There’s Many Forms of Freedom
The novelist Zadie Smith talks about how we often think of freedom as simply doing whatever we want, whenever we want. “But there’s many other forms of freedom that are actually quite valuable,” she says. “Much of life can feel like a performance, where you’re trying to fit in, impress, or meet expectations. Even close friendships sometimes have this performative aspect where you’re not fully yourself. So anywhere you can go where you’re not on stage, where you’re not having to keep up someone else’s idea of you, where you can just be yourself—that is freedom. For me, at least—that’s a form of being free that is really valuable to me.” Forms of freedom (and confinement)—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
You Just Gotta Be Comfortable Making Less Money
At one point in his career, comedian Aziz Ansari felt trapped. He was doing it all—long press tours, performing night after night, juggling multiple projects, saying yes to everything, and chasing every opportunity to stay relevant. One night, feeling particularly stretched thin, Aziz ran into the musician Frank Ocean at a party. “Frank, how do you do it man?” Aziz asked. “You never do any press, you barely tour, you only put out your music when you really want to, only do things you really want to do—what’s the secret?” “You just gotta be comfortable making less money, that’s all,” Frank said. Freed from the arbitrary pressure to do what he thought an artist had to do, Aziz got comfortable doing and making less. “And I still do. You see me, I don’t do a lot of stuff—I just do stuff I really care about, you know?”
I Give You Permission
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 of confinement. With fame and achievement, they find themselves trapped by expectations, 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 that it’s impossible to define or predict what “making history” even means—these increasingly high expectations confine many successful people. 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 create something your audience might hate. 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 told me. “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.”
Show Up And See What Happens
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. Eventually, he managed to break free from this self-imposed confinement. 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.” And what was the lesson? “Relax,” he said. “Prepare as much as you can. Prepare, prepare, prepare. Then show up, and throw it all away. Just show up and see what happens.” His time away from the camera taught him a valuable form of freedom—embracing the unpredictability of just about everything. (File next to: Don’t Try To Map Out Of The Whole 9 Innings)
Few Of Us Are Granted The Grace To Know Ourselves, And Until We Do, The Best We Can Do Is Be Consistent
Mike Agassi had a deep, unfulfilled desire for greatness that he channeled into his son Andre. After Andre was born, Mike moved the family to the middle of nowhere because that’s where he could afford a house with enough land to build a tennis court. One of Andre’s early memories is driving to a local diner, where Mr. Agassi recruited a few strangers to help him pour the concrete, install the cage, paint the lines, and put up the net. Despite having no construction experience, Andre writes, “suddenly my father has his backyard tennis court, which meant I had my prison.” Soon after the prison was built, Mr. Agassi bought a ball machine that he rigged to fire balls at 110 miles per hour—nearly twice the speed of a typical machine—and forced Andre to hit 2,500 balls a day. If he hit 2,500 balls each day, he’d hit 17,500 balls each week, and nearly one million balls each year. “He believes in math,” Andre writes. “Numbers, he says, don’t lie. A child who hits one million balls each year will be unbeatable.” And Andre did. At the age of 6, he was on national television being called a tennis prodigy. By 7, he was winning tournaments around the country. At 13, he was sent to an elite tennis academy, “but it was really a glorified prison camp.” He dropped out of the school at 16, turned pro, and by 18, he was the number three ranked tennis player in the world. And he hated every second of it. “Hated it with all my heart,” Andre writes. “Hated it with a dark and secret passion.” As his resentment for tennis and his father grew in lockstep, Andre began to think that if he became the number 1 player in the world, it would satisfy his father and put an end to his prison sentence. Fueled by anger and desperation, Andre faced the dragon day after day, convinced that the faster he reached the top, the sooner he’d be free. And at 25, he did it—he won back-to-back Grand Slam titles to claim the number one ranking in the world. He raced to the UCLA Medical Center where Mike Agassi, preparing for open-heart surgery, was strapped to machines, tubes running from his body. When Mike sees his son, he gestures weakly with his hand for Andre to come closer. Andre leans in. A tube runs down his throat, muffling his words. He mumbles, but it’s unintelligible. “I don’t understand, Pops,” Andre says. Mike uses the back of his hand to motion something, and it clicks: “Backhand, he was trying to say,” Andre writes. “You should have hit more to [your opponent’s] backhand.” As Andre sat there, hearing his father critique his play even after he had claimed the number one ranking, he realized that the release he had been waiting for was never going to come from his father. Mike wasn’t going to free him—he would have to free himself. “I stand and feel an overpowering urge to forgive,” Andre writes. “I realize that my father can’t help himself, that he never could help himself, any more than he could understand himself…Few of us are granted the grace to know ourselves, and until we do, maybe the best we can do is be consistent. My father is nothing if not consistent.”
Do You Know What Frees One From This Captivity?
At the front of his book Open, Agassi includes a quote from a letter Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother in July 1880. “One cannot always tell what it is that keeps us shut in, confines us, seems to bury us,” van Gogh writes, “but still one feels certain barriers, certain gates, certain walls…And then one asks: ‘My God! Is it for long, is it for ever, is it for eternity?’ Do you know what frees one from this captivity? It is every deep serious affection. Being friends, being brothers, love—that is what opens the prison by supreme power, by some magic force.”