Creative Rebellion Essays: mastery and improvisation

I was walking around my backyard this morning, thinking about what this week’s essay should be about when my good friend Tim Kring texted me that I should check out Jack White’s performance on Saturday Night Live. He wrote: 

“...He (Jack White) is working within an art form that he is completely fluent in, like Picasso. So he can play with it in ways that are incredibly playful and interesting. It’s stripped down to a three-piece band that just showcases his fluency with the idiom. Punk, Funk, rock, blues, he just toggles back-and-forth in this playful way with all of them…”

– Tim Kring

I thanked Tim for sparking this week’s essay’s theme: mastery and improvisation. This is something that has interested me for some time. 

There is the basic notion that if I do something over and over, with enough diligence that I will gain mastery in a particular discipline or practice. This concept was popularized by the famous “10,000-hour rule” that Malcolm Gladwell wrote about in his excellent book Outliers. It has often been misinterpreted that one will become an expert in anything if they put in 10,000 hours of work. In reality, he was referring to “outliers” – people of such talent that they became phenomenal through putting in the hours. In other words, even if I put in 10,000 hours of effort as a child, I’d never become Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant because I lack the intrinsic talent as well as physical capabilities. I would perhaps become really good but not an outlier. 

So, in one arena, good old hard work and putting in the hours will make you much better than you are, no doubt. But the gating factor, and mysterious element, is intrinsic talent: what you are born with. And by “talent,” I’m also including physical talents as well as mental. We are born with certain attributes that could make us excellent in some areas and less so in others. The trick is to align your native platform of capabilities with your interests. 

Picasso. Jordan. Eilish. Gaga. LeBron. Serena. Coltrane. Miles. Jobs. Arnold. Oprah. Ellen. Pretty much anyone who is recognizable just by their name is an outlier and I’d argue was born with innate capabilities but then realized them through extreme practice, perseverance, and a bit of luck. 

Again from my text exchange with Tim, he writes:

“...there is something fascinating about the idea that Picasso at age 9 could draw the human figure as well as any renaissance painter. So, the question becomes what do you do with that mastery, and how does it free you up. The great Picasso museum in Barcelona is built in a giant spiral. The ground floor has his drawings and paintings at a very early age that are wildly impressive for such a young age, detailed and precise. Then you wind your way through his entire career until you get to the top floor where there are these massive canvases that he painted when he was 91 years old. They are huge, crude, infantile drawings. Like something, a nine-year-old would paint. Once you master something to that degree it then becomes all about emotions and thoughts, technique means less and less. Of course, great jazz pianists occupy the same idea. The goal is to Use the mastery of the technique as a springboard into pure expression.  To uncouple yourself from the bonds of the technique. You can see how that must be a kind of spiritual experience…”

– Tim Kring

There are phases to learning and mastery. You must first learn from the past, from those who came before. If you are a painter, you learn how to draw the figure, you learn how to prepare a canvas, how colors work, the properties of different paints (oil, acrylic, watercolor), and you, ideally, train under teachers who are accomplished. This also applies to music, writing, martial arts, dance, wine-making, cooking, or coding. And after you’ve mastered those techniques, then you are free to improvise with them. Bruce Lee famously mastered multiple disciplines of martial arts, initially learning Wing Chun under Ip Man, studying Western boxing and mastering multiple forms until he developed Jeet Kun Do, which was a hybrid martial art of “formless form.” People often assume that Bruce Lee was blessed with a perfect body for mastering martial arts but, in fact, he was severely near-sighted and his left leg was an inch shorter than his right. He compensated through training and used his limitations to his advantage.

The ultimate phase to mastery is to discard what one has learned in order to transcend to the next level. 

“Ultimately, you must forget about technique. The further you progress, the fewer teachings there are. The Great Path is really NO PATH.”

Morihei Ueshiba, founder of Aikido

I think this is what Tim was thinking about when he was watching Jack White on SNL.  

“...What makes that performance so exciting is that it feels like at any minute the wheels are going to come off the car. There’s a kind of exhilaration to that performance  that can’t be produced by someone who’s just faking it.”

– Tim Kring

And that sensation of watching a master perform at the ledge of their capabilities is what is so thrilling, whether it’s sports or dance or theater or even a company that is pushing the boundaries of what has come before. Mastery is demonstrated through improvisation – deviating from the parameters you’ve set for yourself and seeing what happens. Skating on the edge of possibilities and taking risks to push yourself to the next level. 

We lost a genius this week, Eddie Van Halen, a master of improvisation. He put in the hours and he put in his passion. 

“I started doing all kinds of weird stuff on the guitar, which became part of my playing. I started doing harmonics and tapping on the guitar and pulling off strings and doing all this weird stuff that no one had ever done before.”

Eddie Van Halen

In the end, I think it all comes down to authenticity: How much you love what you are doing. You can learn all the craft in the world but it only becomes meaningful when the deep care for what you do shines through.

Keep on shining.

John

What I’m listening to:

Washed Out - the latest album, Purple Noon, by Ernest Weatherly Greene Jr. (aka Washed Out) is chill and perfect music for writing to (for me). 

My latest podcast (with Dov Baron , Part 1 of 4).

What I’m watching:

Legion – I’m late to this show, which is part of the Marvel Universe, but it’s brilliant – psychedelic, trippy, but underneath it all, it deals with the question of consciousness and the definition of reality. 

Song Exploder – a lovely show on Netflix that deconstructs how a song is made. I especially loved finding out the history, serendipity, and creative process behind REM’s famous “Losing my Religion.” 

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