Going Through The Trouble
In 1959, Bob Dylan played his first-ever gig at a coffee house called the Ten O’Clock Scholar in Minnesota. At one point, a woman pulled the owner of the Scholar aside. “Make him stop singing,” she said. “He’s driving all the customers out of this place.” For years, versions of this happened again and again. “He sang so badly,” another venue owner remembered. “He was way off key and after he’d sung for a little while, people would get up and leave.” “He couldn’t play the guitar worth a shit,” said a college student who’d hosted a party Dylan performed at. “The party quickly started to break up because this kid wouldn’t stop singing.” And when Dylan made his first trip to the East Coast, a friend of a friend took him to play a set at Caffé Lena, a coffeehouse in upstate New York. “After it,” the friend of the friend said, “[the owner] called me and said not to bring him back again.” In the midst of all this rejection, all these people telling him he was no good, someone asked Dylan why he keeps at it. “You know,” he said, “I’m one of these people that thinks that everybody has certain gifts when they’re born. Not everybody goes through the trouble of trying to figure out just what they are.” I myself am one of those people who thinks nobody is born with certain gifts. Some people simply go through the trouble of developing abilities others come to regard as gifts.
Going through the trouble of developing abilities—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
People Who Seem To Be Possessors of Mysterious Secrets
In an essay on the age-old question of where good ideas come from, the great science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin wrote that the question reflects a common misconception: that creative ability is somehow different from every other kind of ability. That artists possess certain natural gifts rather than a collection of skills cultivated over time. “If you haven’t learned how to do something,” she wrote, “the people who have may seem to be magicians, possessors of mysterious secrets.” But they are not. “In any complex art,” she continued, “such as house-keeping, piano-playing, clothes-making, or story-writing, there are so many techniques, skills, choices of method, so many variables, that you can learn them only by methodical, repeated, long-continued practice—in other words, by work.” Those who appear to possess certain mysterious gifts have simply put in the methodical, repeated, long-continued work to develop them. Consider how you got good at the things you’re good at, Le Guin suggests: “Nothing I know about how I learned to do the things I am good at doing leads me to believe that there are ‘secrets’ to the piano or the sewing machine or any other art I’m no good at. There is just the obstinate, continuous cultivation of a disposition, leading to skill in performance.”
A Glorious Decade Of Awkwardness
Jon Batiste is often called things like “a certified musical genius,” “a once-in-a-generation talent,” and “a true musical prodigy.” “People think, ‘Oh, you were born playing the piano and you came out singing,’” Batiste said. “This is not the case. There was a glorious awkwardness. There was a decade or more before I got good at the instrument. There was a long period of hours and hours in the practice room.” Those years in the practice room would shape his answer when asked his advice to anyone who wanted to become a great musician: ”You have to be okay with sounding bad for a long time.” Sitting at a piano, Batiste demonstrated the exercises he used to develop his abilities and still practices to keep honing them: meticulous finger drills, scales and chord progressions repeated with subtle variations, the same notes played again and again to hear how changes in pressure altered their sound. “It’s all just like boring, mundane stuff,” he said. “I didn’t like that kind of stuff, but I did it anyway. Because I just wanted to get there, you know?”—to the other side of the long process of developing the abilities people now regard as gifts.
Not Even A Hint Of Talent
The radio personality Ira Glass was once talking to some college students grappling with what to do with their lives. After briefly explaining how he had found his way into radio, one of the students asked, “How did you know not just what you wanted to do, but that you’d be great at it?” “Honestly,” Glass said, “even the stuff you’re really good at, you’re not really good at right away.” To illustrate, he told them about how long it took him to get good at his job. A few years into making his Pulitzer Prize-winning show, This American Life, producer Alix Spiegel pitched a story similar to one Glass had made early in his career. Glass suggested that they dig up the old piece he’d made to see if anything could be salvaged from it. After listening, Spiegel said, “Wow. There’s no sign that you have any talent for radio. Like there’s not even a hint that you’re ever going to be any good.” When Glass then revisited other episodes from his archives, he was struck by how, even 15 years into his career, he still wasn’t very good. “The key thing,” Glass told the students, “is to force yourself through the work it takes to force the skills to come. That’s the hardest phase.” Still, the students pressed for certainty, wanting to know how to be sure before choosing one path or another. “Your problem,” Glass told them, “is you’re trying to judge all these things in the abstract before you do them. And that’s your tragic mistake. I mean it’s not a satisfying answer to hear that you just have to get in there and do things, but in fact it’s the only really honest answer that anybody would give you who’s done it…You just have to push very, very hard on things before they get to be good. And yourself as well.”
Nobody Really Knows Anything About Any Of This
Back in the ‘80s, Jerry Seinfeld’s friend was teaching a comedy course at The Improv in Los Angeles. The friend asked Seinfeld if he’d be willing to visit the class and speak to the students. Seinfeld agreed. “I went in and there were maybe 20 people in the class,” he recalled. “I went up on stage, and I said, ‘The fact that you’ve signed up for this class is already a very bad sign for what you’re trying to do. The fact that you think anyone can teach you or that there’s something you need to learn, you’ve gone off on a bad track because nobody really knows anything about any of this.’” Seinfeld suspected that the students were looking for a shortcut to becoming great comedians, hoping the class would give them the secrets that would spare them the trouble of forcing the skills to come. “You know,” Seinfeld said, “no one’s really that great. You know who’s great? The people that just put a tremendous amount of hours into it.” If he could do it over, Seinfeld said, “what I really should have done is I should have had a giant flag behind me, and when I pulled a string, it would roll down, and on the flag, it would just say two words: Just work.”
Travel To The Moon And Back A Few Times
“Lord knows when I started writing poetry, it was rotten,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver said. “The poetry was just rotten. But I kept at it, kept at it, kept at it. I used to say, with my pencil, I’ve traveled to the moon and back a few times. I kept at it every day.” She went through the trouble of putting in the methodical, repeated, mundane, long-continued practice. “And finally,” Oliver said, “I learned things.” Things others would come to regard as gifts.