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đ„ Taking A Radical Departure and Embracing Oscillation
Weâre trying something new today!
At the end of this edition, you will find a link to an AI guided journaling exercise.
Youâll be prompted with three questions (with a few potential follow-ups) to help you consider how this edition applies to you and your life.
Let us know what you think if you decide to check it out!
P.s. More action awaits you in our archives, including how Steve Jobs cultivated great taste, the personality trait shared by 1381 millionaires, and 40 principles relied on by the worldâs greatest creatives.
From One Extreme To Another
On a hot summerâs day in August 1950, Eunice Kathleen Waymon arrived at the Curtis Institute for Music in Philadelphia for what felt like the most important moment of her life. She was there to take a piano exam with the goal of securing a scholarship at the prestigious institution.
But the pressure Waymon felt upon her shoulders that day was immense.
Almost all seventeen years of her life had led up to this opportunity.
As Alan Light reveals in his biography on Waymon, she had endured an impoverished upbringing. One family home, Light writes, âwas so primitive that not only did it not have indoor plumbing, it didnât even have an outhouse; the family had to use the woods as the bathroom.â
But Waymon possessed a talent that had the potential to change her familyâs fortunes.
At just three years old, Waymon was encouraged by her mother to play piano for the Sunday morning church service. Her early signs of skill quickly led to an intense regimen of practice.
From then onward, Light describes how âEuniceâs schedule of services became increasingly grueling. She went to church in the morning and played for Sunday school, then at eleven oâclock for the choir, and then for two sessions of programs in the afternoon. There was prayer meeting every Wednesday night, choir practice on Fridays.â
At six, Waymon crossed paths with a local piano teacher and her training further intensified: âher life was highly regimented. She was waking up at three oâclock in the morning, studying and doing her chores before she went to school, then practicing piano for hours. Studying Bach, singing gospel in church, playing blues for her father.â
As Waymon herself recalls, âwhen you play Bach, every note is executed flawlessly. It has to be.â And so by the time Waymon showed up to Curtis, she had invested fourteen years of rigorous, disciplined, meticulous, practice.
Only three of seventy-two applicants were accepted that year.
Waymon wasnât one of them.
âEunice Waymonâs dream,â writes Light, âof becoming the first great black American classical pianist, the goal she had fiercely been working toward for most of her life, had now entirely collapsed.â
With the funding her community had raised for her now dwindling, and her family in need of financial support, Waymon put her dream on pause and resigned herself to perform at a âvery crummyâ nightclub.
She was so ashamed of what her mother would think of her new job that she created a pseudonym to keep her work a secret.
The name she settled on was âNina Simone.â
The environment at the nightclub was a far cry from the prim and polished world of classical music. And perhaps this oscillation, from one extreme to another, was precisely what she needed.
âThough she was playing from 9:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. every night, with fifteen-minute breaks each hour,â Light explains, âNina discovered that she was having no trouble filling the time. In fact, having the opportunity to explore these songs so freely was unlocking for her new ways of thinking about music.â
Up until that point, âall the time,â Simone herself remembers, âI was practicing, Iâd practice Bach and Beethoven and Handel and Debussy and Prokofiev. Man, all the talent that I had inside me, that was created from me, songs that I should have been composing? I didnât know anything about those songs until I first started playing in a nightclub. Then, all of a sudden, the fact that I had to play five hours, I started improvisingâbut I didnât know I could improvise like that. I was repressed to the point where I hadnât played any songs of my own for fourteen years, and I didnât even know I had them down there. I didnât know until I first started at the Midtown Bar, and it came out.â
No one could have predicted the effect that Simoneâs new free-flowing performances would have.
âImmediately,â remembers Simoneâs brother, âword got out of this tremendously talented pianist and singer. And from then on, every night we went there, the place was crowded. Couldnât get in!â
It was as if a cult had formed overnight.
Audiences described Simoneâs performances as electric, with one notable jazz impresario recounting how âyou never knew what she would do. She would start playing a Bach riff, and she had the most unusual musical arrangements.â Light describes how Simoneâs newfound fusion of classical rigor and modern improvisation occupied âan indefinable space between pop and jazz, with a hint of the direct impact that would come to be called âsoul.ââ
Still, this popularity was far from an overnight success story.
Another eight summers would go by until Simone was ready and able to release her first album in 1958. But one song on that album, I Loves You, Porgy, garnered national attention and rocketed up the charts.
