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When I lived in the back of my Chevy van, I had to dig my typewriter out from beneath layers of tire tools, dirty laundry, and moldering paperbacks. My truck was a nest, a hive, a hellhole on wheels whose sleeping surface I had to clear each night just to carve out a foxhole to snooze in. The professional cannot live like that. He is on a mission. He will not tolerate disorder. He eliminates chaos from his world in order to banish it from his mind. He wants the carpet vacuumed and the threshold swept, so the Muse may enter and not soil her gown.
The War of Art
Steven Pressfield
At this point, it was out of our hands, and no matter how much we wanted to rein it in, there was no stopping it. The album that we had made in only twelve days at that dumpy old studio in Los Angeles named Sound City was now selling three hundred thousand copies a week. And the news that we had knocked Michael Jackson out of the No. 1 spot on the Billboard album charts came the same day we were to play Saturday Night Live for the first time, January 11, 1992. This may have been the moment that I realized life would never be the same. Since I was a child, Saturday Night Live had been my favorite television show, hands down, and I would stay up in my pajamas to watch it every weekend, waiting to see my heroes of late-night TV. But I wasn’t just watching to see the comedic genius of Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, John Belushi, Laraine Newman, Bill Murray, Steve Martin, and Andy Kaufman; I was particularly interested in the diverse range of musical guests they hosted every weekend. As a young musician this was my education, a master class in live performance by some of the world’s most cutting-edge artists. But if there was one performance that stood out from the rest and steered my life onto a new course, it was the B-52s performing their hit “Rock Lobster” in 1980. TO ME, THESE THREE MINUTES WEREN’T JUST A BAND PLAYING A SONG, THEY WERE A RALLYING CRY TO ALL PEOPLE SUFFOCATING IN CONVENTIONALITY, AFRAID TO LET THEIR FREAK FLAG FLY, WHO WANTED TO CELEBRATE ALL OF LIFE’S BEAUTIFUL ECCENTRICITIES. At ten years old, my thoughts weren’t quite this complex; I know that now. But even then I somehow felt empowered by their pride in their weirdness. As I watched them dance their mess around in a quirky, hyperactive blur, I knew I wanted to break out too. I no longer wanted to follow the norm. I wanted to break away from the pack like the B-52s and lead a life away from the flock. There is that golden moment in any child’s life when independence and identity intersect, steering you in your ultimate direction, and this was mine. I would be an outcast with a guitar who loved music and comedy. Go figure.
The Storyteller
Dave Grohl
In another study of college students, this time at the University of Hong Kong, Dweck and her colleagues showed how these beliefs can influence important real-life decisions. At the University of Hong Kong, all classes are conducted entirely in English, despite the fact that some of the students are not yet proficient in English when they arrive on campus. So Dweck asked those students whose English could use some improvement if they would be interested in enrolling in a remedial English proficiency course. Only the students who believed that they could get smarter (the incremental theorists) showed any interest in the course—73 percent of these students were willing to enroll. Those who believed their smartness was fixed (the entity theorists) wanted nothing to do with it—only 13 percent of these students expressed a willingness to take the course. Most of them did not think a remedial course could actually help them improve. And just as important, they believed that taking a remedial course would publicly expose their lack of ability.3
Succeed
Heidi Grant Halvorson Ph.D. and Carol S. Dweck
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