Physicalize It
The Academy Award-winning director made her directorial debut in 1981. Since then, she’s directed 12 movies, including Blue Steel, Point Break, The Hurt Locker, and Zero Dark Thirty. In a conversation about her decades of working with actors, Bigelow was asked what most commonly causes an actor to struggle with a scene so much that they need an unusual number of takes to get it right. “It’s usually that they’re stuck in their head,” she said. “They’re overthinking it.” What kind of direction does Bigelow give an actor to help them get unstuck? “Something to get them physicalizing it and out of their head,” she said. “Maybe it’s a movement. Maybe it’s, ‘Let’s try it pacing around the room.’ Maybe it’s incorporating an object, giving their hands something to do. Just physicalizing it somehow—that tends to stop the kind of mental process that can be a barrier getting in their way.”
Physicalizing it, getting something out of your head—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
The One Call
At a 3-day personal development program focused on helping people get unstuck, Jeremy Giffon picked up an idea he now refers to as “the one call.” “And the idea,” he said, “is that if you tell people there’s one call they should make, almost everyone immediately knows what that call is. And people will go 40, 50 years without ever making it,” keeping it in their head, where they play and replay how it might go, what they might say, how the other person might react, over and over and over again. “If you’re [reading] this,” Giffon continues, “and you immediately thought of someone and then felt bad about the thought or tried to push it out of your head, that’s the call you need to make. And usually the call takes only five minutes, ten minutes. But making it has massive returns,” even if all that happens is you get released from being stuck in your head spending all that time mulling over it.
Get It Cooking
Nearly forty years into her career, Toni Morrison was asked how her writing routine had evolved over the years. “Well,” she said, “I learned over the last eight or nine books how to use my time better.” Early on, her tendency was to delay—to do more and more research, feeling she needed to have the entire story mapped out in her head before she could begin writing it. “I would just keep looking and looking and looking, letting the book be the one that ‘I’m gonna write one day.’” Over time, she noticed that even after all that preparation, she’d start writing and inevitably run into things she never saw coming. Realizing it was impossible to map the whole thing in advance, “what I have learned to do is to get it cooking—to start the book as soon as I have even a slight sense of the narrative and the characters and so on.” Once she starts physicalizing the story, getting it out of her head and onto the page, “when I come up against a profound wide, deep, and profound ignorance, then I go do research and find out what I need to know. And that more targeted research is much more productive because I’ve got the story already cooking.”
A New No-Nonsense Buzz Cut
When he was 19, Andre Agassi started losing his hair. He wore a hairpiece that he agonized over—wondering constantly whether people could tell. “With every lunge, every leap, I picture it landing on the clay,” Agassi writes. “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?” When a girlfriend suggested he get rid of the hairpiece and “shave your hair short, and be done with it,” he replied, “Impossible. I’d feel naked.” “You’d feel liberated,” she insisted. 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 the mental burden of always worrying about it. He went back to his girlfriend. “Let’s do it,” he said. “Let’s cut it all off.” His first tournament with a bald head was the 1995 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.” 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.” Keeping in mind that Agassi was so worried about what others would think or say about his shaved head, I went searching for what others thought or said after he shaved his head. All I could find was a passing mention in a 1995 Washington Post piece: “The wild mane of hair he sported at the tournament last season has been replaced with his new no-nonsense buzz cut.” It made me think of a line from the philosopher Seneca, who writes in a letter titled On Groundless Fears: “We suffer more in our imagination more often than in reality.” In his head, Agassi thought people would think or say nasty things about him. In reality, once he physicalized it, getting his fears out of his imagination…no one really cared.
The Second Fridge In The Spooky Basement
Whenever stress, anxiety, or a down and uninspired mood linger past a day or two, John Mayer says he’s realized it’s typically due to “spending too much time in the boiler room,” as he refers to the inside of his head. “The inside of your head is a very subjective, highly interpretive, world,” he adds. “Visit it the way you would visit the spooky basement every once in a while just to grab something out of the second fridge. Go in there, grab what you need to grab, and fix what you need to fix. Then get out of there and back into the more objective work—do things, create something, make stuff happen out in the real world.”
What To Do If You’re Unsure What To Do
The entrepreneur Brian Armstrong says it’s “one of my favorite lessons I’ve learnt from working with smart people: Action produces information. If you’re unsure of what to do, just do anything, even if it’s the wrong thing. This will give you information about what you should actually be doing.” Whatever it is you’re stuck on or unsure about—a scene, call, story, fear, decision—physicalize it. That tends to stop the kind of overthinking that can be a barrier getting in your way.