Eighty percent of what comes out of my head is rubbish. Or at least, that’s what it feels like. But, it comes out regularly, and I suspect that’s more important.
To work consistently, rather than sporadically, means the feedback loops inherent in learning are exactly lack, loops. It means they can build on one another rather than fizzle off into an ether and be forgotten about. If we forget about what happened last time, the mistakes made once before are more likely to repeated again and it’s much more difficult to see improvement. If we don’t see progress, it’s more difficult to remain motivated. And without motivation, we stand still. Out in the cold. And freeze.
Keeping warm
To work consistently requires an acceptance of vulnerability. To admit to ourselves that, most of the time, what we produce isn’t good work but the work that’s needed to make the good work.
In sport, or in the theatre, we have training and rehearsals. These are the private arenas where athletes and performers spend 80% of their time making mistakes. The pole vaulter fails to clear the bar. The performer hits a bad singing note. But they keep going. They try again. They train at regular intervals – 2 times, 3 times, 4 times a week. They show up to the track or the theatre. They pick up their pole or the microphone. And they work, again and again, to learn from how they failed last time. And what for? So that when it comes time to enter the public arena, the work is as good as it can be; not perfect, but work that is as good as they can produce at any given time.
Visual art is no different, but the arena is. With pole-vaulting or theatre, the achievement is in the moment. For 20 seconds – you either clear the bar, or you don’t. You either hit the note, or you don’t. The nature of the work goes, generally, unrecorded. Maybe a coach or director watches with intent so they can provide guidance, but you can’t see yourself, most of the time.
With visual art, any attempt to clear the bar in our rehearsal is left on the page or canvas – etched in stone, to confront us with our vulnerability: we got stuff wrong.
This is a double-edged sword.
On one hand, the preservation of our failure can be useful because it provides us with something to go back to. Something to compare against when we produce the next thing, or the next thing after that.
But, on the other hand, it can derail us. Preserving failure is a good reminder that we’re not perfect. And, if 80% of anyone’s attempts to ‘clear the bar’ show us, in plain light, that we haven’t, well, that hurts.
We have two options, just like the pole vaulter or the performer. We can stop trying. We can decide that we won’t show up to training today, or rehearsals tomorrow. We had a bad day yesterday and now we just don’t feel like it. It may make us feel good in the short term, but in the long-term, no one benefits.
The second option is to keep showing up. To accept that, with most attempts, we won’t clear the bar. But occassionally, when things go just right, we will. We’ll sail over it. We’ll hit the big, spongy mat on the other side, look up, and see that the bar is still up there, wobbling away high above us but it won’t come tumbling down. And then, we’ll say to ourselves, “Maybe it’s time to raise the bar up a notch. I reckon I can go higher next time.”