Diminishing The Denominator
At some point, the nineteenth-century psychologist and philosopher William James noticed that things that made him feel bad about himself weren’t so different from things that didn’t bother him at all. He felt incredibly insecure around people who knew more psychology than he did, yet was perfectly content “to wallow in the grossest ignorance” of most other subjects. A fellow philosopher’s book outselling his might stir envy, while a novelist selling hundreds of thousands more copies than the two of them combined barely registered. The experience of any given achievement or disappointment, success or failure, James came to argue, is not determined by its objective magnitude or significance. It depends on the ambitions and expectations we’ve come to, knowingly or unknowingly, judge ourselves by—what James calls “pretensions”—and how well we measure up. “Our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do,” he wrote. “It is determined by the ratio of our actualities to our supposed potentialities.” Thus:
The equation hints at two ways to improve the ratio: “Such a fraction may be increased as well by diminishing the denominator as by increasing the numerator.”
Increasing things by diminishing the denominator—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
You Have No Responsibility To Live Up To It
After working on the Manhattan Project—the effort to build the atomic bomb during World War II—Richard Feynman couldn’t seem to make any headway on any scientific problem. Once, he got a sentence into some problem involving gamma rays, and that was all he could come up with. He was becoming increasingly convinced that his capacity for original scientific work had deserted him. Meanwhile, he was getting job offer after job offer from universities and research organizations eager to recruit anyone who had worked on the atom bomb. They were wonderful offers at prestigious institutions, but he knew the strings attached: “They expect me to accomplish something, and I can’t accomplish anything! I have no ideas.” Then came an offer from the Institute for Advanced Study, where Einstein, John von Neumann, Hermann Weyl, and many other towering figures were working. Along with a generous salary, they said they’d even let him shape the position to his liking—special treatment even Einstein hadn’t received. “It was absurd,” Feynman wrote. “The other offers had made me feel worse. But this offer was so ridiculous, so impossible for me ever to live up to, so ridiculously out of proportion.” Then shaving that night, “I thought to myself, ‘You know, what they think of you is so fantastic, it’s impossible to live up to it. You have no responsibility to live up to it!’ It was a brilliant idea: You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be.”
Permission To Be Free
In his work with great artists, artists who have experienced immense commercial success, music producer Rick Rubin once told me that he often sees a recurring pattern. With the success, they find themselves struggling with the expectations, the pressures to meet a certain standard, the demands of an audience, the need to surpass their previous work. Among others, he mentioned one artist who hasn’t recorded an album in ten years because they feel they can only step into the studio to make an album if it will “make history.” Never mind how you’re supposed to know when you’ve “made history”—such impossibly large pretensions are common. So Rick said he often finds himself saying, “I give you permission.” I give you permission to make something terrible. I give you permission to let go of what worked in the past. I give you permission to disappoint other people’s expectations. “Now, it’s ridiculous,” Rick said. “I have no authority over the person. And they know I have no authority over them. But I’ll still grant them permission and somehow it frees them.”
I Approached It Like, “This Is Probably Not Going To Happen”
After graduating from college with a sports journalism degree, Will Ferrell took a job at a small cable news station in Los Angeles, where he learned about The Groundlings, a sketch comedy school in West Hollywood. He signed up for comedy classes at The Groundlings, and as he wrote comedy sketches to perform in class, he experienced this growing, “gnawing” desire to quit his job “to pursue this comedy thing.” Torn between the stability of his job and the uncertainty of “giving this comedy thing a shot,” Ferrell said, “I had the best conversation with my dad,” a musician who’d navigated an unpredictable career, jumping from gig to gig without ever finding steady mainstream success. “I said, ‘so Dad, I think I’m going to try to get into comedy. Any words of advice?’ And he said, ‘You know, if it was only about talent, I wouldn’t worry about you because you really have some talent. But just know that there’s so much luck involved and that if you go down this road, and it’s starting to feel like you’re not getting anywhere, it’s okay to quit and just do something else.’” Ferrell called it the best anti-pep pep talk ever, saying he interpreted his dad’s advice like this: “don’t worry if you fail, because it’s a crapshoot anyway.” “And for some reason, that completely took the pressure off.” The denominator was completely diminished: “I approached comedy with like, ‘This is probably not going to happen, so might as well have a blast,’ and because I gave myself that break internally, I think it—unbeknownst to me—opened all these doors because people could read that I was so free with what I was doing.”
You’re Up To High. Come Down Low.
In 2010, Cheryl Strayed received a letter from a woman named Elissa Bassist, cataloging her doubts and anxieties. She worried that she writes “like a girl.” That she’d never be as good a writer as David Foster Wallace. That she’d forever be “sick with panic that I cannot—will not—override my limitations, insecurities, jealousies, and ineptitude.” And that she’d “eventually collapse in a heap of ‘I could have been better than this.’” In her own long period of self-loathing, convinced she too would never measure up to her favorite writers, Strayed replied: on a chalkboard in her living room, “I wrote, ‘The first product of self-knowledge is humility,’ Flannery O’Connor.” The word, she pointed out, comes from the Latin words humilis and humus. To be down low. To be of the earth. To be on the ground. That’s where I went.” She lowered herself to possibility of writing a “mediocre,” “never-going-to-be-published,” “nowhere-in-league-with-the-writers-I’d-admired-so-much-that-I-practically-memorized-their-sentences” book. “It was only then,” only when she diminished the denominator, “only when I humbly surrendered, that I was able to do the work I needed to do.” She suggested that Bassist get a chalkboard and write the words “humility” and “surrender” on it. “The most fascinating thing to me about your letter is that buried beneath all the anxiety and sorrow and fear and self-loathing, there’s arrogance at its core. It presumes you should be successful at twenty-six, when really it takes most writers so much longer to get there. It laments that you’ll never be as good as David Foster Wallace—a genius, a master of the craft—while at the same time describing how little you write. You loathe yourself, and yet you’re consumed by the grandiose ideas you have about your own importance. You’re up too high.” Come down low, down to earth: “Writing is hard for every last one of us…Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig…So simply write, Elissa Bassist. Not like a girl. Not like a boy. Write like a motherfucker.” (Bassist eventually published her first book, an acclaimed memoir, in 2022. On the back cover, there’s a blurb from Strayed: “…an impressive debut. Elissa Bassist wrote it like a motherfucker.”)
The Fraction of Life
In Sartor Resartus, the nineteenth-century Scottish writer and historian Thomas Carlyle, “So true is it that the Fraction of Life can be increased in value not so much by increasing your Numerator as by lessening your Denominator.”