Don’t Adopt My Prejudices. Develop Your Own.
The son of a jazz musician who mostly performed solo, Wynton Marsalis grew up wanting to be like his dad. When Marsalis was 12, some local musicians invited him to join their band. “I didn’t want to join the band,” Marsalis said. “At the time, I just wanted to play jazz like my dad. But my dad was the one that said, ‘Man, play in the band. Join the band.’” When Marsalis told his dad that he wanted to be a solo musician like him, his dad said, “Don’t adopt my prejudices. Develop your own.” “He was always saying that,” Marsalis reflected. “’Don’t adopt my prejudices. Develop your own.’ He would say, ‘Don’t cut yourself out of experiences.’ You have to experience things to know if something’s for you or not for you.”
Not adopting other people’s prejudices—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
Bumping Out Of An Inherited Enclosure
After a poetry reading, the poet David Whyte was approached by a crowd-member who turned out to be a high-level executive in corporate America. “I want to hire you to give talks at my company,” the man said, adding that they’d not only pay him extremely well, but would cover travel and accommodation costs too. Though struggling to make ends meet as a poet, Whyte had no interest in the offer. “Where I grew up,” he explained, “anything that was part of the corporate world was the enemy to art.” Whyte grew up in a “raving socialist” part of Northern England. “In fact,” Whyte explained, “the Luddites used to meet in the field next to where I grew up to train before they marched across the fields and broke up the new weaving machinery they thought was taking their jobs. So in the milieu I grew up with, I inherited the belief that the corporate world was filled with big, bad, overreaching, all too powerful, inhuman people.” To enter that world, Whyte said, “was to sell yourself out. It was to compromise and sully your art. It was simply not what serious artists do. So I told the man, ‘No, I’m not interested. But I am interested in why you would want to hire me.’ And he said a beautiful thing actually. He said, ‘The language we have in that world is not large enough for the territory that we’ve entered. And I just heard the language—in your poetry—that’s large enough.’” Though moved by the man’s interest, Whyte said, “it still didn’t bump me out of my inherited enclosure of what it meant to be an artist.” Whyte returned to Whidbey Island, the small island north of Seattle where he was living at the time. A couple weeks later, he got a phone call from the exec, who tracked down Whyte’s contact information to reiterate his interest in hiring him. When Whyte turned him down again, “the man said, ‘Right, I’m coming out to Whidbey Island then to see you.’” The following weekend, the man made the trip, “and we had a great old conversation. He was a very imaginative man. Very funny. Very insightful. Very kind and sincere.” Not at all like the big, bad, overreaching, all too powerful, inhuman caricature Whyte had inherited from his upbringing. So Whyte finally agreed to give a talk at the man’s company—the beginning of what has now been decades of bringing his poetry into corporations around the world. “And to my surprise at first, then to my gratification, I found that I didn’t have to compromise my work at all.”
You’re Wasting Your Time With Those Puppets
In 1954, at his local library, Jim Henson checked out two books on puppetry. Soon after he read them, he started making puppets, performing puppetry, and considering a career as a puppeteer. Then one day at school, Henson was holding one of his puppets when a teacher said to him, “You [are] wasting your time with those puppets.” There is no future in puppetry, she said. Adopting his teacher’s belief that puppets are for little kids, from that point on, Henson said, “I didn’t take puppetry seriously…It didn’t seem to be the sort of thing a grown man works at for a living…I decided to chuck it all.” Not long after he chucked the dream of being a puppeteer, Henson “wandered over to Europe” without a plan. It turned out to be a turning point in his life. To his surprise, in Europe, puppetry was a highly regarded art form. “That was the first time I’d ever met any other puppeteers,” Henson said. “They were very serious about their work. It was at that point I realized puppetry was an art form, a valid way to do really interesting things.” After being in a different place where there were different puppetry prejudices, Henson said, “I came back from that trip all fired up to do wonderful puppetry.” And for the rest of his life, Henson did wonderful puppetry, performing with his classic characters: Kermit the Frog, Bert and Ernie, Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Cookie Monster, Big Bird, and on and on. (File next to: what the late poet Nikki Giovanni said about people telling you you’re wasting your time with this or that).
A Convenient Assumption
Brain imaging technologies date back to the late 1880s and for decades, researchers—adopting the prejudices of those who came before them—used them more or less the same way. They designed studies to include an “experimental” group and a “control” group. The experimental group would always do some task. If wanting to study the brain regions linked to creativity, for instance, subjects in the experimental group might do a word association test. Meanwhile, the control group would always do nothing. Regardless of the study, the control group subjects were always instructed to stretch out on a bed or sofa and “rest” with their eyes closed—the longstanding, unquestioned, “convenient assumption,” as the neuroscientist and creativity researcher Dr. Nancy Andreasen explains in The Creating Brain, being that “the brain is blank or neutral during ‘rest.’” Then, in 1995, as she was designing her first brain-imaging study, Dr. Andreasen began to have doubts about this longstanding assumption. As she thought about her own experiences, Dr. Andreasen writes, “I knew that my own brain is often at its most active when I stretch out on a bed or sofa and close my eyes.” So she decided to have that be the experimental group, conducting the first study of brain activity when in a “resting state.” “We found activations in multiple regions of the association cortex,” she writes. “We were not [seeing] a passive silent brain during the ‘resting state,’ but rather a brain that was actively connecting thoughts and experiences.” Essentially, Dr. Andreasen demonstrated that the brain defaults to creativity. When you are doing absolutely nothing, the brain engages in what she termed “random episodic silent thought” or…REST. And during REST, the brain “uses its most human and complex parts.”
Develop And Own Your Style
Prior to writing the book The Psychology of Money, the finance and investing writer Morgan Housel had been writing online for over a decade. In that time, he developed his unique style: in 800-1000 words, he would tell an interesting story (which usually had seemingly nothing to do with finance or investing) to illustrate a lesson about finance or investing. But when Morgan set out to write his first book, he abandoned his unique style, opting to instead adopt the style of the authors he admired. So the first draft of The Psychology of Money was 10 chapters, each about ~4000-5000 words—a length he had no experience with. To hit that ~4000-5000 word count, Morgan said, he rambled, he added fluff, he included additional examples that made the same point as earlier examples. And a third of the way through writing The Psychology of Money, he said, “I just didn’t like where it was going.” So he threw it all out and started over. Instead of conforming to the style of most books, he said, “I just owned the style of writing that I have.” Instead of 10 long chapters, The Psychology of Money is 20 short chapters. (One chapter is so short that when Morgan submitted it to his publisher, they emailed him and asked if he had sent the wrong file. “No,” he said, “that’s all I have to say on the topic”). He owned his style, and to date, The Psychology of Money has sold over eight million copies worldwide.
Folklore
Asked how he—a college dropout with no prior business experience—learned how to run a company like Apple, Steve Jobs replied: “you know, throughout the years in business, I found something, which was I’d always ask why people do things. And the answers you invariably get are, ‘Oh that’s just the way it’s done.’ … I call it ‘folklore’—a lot of things are done because they were done yesterday and the day before…Nobody knows why they do what they do. Nobody thinks about things very deeply—that’s what I found.” Don’t adopt someone else’s prejudices, folklore, beliefs, style, or brain-imagining study design. Develop your own.