We’re trying something new today!

At the end of this edition, you will find a link to an AI guided journaling exercise.

You’ll 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 world’s greatest creatives. 

From One Extreme To Another

On a hot summer’s 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, “was so primitive that not only did it not have indoor plumbing, it didn’t even have an outhouse; the family had to use the woods as the bathroom.”

But Waymon possessed a talent that had the potential to change her family’s 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 “Eunice’s schedule of services became increasingly grueling. She went to church in the morning and played for Sunday school, then at eleven o’clock for the choir, and then for two sessions of programs in the afternoon. There was prayer meeting every Wednesday night, choir practice on Fridays.”

At six, Waymon crossed paths with a local piano teacher and her training further intensified: “her life was highly regimented. She was waking up at three o’clock 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.”

As Waymon herself recalls, “when you play Bach, every note is executed flawlessly. It has to be.” 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 wasn’t one of them.

“Eunice Waymon’s dream,” writes Light, “of 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.”

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 “very crummy” 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 “Nina Simone.”

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.

“Though she was playing from 9:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. every night, with fifteen-minute breaks each hour,” Light explains, “Nina 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.”

Up until that point, “all the time,” Simone herself remembers, “I was practicing, I’d 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 didn’t 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 improvising—but I didn’t know I could improvise like that. I was repressed to the point where I hadn’t played any songs of my own for fourteen years, and I didn’t even know I had them down there. I didn’t know until I first started at the Midtown Bar, and it came out.”

No one could have predicted the effect that Simone’s new free-flowing performances would have.

“Immediately,” remembers Simone’s brother, “word got out of this tremendously talented pianist and singer. And from then on, every night we went there, the place was crowded. Couldn’t get in!” 

It was as if a cult had formed overnight. 

Audiences described Simone’s performances as electric, with one notable jazz impresario recounting how “you never knew what she would do. She would start playing a Bach riff, and she had the most unusual musical arrangements.” Light describes how Simone’s newfound fusion of classical rigor and modern improvisation occupied “an indefinable space between pop and jazz, with a hint of the direct impact that would come to be called ‘soul.’”

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 Don’t 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 didn’t 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 Simone’s 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 one—represented for centuries by the Yin and Yang symbol. Simone’s 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 life…

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.

“When 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.”

But just as Freeman finished insisting that his creativity hinges on his door being open, he stressed the importance of having it closed.

“Of 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.”

And when he finished writing? 

Freeman would toggle once more.

“But 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. It’s broadened my horizons very much. But that is only after the writing is finished and not while it is going on.”

For many things in life there is a “U-shaped curve” 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 it’s time to Zig and then go unreservedly hard on Zag when it’s 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:

“Here’s a little—a fine point of writing technique that I’ll pass along to you writers out there. Never talk to anyone about what you wrote that day—that 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 feeling—that you did that very difficult thing that you tried to do, that you accomplished it. You wrote. You sat down and wrote.”

The danger of sharing with others is that they may not love what you’ve done and then you’ll feel as though your day was “a wasted effort.”

Taking this idea one step further, Seinfeld recommends protecting yourself from yourself, at least for a while:

“The 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, ‘That is just not good enough. That’s got to come out,’ or ‘It’s got to be redone or thrown away.’ So flipping back and forth between those two brain quadrants is the key to writing. When you’re writing, you want to treat your brain like a toddler. It’s 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.”

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 reflect…

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