Rock, architect, drummer
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“Whatever you practice, you strengthen.” —Tara Brach
As creative pros, we forget what we learn if we don’t apply it. There are three big lessons that are waiting for you and I every day to learn and practice.
Don’t be so eager for praise from others.
Consider for a moment a rock thrown in the air, as Marcus Aurelius (https://www.amazon.ca/Meditations-New-Translation-Marcus-Aurelius/dp/0812968255/ref=sr_1_10?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1550407556&sr=1-10 ) invites us all to do. “It loses nothing by coming down,” he says, and “gained nothing by going up.”
Your ego is that rock.
If you set yourself up to believe you gain something from compliments and praise, you set yourself up equally for suffering when you receive criticism or a lack of kindness from others.
This is as true when it comes to success in your career, your finances and your relationships. If your self-worth and self-identify are tied to things going the way you feel you are owed, you are in for a lot of disappointment.
Be as wary of judgement (https://us4.campaign-archive.com/?u=89226eb68936fc712577977b8&id=2fbe35eb82) in your own life as an author is (or ought to be) of Amazon reviews. Whether it’s seeking approval of others or avoiding their criticism, both are forms of disenfranchising yourself and undermining what you’re capable of.
Seek out patterns.
In the 1970s, architect and design theorist Christopher Alexander co-wrote a fascinating book on urban design, called A Pattern Language (https://www.amazon.ca/Pattern-Language-Towns-Buildings-Construction/dp/0195019199/ref=nodl_ ) .
In it, he argues there are patterns to all problems and in those patterns are the solutions we need to be seeking. It’s the next thing he says that I find even more striking:
“When you build a thing,” he says, “you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole.”
You are no different from the architect in how you approach your work. Create and build with intent to solve a larger pattern of problems (https://us4.campaign-archive.com/?u=89226eb68936fc712577977b8&id=8fee6d019e) , otherwise you are missing the reason why you do what you do.
Turn understanding inside out.
Stop being so attached to the habit of making safe choices (https://us4.campaign-archive.com/?u=89226eb68936fc712577977b8&id=9bfa08458e) in your craft.
As a creative pro, sometimes you have to turn your talents inside out to understand fully how you come up with your ideas. It stretches you a little. It makes you uncomfortable. It raises the stakes and the risk of failure. And it makes the work better in a way that otherwise would have been unreachable.
That’s what session drummer Kenny Aronoff did in 1982 while working in the studio on John Mellencamp’s song “Hurts So Good (https://open.spotify.com/track/67eX1ovaHyVPUinMHeUtIM?si=h-qgtqH8TpCks61jfQcciA ) .”
Aronoff’s normally a right-handed drummer, but decided to play lefthand lead on the track. That’s more complicated than it might seem, because it involves doing everything in reverse: the drummer’s hi-hat is where their snare drum usually is. So everything is backwards.
For someone whose job hinges on keeping time and setting tone, this meant deliberately putting himself in a place where he was barely hanging on. The risk paid off for Aronoff: Mellencamp got a hit song and a fresh sounding rhythm track.
We are owed nothing as adults. Instead we are afforded the privilege of figuring out our lives and making fruitful work of that enterprise. If we are lucky, we get to do that for a long time. And not all of us are so fortunate.
So be the rock. Be the architect. And be the drummer.
Do it now.
Very best, Patrick
P.S. Thank you to all of you who kindly forward this email to friends. It helps me a lot. You can do so clicking either of the green buttons below.
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