, which won a Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album in 2010.
The Most Fascinating Thing About Self-Loathing
In 2010, Cheryl Strayed received a letter from a woman named Elissa Bassist, cataloging her doubts and anxieties. She worried that she writes “like a girl.” That she’d never be as good a writer as David Foster Wallace. That she’d forever be “sick with panic that I cannot—will not—override my limitations, insecurities, jealousies, and ineptitude.” And that she’d “eventually collapse in a heap of ‘I could have been better than this.’” In her own long period of self-loathing, convinced she too would never measure up to her favorite writers, Strayed replied: on a chalkboard in her living room, “I wrote, ‘The first product of self-knowledge is humility,’ Flannery O’Connor.” “Do you know what that is?” she asked Bassist. “To be humble? The word comes from the Latin words humilis and humus. To be down low. To be of the earth. To be on the ground. That’s where I went.” She lowered herself to possibility of writing a “mediocre,” “never-going-to-be-published,” “nowhere-in-league-with-the-writers-I’d-admired-so-much-that-I-practically-memorized-their-sentences” book. “It was only then,” only when she lowered the stakes, “only when I humbly surrendered, that I was able to do the work I needed to do.” She suggested that Bassist get a chalkboard and write the words “humility” and “surrender” on it. “That’s what I think you need to find and do to get yourself out of the funk you’re in. The most fascinating thing to me about your letter is that buried beneath all the anxiety and sorrow and fear and self-loathing, there’s arrogance at its core. It presumes you should be successful at twenty-six, when really it takes most writers so much longer to get there. It laments that you’ll never be as good as David Foster Wallace—a genius, a master of the craft—while at the same time describing how little you write. You loathe yourself, and yet you’re consumed by the grandiose ideas you have about your own importance. You’re up too high.” Come down low, down to earth: “Writing is hard for every last one of us…Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig…So simply write, Elissa Bassist. Not like a girl. Not like a boy. Write like a motherfucker.” (Bassist eventually published her first book, an acclaimed memoir, in 2022. On the back cover, there’s a blurb from Strayed: “…an impressive debut. Elissa Bassist wrote it like a motherfucker.”)
Who Cares? What’s The Big Deal?
After winning back-to-back gold medals at the 2006 and 2010 Winter Olympics, Shaun White was the favorite to win gold at the 2014 games in Sochi. Before he dropped into the halfpipe in Sochi, Shaun said, “I knew I was going to lose…It was totally mental.” He was feeling the weight of the pressure to three-peat and, he said, “my mind was just not in a good place.” White didn’t podium. So after Sochi, alongside the physical training, he worked on the mental side, on making the biggest stage in his sport feel a little smaller. At the 2018 Games in PyeongChang, before he dropped in for his final run, White said, “I said, ‘Who cares?’ At the end of the day, ‘Who cares?’ What’s the big deal? I’m here, I’m going to try my best, and, ‘Who cares?’ I’m going to go on from this regardless of what happens. Even though my whole world is wrapped up in this—Who cares?” He then put down one of the best runs of his life, scoring a 97.75 to win gold.
The Down-Up Theory
In high school, Judd Apatow began his lifelong practice of interviewing his comedy and writing heroes. From interviewing hundreds of legendary artists, he said, he developed a very simple theory of creativity. He calls it the Down-Up theory: “get the ideas DOWN then fix them UP.” “Give yourself permission to suck. Anything goes. Just get something down.” Even if it’s bad, mediocre, nowhere-in-league-with-those-you-admire. “Then in a different session,” Apatow said, “go into fix-up mode.” (File next to: Everyone Starts With Shit)
Premeditated Resentments
Anne Lamott writes in Crooked Little Heart: A Novel, “expectations are resentments waiting to happen.” Elsewhere, she said, “expectations are premeditated resentments.” And: “Expectations are resentments under construction: set the expectations bar as low as you can!” It is one of the best strategies—to lower the stakes, to be down low, to set expectations aside, and simply write, create, ride, compete, perform, or dig.