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what I was starting to feel I might never glimpse: “gold fever,” or “target panic,” as it’s called—what happens when an archer gets good, even too good, compared to her expectations, and starts wanting the gold without thinking about process. In extreme cases, it means that one day she is hitting the bull’s-eye, the next day her arrows could end up in the parking lot. No one is clear about whether it’s choking, a kind of performance anxiety, or some form of dystonia.4 But what we do know is that the only way to recover fully from it is to start anew, to relearn the motions and to focus on the
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Watching an archery team in this modern age had been like seeing a similarly ancient relic, a vestige of a past way of work that we rarely spot in action—not a contest, where there is a victor, but the pursuit of mastery.
such beautifully crafted sentence
Mastery requires endurance. Mastery, a word we don’t use often, is not the equivalent of what we might consider its cognate—perfectionism—an inhuman aim motivated by a concern with how others view us. Mastery is also not the same as success—an event-based victory based on a peak point, a punctuated moment in time. Mastery is not merely a commitment to a goal, but to a curved-line, constant pursuit.
Its the process, not the end goal.
As an only child who lived in my imagination, I would delve into the life stories of my elders; my contemporaries; historic innovators, creators, and inventors; and those working at the peak of their powers today—people whose lives are like mine, but at the same time vastly different from my own.
I couldn’t escape one observation: Many of the things most would avoid, these individuals had turned into an irreplaceable advantage. I still remember the shudder when I sensed a knowing as sure as fact—that I might only truly become my fullest self if I explored and stayed open to moving through daunting terrain.
A division line often positions creativity, innovation, and discoveries as a separate, even elite, category of human endeavor: chosen, lived out by a few. Yet our stories challenge this separation. If we each have the capacity to convert the excruciating into an advantage, it is because this creative process is crucial for pathmaking of all kinds.
The word failure is imperfect.
once we are ready to talk about it, we often call the event something else—a learning experience, a trial, a reinvention—no longer the static concept of failure.
Perhaps a nineteenth-century synonym comes closer—blankness—a poetic term for the wiping clean that this experience can provide. It hints, too, at the limitlessness that often comes next.10 Trying to find a precise word to describe the dynamic is fleeting, like attempting to locate francium, an alkali metal, measured but never isolated in any weighted quantity or seen in a way that the eye can detect—one of the most unstable, enigmatic elements on the Earth.
Transformation comes from how we choose to speak about it in the context of story, whether self-stated or aloud.
There are enough forms of the unfinished to create a taxonomy. Some works seem complete to the outside world, but remain truncated in the eyes of their makers, stopped short perhaps by an imposed deadline. Others are abandoned out of pure defeat. More still are curative works, ones that remain incomplete, but have helped an artist improve. Some are cut off by death and then completed posthumously by others.
What would you say increases with knowledge?” Jordan Elgrably once asked James Baldwin. “You learn how little you know,” Baldwin said.24 The technical term for this, if you like, is the Dunning–Kruger effect—the greater our proficiency, the more clearly we recognize the possibilities of our limitations.
saudade, the Portuguese term for persistent longing for what we sense may never come.
Masters are not experts because they take a subject to its conceptual end. They are masters because they realize that there isn’t one.
Trying to bridge the gap between work and vision can be like hearing the notes to a song without being able to finish hearing the complete tune.
As with earworms, snippets of songs that we hear and then repeat in our minds, the unfinished scenario often crops up in our thoughts over and over again until we discern how to complete it.
Completed paintings, or at least ones in a confident state of incompletion,
Innovative ideas, after all, are often so counterintuitive that they can, at first, look like failure.
Playing jazz is “like a conversation,” Wynton Marsalis said. “You can’t evaluate yourself while you’re having it. You’re playing in time.”
“The scuffling jazzmen around my father were so self-assured,” Marsalis remarked, “they didn’t mind you knowing who they were.”55 Quelling self-judgment, “jazz leads you to the core of yourself and says ‘Express that,’” Marsalis continued.
This means that every player has the ability to convey their own unique sound, to use that personal language to communicate how the world feels to them. They learn to accept all that comes, keep their equilibrium in the midst of it all, and do it in the time signature of swing.
