“The Point”
A little while back, I overheard someone talking about the many things they’d decided against doing because they didn’t see “the point” in doing them. They’d thought about starting a YouTube channel, but as they saw it, YouTubers just game an algorithm to get subscribers, and they didn’t really see the point in doing that. They’d thought about writing a book, but figured they’d spend a long time on something that would probably be read by very few people, and they didn’t really see the point in that either. They’d thought about starting a podcast, but there are already millions of podcasts, so they didn’t see the point in becoming just another person with a podcast. Around this same time, I had watched a talk by the science-fiction writer Brandon Sanderson in which he quoted a line from Oscar Wilde’s preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray: “All art is quite useless.” “What he meant,” Sanderson elaborated, “is that there is a point to doing things that doesn’t have to do with their usefulness. It doesn’t have to do with whether it makes money”—or whether it gains subscribers, reaches a wide readership, or is something anyone else particularly wants or needs.
Doing seemingly pointless, useless things—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
The World Doesn’t Need It
Today, Suzanne Ciani is widely regarded as one of the pioneers of electronic music. A five-time Grammy nominee, she has released more than twenty solo albums and composed music for films, television, video games, and some of the most recognizable commercials of her era. As a teenager growing up in the 1950s and ‘60s, Ciani spent as much time as she could making music. At the time, there was no obvious path for a young woman to become a professional composer, much less one working with strange new electronic instruments. Her mother didn’t see the point. To her, it was a tremendous investment of time in something with no practical future. “My mother would always say,” Ciani recalled, “‘The world doesn’t need another album.’ And I would say, ‘Yeah, you’re right, the world doesn’t need it. But I do.’” Gesturing outward, she said, “I’m not doing it for out there.” Then she placed a hand over her heart: “I’m doing it for in here.”
“Why Are You Wasting Your Time?”
For many years, the late great poet Nikki Giovanni was surrounded by people telling her that she was wasting her time pursuing poetry. That writing poems was no way to make a living. “That is the one thing that I really hate,” Giovanni said, “is people saying, ‘Oh, why are you wasting your time with that?’ As if they know how much time you have and what you should do with it. I’m always amazed—people will tell you, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t waste any time doing this,’ or, ‘I wouldn’t waste any time doing that.’ Well, ‘Who the hell are you? And how do you know this is a waste of time?’ It may not be wasted.” Asked what she’d think or say when people told her she’d never make money as a poet, Giovanni said, “Well, not having money was not significant to me. What I wanted to do was what I was doing.”
The Target Is Not The Bullseye
At a meditation retreat on the Big Sur Coast, Zen Master Kobun Chino Roshi put on an archery demonstration. He set up a target at one end of a lawn along the Pacific Ocean. As the many retreatants watched, “slowly and with exquisite care,” Jack Kornfield writes in No Time Like the Present, “Roshi raised and unsheathed his bow from its leather case and carefully strung it. Then he uncased the arrows, sat meditating with them in his lap, then spun them and looked down the length from feathers to tip, finally selecting one. He stood and mindfully paced fifty feet from the target.” There he stopped and turned to face the target. He stood tall, and as he drew the arrow back, the spectators watched with great anticipation for the master archer to hit the center of the target. He aimed at the target for one, two, three, four, five seconds, then suddenly, Roshi raised the bow forty-five degrees and let the arrow fly. “It flew,” Kornfield writes, “over the target, over the cliff, and into the ocean. ‘Success,’ he smiled broadly.” Then, slowly and with exquisite care, he took another fifteen minutes to unstring the bow and pack the arrows. He turned to those watching and bowed. “It was completely unexpected,” Kornfield said. “It was a beautiful teaching: it’s not the bullseye…It’s the preparation, the care, the dance of doing it.”
A Metaphorical Come-To-Jesus Moment
Perhaps Sanderson is fond of that Oscar Wilde line because it reflects a decision he once had to make about his own work. To date, Sanderson has sold more than 40 million books in 35 languages. But his first 12 books were all rejected by every publisher he sent them to. After the twelfth was repeatedly rejected, Sanderson said, “I had a metaphorical come-to-Jesus moment where I was like, ‘What am I doing?’ … I was not making any headway at all.” He had to decide if writing was still worthwhile if it proved useless in every practical sense. “I had to ask myself,” Sanderson said, “’If I died with 150 unpublished manuscripts, was I okay with that? Was I going to keep doing this, even if I knew I would never get published?’ And I realized, ‘Yeah. I would. I would keep going. I would keep writing and telling my stories.’ And I made the call that I was going to keep writing even if I eventually never sold anything.” Telling this story to a creative writing class during the first class of the semester, Sanderson encouraged them to similarly decide whether they’d be content to spend their writerly lives writing books and never selling one. “You can divorce the ‘I have to be professional and make a full-time living’ from the ‘I just like writing and telling stories,’” he said. “You can decide, ‘I just like telling stories. I just like getting better as a writer.’”
Those Who Are Constantly Miserable
In The Bhagavad Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna, “You have the right to work, but never to the fruit of work. You should never engage in action for the sake of reward…Those who are motivated only by desire for the fruits of action are miserable, for they are constantly anxious about the results of what they do.” Or worse, they are constantly deciding against doing things because they cannot see there being any fruit, any usefulness, any point in doing them.