It’s A Matter Of Protecting Your Instincts
The musicians Lainey Wilson and John Mayer were once talking about the strange unpredictability of what audiences do and don’t respond to. Pretty nonchalantly, Mayer said that he just about always either overestimates or underestimates the songs he puts out—the ones he thinks are sure to resonate usually don’t, and the ones he doesn’t expect very much from often take off. That he seemed entirely unbothered by this intrigued Wilson. After some fifteen years of making and releasing music to little fanfare, she had relatively recently broken into the mainstream. And so far, song after song, her expectations had been wrong just as often as Mayer’s. For her, though, this had stirred doubts about her creative instincts, leaving her worried that “I don’t really know what I’m doing.” And so she wanted to understand how Mayer had managed not to let it get to him—“Tell me how you do that.” “Well,” he said, “what else are you gonna do but do the thing that’s in your heart to do? I would rather make something that turns out to be a huge failure than change my instincts. You know what I’m saying? You gotta keep your instincts. It’s not a matter of getting good at knowing how things will work out. It’s a matter of protecting your instincts. You try your best, you don’t talk yourself out of a thing that feels right, and if it doesn’t work out, you say, ‘Tried that. Didn’t work out.’”
Protecting your instincts—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
“No, No, No, I Did It That Way On Purpose. I Like It.”
When he was 13 years old, the future multi-Grammy-winning music producer Finneas O’Connell called his friend’s dad, who worked professionally in music production. Finneas had just discovered a tool called a limiter—something music producers use to help control the volume of sound—and after some experimentation, he wanted to know, “Am I using it correctly?” “Finneas,” his friend’s dad told him, “listen, it’s really important that you understand the delineation between the correct way to do something and whether you like it or not. There’s always going to be someone in the music world to tell you why you did something incorrectly, why this is too that or that is too this. So it’s really important to like something or not like it…If somebody tells you, ‘That vocal is too compressed,’ that might be true. If they don’t like the song, the compressed vocal might be the reason. But if you say, ‘No, no, no, I compressed it that way on purpose. I like it,’—if you like how it sounds, then it’s the correct way.”
The Habit Of Seeking Reassurance
For a while, I would often use AI as a kind of second set of eyes on day-to-day emails: I’d paste in a draft and ask, “Does this all sound right?” or, “Is there anything you’d change here?” A month or two ago, I started to become faintly aware that this habit was making me second-guess myself more often, even with the most routine replies. Once, replying to an email letting me know about a scheduling change, I asked ChaGPT which was better: “Sounds good, thanks for heads up!” or, “Thanks for heads up!” Anyway, I didn’t think much about any of this, nor about how ChatGPT was deciding whether something sounded right, or what it would change, or why “Sounds good, thanks for the heads up!” is the way to go. Then I had an unusual thing happen. For the past five years, I’ve published SIX at 6 the same way every week: I write the newsletter in a blank document, then copy and paste it into WordPress to publish it to my website, then add that URL to the “Read Online” line at the top of the email. Two weeks ago, when I pasted the finished issue into WordPress as usual, the whole thing suddenly lit up with red, blue, and purple underlines. It turned out that some new AI writing tool had automatically switched on, and the colored underlines were flagging all sorts of things it thought should be changed. Many of which were things I happen to like and do on purpose. It suggested, for example, breaking up the blocks of text into a long string of one-line paragraphs, with a line break after every single sentence—a style I personally can’t stand, and find impossible to read. Anyway, it struck me as a particularly vivid example of what LLMs do less visibly all the time: whenever we ask one whether something sounds right or what it would change or how to make this or that better, it compares our particular case to the dominant patterns of similar ones, then nudges us toward something like the average of all those other examples. Which can be good and harmless. But it can also gradually shape your instincts into an aggregate of everyone and everything else’s. Or worse, get you so in the habit of seeking reassurance that it becomes a reflex, something you need even before hitting send on, “Sounds good.”
The Extremes Of Skin Thickness
Protecting your instincts doesn’t mean walling them off from all outside input. Early in his career, writer Derek Thompson couldn’t take criticism. It didn’t matter who it came from, Thompson writes, a bit of criticism “would always derail my day and send me into a spiral of self-doubt. I had thin skin.” A few years into his career, he read an interview with a famous journalist who, in Thompson’s opinion, was getting worse and worse at writing. In the interview, the journalist said they deal with criticism by ignoring feedback altogether. Thompson couldn’t help but think, No wonder you’re a terrible writer now. “This journalist had the opposite problem that I had,” Thompson writes. “Their skin was too thick. I wish there were a formula for growing one’s ‘ego epidermis’ to the perfect level of thickness. There is not. All I can say is…stay away from the extremes of hypersensitivity-to-feedback and obliviousness-to-feedback. Seek out wise criticism.”
Manifest Your Unique Character Through Your Discipline
The chess prodigy Josh Waitzkin quit playing chess around the age of 18. “I was a naturally creative, aggressive chess player,” Waitzkin explained. “My style was to create chaos on the chessboard, and my strength lay in finding hidden harmonies.” With this style, Waitzkin won the U.S. Junior Chess Championship at the age of 11 and became an International Master at age 16. Then, Waitzkin got a coach who forced him to play like the world champions, Anatoly Karpov and Tigran Petrosian—“the most positional, conservative chess players.” When he was forced to override his instincts, Waitzkin said, “I lost my love for the game.” So Waitzkin quit playing chess, and shortly after, he took up martial arts. He trained for just two years before he won his first national championship in martial arts. Asked if he took anything from chess into the martial arts, Waitzkin said he made sure to protect his unique physical and mental traits from being forced into the mold of some conventional style. “And in my observation of competitors in any discipline, this is a really fundamental idea,” he said. “Those who succeed at the highest level, I think, basically manifest their unique character through their discipline.
And That’s You, And That’s You, And That’s You
The great architect and designer Frank Gehry was asked if he had any advice. “Be yourself,” he said. “When I teach a class, the first thing I do with students is ask them to write their signature on a piece of paper. And we spread them out and I say, ‘They all look different and that’s you, and that’s you, and that’s you, so stay with that forever.’”