The Positive Value of Negative Things
In his books and in interviews, the psychiatrist Phil Stutz talks about what he calls “Reverse Indicators,” defined as, “an unpleasant feeling that says you’re making progress.” “Painful emotions,” he writes, “often have a positive value. Instead of indicating failure, they often actually indicate progress. We’ve all experienced the physical version of this in the gym—your muscles hurt during a workout, but you give that pain a positive value because it’s making you stronger.”
The positive value of negative things—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
The Shadow Is Proportionate To The Dream
In his book The War of Art, Steven Pressfield coined the term “Resistance” as a catch-all for the variety of forces—fear, self-doubt, anxiety, et cetera—that prevent us from doing the work we need to do. While Resistance is largely problematic, in one way, it’s helpful. “Resistance is an indicator,” Pressfield writes. “It tells us what we have to do…Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates to the strength of Resistance.” In an interview, Pressfield once said that another way he likes to think about it is like this: “Resistance comes second.” To explain what he means, he picked up a big bottle—“Now, imagine that this is our dream—our novel or our startup or whatever it is—and we set it out in the sunshine. Immediately, a shadow is gonna fall from this thing.” The shadow comes after and is exactly proportionate to the object that casts it. “So, in other words,” Pressfield continued, “if you’re feeling—and I say this to myself—the more Resistance I feel to something, the more certain I can be that there’s a big dream there and that I’ve gotta do it. If it’s a little dream, you don’t have any Resistance at all. So when you’re feeling that horrible Resistance, it’s a good sign. It shows you, there’s something important there.”
The Conditions That Produce The Most Errors
In a series of experiments, the psychologists Nate Kornell and Robert Bjork showed people paintings by twelve different artists and asked them to learn to recognize each artist’s style. For some artists, the paintings were “massed,” the participants shown all of their works consecutively: ten Braques, then ten Crosses, then ten Cipollas, and so on. For others, the paintings were “spaced,” so that a given artist’s work was separated by paintings from various other artists. The massing method seemed to be the easier way to learn. And afterward, participants overwhelmingly said they thought they had learned more that way. But they hadn’t. When shown new paintings and asked to identify the artist, they performed drastically better on the artists whose paintings had been spaced. This is part of a larger phenomenon Bjork calls “desirable difficulties.” Conditions that slow us down, make practice harder, and produce more mistakes in the moment produce more durable learning. “The conditions that produce the most errors during acquisition,” Bjork wrote, “are often the very conditions that produce the most learning.”
It’s Like Eating Bad Fish
At the age of 8, the future renowned singer-songwriter Jewel was abandoned by her mother. Her father, repeating a cycle from his own abusive upbringing, became abusive, and so at 15, Jewel left home. She lived in a car and eked out a living from odd jobs and street gigs along the San Diego shoreline. Her circumstances were perfectly suited to an existence of constant stress and anxiety. While Jewel was indeed often stressed and anxious, she said she learned to reframe those sorts of sensations as information. It’s like eating bad fish, she explains: “If I eat bad fish and I get food poisoning and I throw up, something’s not wrong with me; something’s right with me—my body is working properly. Anxiety, fear, stress, doubt are the same way. They’re a neon sign trying to tell me that I’m consuming something in my environment that my body isn’t agreeing with. That I’m engaging in a behavior, a thought, or an action that my body doesn’t agree with. Things like anxiety are your body’s way of communicating inner conflict.”
I’ve Just Been Going, “If You Aren’t Challenged, Then Don’t Do This Anymore.”
In the middle of shooting the fifth episode of The Newsroom, the show’s lead Jeff Daniels fell to a knee. “Give me the line again,” he yelled to the script supervisor. “Give me the line again.” She yelled back the line. He just has to repeat it. He can’t. “Give me it again.” She does once then twice more. He can’t keep a single word in his head. “Ok Jeff,” the director said. “Why don’t you go home?” In his two decades of acting, Daniels never struggled like this. This was his first time working for screenwriter Aaron Sorkin. Every actor who gets asked about working for Sorkin inevitably mentions the word “dialogue.” Sorkin is known as a master of writing dialogue. And as is the nature of working for a master, expectations are high. “You have to memorize mountains of dialogue,” Daniels said. “And then you have to spit it out at a hundred miles an hour.” That means actors can’t do what actors typically do: memorize their lines in the makeup chair. “I’ve seen day-players come in on Newsroom, and they’re trying to learn three pages of Sorkin in the makeup chair, and the flop sweat hits them. I’ve never seen it anywhere else.” Daniels would come to call it “getting Sorkinized.” He was the first to fall to a knee in that first season of filming The Newsroom but not the last: “We all, at some point, took a knee.” Daniels tells this story when asked how he decides what jobs to take. He said he has to be at least pretty sure the job will be at least pretty hard. Because if it’s not hard, it’s easy. If it’s easy, he’s not getting better. If he’s not getting better, what is he doing? A few months after getting Sorkinized, he won an Emmy Award for Lead Actor in a Drama Series for the first season of The Newsroom. A few years later, he got a call from Sorkin, who had just acquired the stage rights for To Kill a Mockingbird and wanted Daniels to play Atticus Finch. Sorkin warned him that what they were attempting—adapting a book almost universally beloved for the stage—was probably a “suicide mission.” “I didn’t blink,” Daniels said. “I’ve just been going, ‘if you aren’t challenged, then don’t do this anymore.’” (The play opened on Broadway in December of 2018. It shattered opening week box office records and became the highest grossing play in Broadway history.)
Thank Your Faults
In his essay, Compensation, Ralph Waldo Emerson tells an old fable of a stag who was proud of his magnificent antlers and ashamed of his thin, ugly legs. Then when a hunter appeared, the stag’s legs saved him. Later, the antlers became tangled in the brush and got him killed. “Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults,” Emerson writes. “Our strength grows out of our weakness…In general, every evil to which we do not succumb is a benefactor.”