Find Out
In his work on “practical reasoning”—basically, “the question of how people figure out what to do”—the philosopher Elijah Millgram distinguishes between a top-down and a bottom-up approach. The former—and more common—is what Millgram calls deduction: trying to work backward from the outcome, wanting to know in advance, with some confidence, how this or that will turn out before committing to it. But the way most things work, Millgram argues, is just the opposite, through what he calls “practical induction”: you try things, pay attention to how they go, and use that information to decide whether you want to keep doing them. Another way Millgram puts it: in the top-down approach, you want “the certainty and the assurance that you already know, without looking, what you should be doing.” In the bottom-up approach, “you’re willing to find out.”
The bottom-up, willing-to-find-out approach—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
Never Rely On The Description Of The Idea
Rick Rubin was asked what he’s learned through making a lot of different kinds of music with a lot of different kinds of artists. “One thing is,” Rubin said, “never try to judge an idea based on the description of the idea. Always musically try the idea.” He explained, “An artist will say, ‘I have an idea, we can write the bridge like this,’ and they’ll give me a description of their idea, and it sounds terrible—the description sounds terrible. And I say, ‘Great, can’t wait to hear it.’ And then they do it, and it’s incredible…so we never rely on the description of the idea. It’s always, ‘show it to me. Let me hear it.’”
This Very Misguided Idea
As an author, professor, and psychiatrist, Dr. Anna Lembke says, “A lot of people come to me and say, ‘I’m anxious, depressed, and miserable. If I could only find that thing that I was really meant to do, my life would be better.’” They’ve bought into some version of the passion fallacy—the notion that the key to life satisfaction is to figure out what you’re uniquely passionate about, deeply interested in, and naturally good at, and then find a profession that sits perfectly at the intersection of those things. “It’s a big problem,” Dr. Lembke continues. “This very misguided idea about finding your passion. It’s almost as if people are looking to fit the key into the lock of the thing that was meant for them to do. They think they have to find that perfect thing, and then everything will be wonderful and they’ll have all this great success…And my first intervention for the many, many people like that that I see in clinical care is to tell them, ‘You have it backwards’”—passion is not deduced from the top down. It is something you find, from the bottom up.
And I Was Like, “Let’s Find Out. Let’s Find Out If You Can Do This”
Throughout his twenties and early thirties, Jason Segel acted in comedies and rom-coms: Freaks and Geeks, Knocked Up, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, This Is 40, How I Met Your Mother, and I Love You, Man among others. Then when Segel was 33, director James Ponsoldt wanted him for the part of David Foster Wallace in The End of the Tour. “It was such a drama,” Segel said. “It was nothing I had ever done before.” It would force him to stretch: “Up until that point,” he explained, “I either wrote the thing, so I knew I could do it, or I was sent stuff that was adjacent to things I had written, so I knew how to do it.” So when he was offered the role in The End of the Tour—“I read it, and I was not sure that I would be capable of doing it…And I was so scared.” As he leaned toward coming up with an excuse to turn down the role, Segel thought to himself, “I was like, ‘who do you wanna be? The guy who finds out, or the guy who, for the rest of their life, sits at the dinner party saying like, Well, if I had played David Foster Wallace, I would’ve…’ You know what I mean? We all know that guy—‘If I had directed The Revenant, the bear would’ve been much faster. And I was like, ‘Let’s find out. Let’s find out if you can do this.’” The movie premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, where it received “rave” and “glowing” reviews. In particular, “Mr. Segel’s performance—empathetic, nuanced, whip smart—left the packed theater breathless.” A few months after Sundance, the movie was released in theaters worldwide, and Segel went on to win multiple Best Actor and Best Male Lead awards. Reflecting on how almost didn’t find out if he could do it, Segel said, “The End of the Tour is the movie that changed my career and my approach to acting.”
Show Up And See
After directing four consecutive box office hits, earning two Academy Award nominations and an Oscar for Best Director, Mike Nichols made a film that flopped. For the next seven years, he didn’t direct a single movie, paralyzed by the fear of how others would perceive him and his work, wanting to be certain in advance how his next film would be received before committing himself to making it. Eventually, he accepted that no such certainty was possible, that the only way to know how a film would be received was just to make one and find out. Reflecting on that period, Nichols said, “those seven years of not making movies taught me more about making movies than the years I spent making them.” What did they teach you? “Relax,” he replied. “Prepare as much as you can. Prepare, prepare, prepare. Then show up, and throw it all away. Just show up and see what happens.”
Start With The First Thing, Close in
Once, asked how he navigates a big writing project without becoming overwhelmed by how much there is to do or how far there is to go, the poet David Whyte said, “I have a poem that literally works with that called Start Close In. “Start close in,” goes the poem, “don’t take the second step / or the third, / start with the first thing / close in … Start with the ground you know, / the pale ground beneath your feet … Start right now / take a small step … Start close in, / don’t take the second step / or the third, / start with the first thing / close in”—and find out from there what the next step is, and then from there the next, and then the next, and then the next, and then the next.