Aren’t You Afraid?
Since her book Eat, Pray, Love became an international sensation, Elizabeth Gilbert said, “everywhere I go, people treat me like I’m doomed.” People constantly ask her, “Aren’t you afraid? Aren’t you afraid you’re never going to top the success of Eat, Pray, Love? Aren’t you afraid you’re going to keep writing for your whole life and you’re never again going to create a book that anybody in the world cares about at all, ever again?” A little over two decades before her book’s success, when Gilbert started telling people that she wanted to be a writer, “I was met with this same sort of fear-based reaction. People would say, ‘Aren’t you afraid you’re never going to have any success? Aren’t you afraid the humiliation of rejection will kill you? Aren’t you afraid that you’re going to work your whole life at this craft and nothing’s ever going to come of it and you’re going to die on a scrap heap of broken dreams with your mouth filled with bitter ash of failure?’” Dealing with the fears, the expectations, the pressures, and the head games to succeed or to follow up success or to be seen as successful, etc.—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6.
Wait Until I Show You North Dakota
Shortly after the release of Vampire Weekend’s fifth album, Only God Was Above Us, the band’s frontman Ezra Koenig was asked if he felt any pressure to follow up the success of their Grammy-winning fourth album, Father of the Bride. “What I’ve always felt,” Ezra said, “is we don’t try to top a previous album. Instead, we try to continue to reveal the whole. It’s like if you’re showing someone around the United States, and you started out in Los Angeles—if the person has never seen the rest of America, they might say, ‘Ok, I get it, America is filled with palm trees, sunshine, the film industry, and celebrities.’ And then you’d go, ‘No, no, that’s just L.A. Wait until I show you North Dakota. Wait until I show you Ohio. Wait until I show you Florida.’ As a huge music fan and a discography nerd, when I think about the arcs of the bands I admire the most, they reveal new or different territory from album to album. So I always thought of progress like that.”
Who Cares?
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. After Sochi, he made some changes in his personal life. He reconnected with his brother. He prioritized spending time with his friends. And he shifted his mindset. At the 2018 games in PyeongChang, before he dropped in for his final fun, Shaun 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.
Like A Rolling Stone
In 1964, Bob Dylan was a wildly successful folk musician touring the world. But he didn’t really want to be a folk musician. “I play these concerts,” he said, “and I ask myself: ‘Would I come see me tonight?’ and I have to truthfully say: ‘No, I wouldn’t come.’” And then he’d ask himself what kind of music he would want to see himself play. “Rock,” he said. “I’d rather see me do rock.” The problem was that he had built a massive audience full of people who love folk music. If he all of a sudden started playing rock music, he knew he might lose his audience. Playing the folk shows eventually got to the point where he was ready to quit playing music altogether. If he were to quit, he realized, it’d sort of be just losing an audience. So Dylan said, Who cares?, and in June 1965, he recorded his first rock song, Like A Rolling Stone. And a month after that, at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, he famously plugged in an electric guitar and performed Like A Rolling Stone for the first time. As expected, the folk enthusiasts in the crowd booed and yelled things like, “Get rid of the electric guitar,” and, “We want the old Dylan!” Dylan shrugged off the boos. He loved the music he was playing. “Now,” Dylan said shortly after Newport, “when I ask myself, would I wanna come hear this tonight? I gotta say, I would. I dig it. You know? I really dig it. I don’t think about quitting any more.”
I’m On House Money, Full-Time
The comedian Hasan Minhaj is the son of Muslim Indian immigrants. His father is an organic chemist and his mother is a physician at Mather Air Force Base. “The choices,” Minhaj says of his parent’s expectations for him, “were doctor, lawyer, engineer, failure.” So, “for my first decade as a comedian,” Minhaj says, “it was real rough between me and my parents.” For his first decade as a comedian, he said, “I had to go to the family wedding or the family party or whatever, and I just had to be like, ‘Yeah, I’m the freak.’” Along with many of the same fear-based questions Gilbert talked about, Hasan said people would always ask if he thought he was actually going to make it as a hugely successful comedian. “I don’t like that question,” he said. “I fundamentally don’t like that question.” Because that question implies that he was doing comedy as a means to some end (money, fame, etc.). “No, no, no,” he said, “The set I get to do tonight at 7:20 PM is the win. I get to do comedy—I won. I’m not an engineer, I’m not a doctor—I won. It being predicated on doing X or being bigger than Y—no, no, no. To me, it’s always just been about the work. I’m on house money, full-time.”
The One Poverty Is Hard On
During the last years of his life, Ernest Hemingway reflected on his early twenties. At the time, he was a very poor, struggling writer. But he was not entirely aware of the fact that he was a very poor, struggling writer. “The one who is doing their work and getting satisfaction from it,” he wrote, “is not the one poverty is hard on.” The one who is doing their work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one fear-based questions, expectations, and pressures are hard on. The one who is doing their work and getting satisfaction from it is on house money, full-time.