Be a beginner
I believe in beginners mind. During my years of teaching music, I found that I would be as equally impressed by a seven year olds composition as I would be by a jazz veteran. Why? Because the passion and intent is coming from the same place. A deep well of inspiration and feeling inside of us that rewards us for simply…trying. The child is using all of their knowledge to create and so is the master pianist. The child will eventually grow and learn more and their music will change, but as long as they’er drawing from the same source that the seven year self was, it will always be wholly inspiring.
Surely there is space to admire a master painter, musician or writer, but that feeling is different. Not better, not worse, but…different.
Being a beginner means you don’t know everything, you lack baggage (a great tool!) but you are able to simply express an idea through passion and effort. Too many creatives get bogged down in the minefields of their own mind and strive for perfection. Maximize output, rely on authenticity and your work will reach the eyes and ears of its audience. Besides, your intent will be filtered through your audiences perception and changed to fit their daily experiences. Perfect is the enemy of done.
Jeff Tweedy (lead singer and founder of Wilco) said:
The act of making art is more important than art
What Mr. Tweedy is saying is that the finished product doesn’t matter, but rather giving the inspiration to someone else to do “the thing”. Surely, comparing yourself to The Beatles or Aretha Franklin will stifle any aspirations at a music career in their tracks. When they started, these artists didn’t think of themselves as masters of their craft, they simply began creating.
Don’t think of being a beginner as a crutch. Instead, focus on the traits that being a beginner give you that an expert cannot have. In directors commentary for the movie ‘Mean Streets’, Martin Scorsese talks about needing a crew member to shoot the wedding scene to give it an authentic, home-spun camera look (if you’ve never seen ‘Mean Streets’, think home movies from the early 60's). He lacked the ability to do it himself because he would be too obsessed with making it look ‘right’. He wasn’t gloating or saying that the work was beneath him, he was simply suggesting that a different perspective was needed to get the shot. Spoiler alert: both of their footage was in the movie, none more important than the other, all working towards the end goal of a complete film! The crew member offered something that one of the greatest directors in the history of cinema couldn’t…his in-experience.
We sometimes think that perfecting the next step will finally get us to cross over the threshold of doing, when in reality, the doing is the lesson. We go from beginner to intermediate to expert through practicing a craft and finding a singular voice. Don’t waste anymore time in finding yours.