His napkin became an incubator, a safe haven, a way of silencing the brash inner critic before it was time for it to have its say. Some force themselves into a physical isolation of extreme kinds to silence unwanted commentary.
In a world where we are increasingly blasted by the stories of others, retreating to recover our own is more vital than ever before. The critic, whether internal or external, who speaks up when the work isn’t coming together is a healthy part of the psyche and our environment.
Head to a retreat, give yourself a deadline, make it nearly impossible to get something done, and a new reservoir can often open up. As composer Leonard Bernstein said, “To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.”
There is a reason why so many residencies are successful, ritualistic places for artists to work: time is in short supply.
In the beginning, all ideas are let in, more or less. “We talk, we listen, we generate, we gather, we teach, we make stuff, and it is all okay.” Then there comes a point when you start to shut down the gates of what ideas get to be realized.
Steve Jobs put this productive constraint on himself his whole life. He told his colleague John Sculley, “None of us has any idea how long we’re going to be here, nor do I, but my feeling is I’ve got to accomplish a lot of these things while I’m young.”76
After seventy-two days of trudging alone on the pack and pressure ice, at times swimming through the “inky black water” of the Arctic Ocean over three miles deep, he had no cheering squad, no flag to plant.11
nicely constructed
People driven by a pursuit that puts them on the edges are often not on the periphery, but on the frontier, testing the limits of what it is possible to withstand and discover.
And particularly being alone out there, there’s always this knowledge that this scenery and the icescapes were unique to me; that someone could come back to the same point, at the same time, a day later, and it would look completely different.”
There were days where it seemed completely impossible, and I couldn’t even contemplate the ultimate goal. There were days when I’d just look at a bit of ice in front of me on the right bearing north, and just think, ‘All I’m going to think about is getting to that bit of ice there, that’s thirty feet away, and when I get there, if I get there, that will be a success. It’ll be in the right direction, and then I can think about the rest of it.’ So there were days like that where I just had to break it down into the smallest possible steps.
To convert our own energy and operate at full force, often we must first surrender.
The kind of surrender that Saunders means is more akin to Nietzsche’s idea of amor fati, to love your fate. “The demon that you can swallow gives you its power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply.”
Aikido embodies the idea that when we stop resisting something, we stop giving it power.
In aikido, an uke, the person who receives an attack from the thrower, or nage, absorbs and transforms the incoming energy through harmony and blending.30
my life was to have a soul-stated meaning, I needed to be unafraid to walk down paths of my own choosing, which to some might seem like failure, to pursue all that mattered most to me.
Zero is the oddest number. Its value is foundational and yet unstable; it has what seems to be inexplicable properties. It can threaten some—multiply or divide a number by zero and you wipe it out. Or it can act neutrally—add or subtract zero from any number and it remains. For centuries, it has been a limit that most civilizations have preferred not to consider, with the exception of Hindu societies, which embraced it.46 It is on the threshold, separating positive from negative, all that we want from all that we don’t. Surrender, like zero, doesn’t translate into an appreciable form. It is
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“Jung talked about the fact that we all have unlived lives within us.
‘pain is not a punishment. And pleasure is not a reward.’ You
The most paternal endeavor he could find to replace his father was exploration, Saunders said, that and mentorship from invented father figures whom he has found along the way.
Colonna may not be a father figure, Saunders told me, but still, “he says things I wish I had heard from him.”
man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it,” novelist George Moore once wrote.51 If he can’t, he may continue the pursuit.
He had hoped that the trip “might scratch the itch for good. I hope I won’t be bashing away out there in my sixties,” he told me through a smile.57 Yet he knows that there’s something addictive about living at one’s own edge.
“picture of life contrasted with the fact of life.”
“it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake … the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed.”
“Art is a journey into the most unknown thing of all—oneself,” architect Louis Kahn stated.
“memory is set up to use the past to imagine the future” and “its flexibility creates a vulnerability—a risk of confusing imagination with reality.”
This is what aesthetic force can do—create a clear line forward, and an alternate route to choose.
The melody of a song about heartbreak suggests that we believe life will improve, yet in its bittersweet tones we remind ourselves that sometimes the only way out is through.35
Today, saturated with images, we live in a world where aesthetic force is alternatively so self-evident, so easily dismissed, that we move forward through its veracious power without realizing it.
