Mental Jiu-Jitsu Moves
On May 2, 1972, Bruce Springsteen auditioned for John Hammond, the record producer who’d signed Bob Dylan and Aretha Franklin—two of Springsteen’s heroes. “I would’ve been in a state of complete panic,” Springsteen wrote, “except on the way up in the elevator, I performed a little mental jiu-jitsu on myself.” “I thought, ‘I’ve got nothing, so I’ve got nothing to lose…If nothing happens, I’m going to walk out of here the same person as when I walked in.’” By the time the elevator doors opened, he felt loose. He sat across from Hammond and played It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City. ”When I was done I looked up,” Springsteen wrote, “and I heard him say, ‘You’ve got to be on Columbia Records’”—the start of a fifty-year run with Hammond and Columbia.
Some mental jiu-jitsu moves—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
Funny, Stupid Goals
In the years leading up to the Olympics, the snowboarder Shaun White would come up with a “funny, stupid goal.” Before the 2010 Vancouver Games, for example, he commissioned a custom pair of American-flag pants and made it his goal to wear them on the cover of Rolling Stone. He started setting these funny, stupid goals, he said, because the “daunting task” of winning the Olympics put him in a day-to-day mental state he didn’t enjoy. Thinking about wearing a ridiculous pair of pants on a magazine cover “took a lot of the pressure off,” while still supplying the daily fuel of a big goal. And of course the silly goal was itself a kind of jiu-jitsu move: if he were to end up on a magazine cover wearing American-flag pants, it would have to mean that he won gold…
“Dear Mother…”
Across his forty five-years of teaching, the great writer John McPhee said he was constantly writing letters in response to students suffering the “self-inflicted paralysis” of a block. “Dear Joel,” goes a typical McPhee reply. “You are writing, say, about a grizzly bear.” For hours—six, seven, ten hours—you can’t think of anything to write. With each passing hour, you get more and more frustrated, more and more hopeless, more and more blocked. “What do you do? You write, ‘Dear Mother….’ And then you tell your mother about the block, the frustration, the ineptitude, the despair. You insist that you are not cut out to do this kind of work. You whine. You whimper. You outline your problem, and you mention that the bear has a fifty-five-inch waist and a neck more than thirty inches around but could run nose-to-nose with Secretariat. You say the bear prefers to lie down and rest. The bear rests fourteen hours a day.” And you keep going on and on like that. “And then you go back,” McPhee writes, “and delete the ‘Dear Mother’ and all the whimpering and whining, and just keep the bear.”
Forgetting To Have A Panic Attack
Usually, Judd Apatow is a mess at social events. “Usually,” he said, “I’m really nervous. I’m anxious. I’m awkward in conversations. I’m bad with names. I’m worrying all night if people think I’m funny.” A few weeks before a party he was dreading, Apatow was watching an interview where one person suggested to the other that they close their eyes for a few seconds to make the conscious decision to be present for the length of their conversation. When he saw that, Apatow figured it couldn’t hurt to try something similar before that event he was dreading. Before he walked into the party, he closed his eyes, “and it’s corny but I thought, ‘I’m just going to think that I’m so lucky to be here.’ … And it actually worked. It really worked. It really affected me the whole night. As the night was almost ending, I thought, ‘Oh, I completely forgot to be in a panic attack about whether or not people like me or think I’m funny.’ It was the least anxious I’ve been at a social event.”
Hacking Your Brain Into Doing What You Want To Have Done
Brandon Sanderson has written more than 70 books. Asked if he’s so prolific simply because he loves writing, Sanderson said no. “I enjoy writing,” he said, “but it is still work. Playing a video game, playing with my magic cards, doing things with my wife and kids—these things bring me much more pure joy in the moment than working on a book.” His favorite part of his job, he said, “is writing the end of a book and then letting people read it. The experience of knowing people now get to read this thing that I’ve created—that’s the best part.” But to get there, “I need to spend between 6 and 18 months working in order to have this thing that I can show to people.” Which is between 6 and 18 months spent getting himself to do things he doesn’t necessarily want to do. “I kind of trick myself into doing what I want to have done,” he said. One of his tricks, for example, is tracking his word count on a spreadsheet, where watching the numbers count up gives him nearly as much satisfaction as watching a progress bar inch toward the next level in his favorite video games. On his website, he even has progress bars counting toward the completion of a book—the thing he loves to have done. He says it’s something he often tells his students in the creative writing class he teaches at Brigham Young University: “Success involves making yourself do the things you want to have done. Learn to hack your brain, tricking yourself into doing what you want to have.”
Taste Governs Every Free Human Response
“Most people think of sensibility or taste as the realm of purely subjective preferences, those mysterious attractions,” Susan Sontag wrote. “But this attitude is naïve…For taste governs every free—as opposed to rote—human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion—there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.” And there is taste in the mental jiu-jitsu moves you make throughout the day. There is taste in what you tell yourself in the elevator on the way up to a big audition. In how you take the pressure off a daunting goal. In what you do when you’re blocked. In what you think walking into a social event. In how you get yourself to do what you want to have done. Nothing is more decisive.