So Good At Not Being So Good
When the former professional tennis player Paul Annacone began coaching Pete Sampras in 1995, Sampras was the best tennis player in the world. Just 23 years old, Sampras had already won five Grand Slam titles and was coming off two years as the world’s No. 1 player. When Annacone started working with him, there was something that immediately jumped out about Sampras. Of course, he was enormously talented, but Annacone—who himself had been a three-time All-American in college before spending nearly a decade playing on the professional tour—had spent most of his life around players with enormous talent. Sampras had “a different kind of talent,” Annacone wrote. Nobody has their A-game every day. In Annacone’s experience, when most players are having an off-day, it tends to set off a downward spiral: they get frustrated by how they’re playing, the frustration chips away at their confidence, the dip in confidence leads to even worse play, which leads to even more frustration, which leads to losing even more confidence, which leads to playing even worse, and so on. Sampras, Annacone noticed, was unusually good at not getting caught in that vicious cycle. When Sampras’s game was off, Annacone wrote, “he kept his confidence and stayed positive and didn’t let his emotions affect his performance.” That was what set him apart: “he was so good at not playing so good. No matter how he played, he was going to react great, and that’s a more important trait. That’s what the greats do so well.”
Being good at not being so good—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
That Old Archenemy of Mastery
I have a three-year-old nephew who I see every three or four months, and every time I see him, I’m struck by how good he is at not being so good at things. When he was two and a half, he got his first bike—a little balance bike without pedals—which he’d sort of waddle around on, scooting himself along with his feet. By the next time I saw him, he was riding with pedals and doing things like picking up speed before slamming on the brakes and skidding into a 180-degree turn. But he seemed just as happy doing the 180 as he had been waddling around on the pedal-less bike, blissfully unaware that one was more impressive than the other. He seems to approach just about everything that way, without any conception of whether he’s good or bad at this or that. He always makes me think of this point George Leonard makes in this 1987 Esquire piece on mastery, where Leonard pushes back against the idea that children are naturally better and faster learners than adults. “This is not true,” he wrote. If children often appear to be better learners, “It’s because so many adults have allowed themselves to fall prey to that old archenemy of mastery: excessive goal orientation. The typical adult in our culture is constantly looking ahead, is impatient for significant results, is unwilling to appear foolish or to make mistakes. The typical young person, on the other hand, is more sensuous, more in the moment, less concerned about appearances or results.”
A Lot Of Us Fell Prey To The Taste Gap
Lin-Manuel Miranda (creator of the Broadway musicals Hamilton and In The Heights, as well as the soundtracks for the animated movies Moana, Vivo, and Encanto) attended a selective school for gifted students with artistic aspirations. Decades later, after he’d become one of the most successful artists of his time, some of his former classmates were asked why, in a school filled with kids who had similar potential and ambitions, Miranda became the superstar. “A lot of us fell prey to the taste gap,” one said, “feeling that we’d never [be] like the greats. A lot of us made ourselves give up. But Lin was never like that. He always saw his creative output as worthwhile. He wasn’t comparing himself to his heroes. He was like: ‘I’m going to make what I can right now…and learn as I go.’”
The Lesson From The Things You’re Good At
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 staying with things through the long, awkward process of eventually getting good at them.
The 1.5%
Jerry Seinfeld started performing stand-up comedy in 1976. Since then and to this day, every day he sits with a yellow legal pad and writes jokes. Given that he’d been honing his craft for 47 years, he was asked, “How do you know a joke is going to work on stage?” Seinfeld said, “You don’t.” “You just trust yourself?” the interviewer asked. “No you don’t,” Seinfeld said. “There’s no trust. It’s excruciating—8 or 9 times out of 10, it doesn’t work.” The interviewer pushed back, noting that he had recently seen Seinfeld perform at The Beacon Theatre in New York City, where Seinfeld got nothing but laughs. “What you saw is what’s worked,” Seinfeld said. “But you only saw 1.5% of what I’ve tried.” Rarer than comedic talent, Seinfeld adds, is the ability to be good at not being so good 98.5% of the time. “It’s slightly terrorizing,” Seinfeld said. “A lot of people can be funny, a lot of people can write jokes, but not a lot of people can handle that daily slight terror.”
The Fallow Periods
The legendary designer Paula Scher said, “I still [a little over 5 decades into her career] make things that are pretty awful. It’s part of the process. You have periods of tremendous productivity and other periods where you’re fallow. The fallow periods are really important because that’s where you’re figuring something out. You have to work through it in order to discover something new. You need those sorts of periods in order to grow.” You need to be good at not being so good.