Over the coming years, Simone would release multiple hit originals and covers, now all famous the world over, including Feeling Good, Sinnerman, and Donât Let Me Be Misunderstood, leaving a musical legacy that is likely much more impactful than the one she would have created by sticking with her original goal of becoming a classical pianist.
Simone didnât abandon her extreme discipline, she integrated it with the opposing, free-flowing force of improvisation.
If you were to make a mistake during one of Simoneâs practices, she would still insist that everyone replay the piece at least ten times to make up for it.
To produce breakthrough work, we must often find a way to let two oppositional extremes co-exist together. This idea is an ancient oneârepresented for centuries by the Yin and Yang symbol. Simoneâs story shows how pivoting from one extreme to another can release explosive creative energy.
When you find yourself stuck, the solution could be to flip your approach entirely on its head, not just simply making a minor tweak, but rather doing a rubber-burning U-turn that takes a radical departure from the norm.
In fact, many creatives argue that oscillation between extremes should be a regular feature in your creative lifeâŠ
Open, Closed, Open, Closed
When the acclaimed psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was compiling his research on creativity in the mid 90s, he found himself in the office of Freeman Dyson, himself an award winning physicist who conceptualized the Dyson Sphere and advanced quantum science.
At one moment, as Csikszentmihalyi grilled Dyson on the origins of his creativity, he pointed to the door in his office.
âWhen I am doing science I have the door open. I mean, that is kind of symbolic, but it is true. You want to be, all the time, talking with people. Up to a point you welcome being interrupted because it is only by interacting with other people that you get anything interesting done. It is essentially a communal enterprise. There are new things happening all the time, and you should keep abreast and keep yourself aware of what is going on. You must be constantly talking.â
But just as Freeman finished insisting that his creativity hinges on his door being open, he stressed the importance of having it closed.
âOf course, writing is different. When I am writing I have the door shut, and even then too much sound comes through, so very often when I am writing I go and hide in the library. It is a solitary game. So, I suppose that is the main difference.â
And when he finished writing?
Freeman would toggle once more.
âBut then, afterward, of course the feedback is very strong, and you get a tremendous enrichment of contacts as a result. Lots and lots of people write me letters simply because I have written books which address a general public, so I get into touch with a much wider circle of friends. Itâs broadened my horizons very much. But that is only after the writing is finished and not while it is going on.â
For many things in life there is a âU-shaped curveâ where the sweet spot lies somewhere in the middle between two extremes.
When it comes to making your ideas happen, however, the middle is often a dead zone. Instead, we are called to toggle repeatedly between two extremes.
Go all in on Zig when itâs time to Zig and then go unreservedly hard on Zag when itâs time to Zag.
Toddler, Hard-ass, Toddler, Hard-ass
Just as there is value in toggling between chatter and silence, so too there is value in toggling between the voices you hear inside your head.
When comedian Jerry Seinfeld was asked about his creative process, he imparted the following:
âHereâs a littleâa fine point of writing technique that Iâll pass along to you writers out there. Never talk to anyone about what you wrote that dayâthat day. You have to wait 24 hours to ever say anything to anyone about what you did, because you never want to take away that wonderful, happy feelingâthat you did that very difficult thing that you tried to do, that you accomplished it. You wrote. You sat down and wrote.â
The danger of sharing with others is that they may not love what youâve done and then youâll feel as though your day was âa wasted effort.â
Taking this idea one step further, Seinfeld recommends protecting yourself from yourself, at least for a while:
âThe key to writing, to being a good writer, is to treat yourself like a baby, very extremely nurturing and loving, and then switch over to Lou Gossett in Officer and a Gentleman and just be a harsh pr***, a ball-busting son of a b****, about, âThat is just not good enough. Thatâs got to come out,â or âItâs got to be redone or thrown away.â So flipping back and forth between those two brain quadrants is the key to writing. When youâre writing, you want to treat your brain like a toddler. Itâs just all nurturing and loving and supportiveness. And then when you look at it the next day, you want to be just a hard-ass. And you switch back and forth.â
You need both an inner cheerleader and an inner critic to produce creative work.
But sometimes they need time and space away from one another to do their best work.
Time to reflectâŠ
How do todayâs insights apply to you and your life?
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This edition was written by: Lewis Kallow || (follow) ![]() | With input and inspiration from: Scott Belsky || (follow) ![]() |