This is a note to self, a journal of sorts. You might find it relevant too…
There's a game I play in my head daily. I'm willing to bet you play it too. It's the "what if" game, the one where we contemplate how our lives would be different if we'd taken other paths, made other decisions, and/or explored other things. It's the ultimate exercise in wondering what could have been, and juxtaposing it against what is.
The thing is, I'm content with my life; I'm healthy, I'm happy, I'm creative, and I'm loved. So my “what if” game isn't triggered by regret for “what is” in my personal life, but rather “what could have been” in the context of my creative and professional life.
I've taken a long and windy road to get to where I am now – as a singer-songwriter and soon-to-be-published author – but when I think about my journey, it doesn't sound anything like those of the creatives I admire, and it doesn't sound like the typical story of the "successful" folks who found their passions early in life and pursued those passions unilaterally. Even among my creative friends on the local scene, the common narrative is of the musician that started playing the guitar at the age of 10, or the poet who has been writing since they were 7. We romanticise origin stories where someone was gifted a half-sized guitar for their 7th birthday and that ignited a passion that they’ve followed ever since. What’s more, is that when I watch them play or perform their songs or poems, it shows. All the years they've put into their art manifests in their performance; their music or poetry is second nature to them, like they grew up with it and it's a part of every fibre of their being.
In moments like this, I feel a tinge of regret for not discovering the arts as a prepubescent boy. This is the “what if” game I play. What if I started writing stories when I was a child, what if I took up the guitar earlier? How much more proficient would I be now if I’d accumulated all those extra years of experience under my belt?
I've come to realise that this is a silly question to ask – it really is – but I still can't refrain from this counterproductive navel-gazing. I still struggle with letting go of the idea that I’d somehow be a better musician and writer if I started earlier. I know it's silly because proficiency isn't solely a function of time. Sure, time plays a part; all things being equal, the more time spent in deliberate practice, the better. This is the crux behind the 10,000 hours rule that Malcolm Gladwell popularised in his bestselling book Outliers. I’m a fan of Gladwell’s work, but the 10,000 hours rule has since been debunked.
Still, while the 10,000 hours rule is a misinterpretation and gross generalisation of an idea that was first proposed by Swedish psychologist Anders Ericsson, there’s no doubt that time spent in deliberate practice and focused pursuit of a goal tends to pay off. But there's another aspect to art execution that goes beyond technical ability. I'd like to call this “soul” or “essence”. To explain what I mean, I'd like to share a little anecdote.
The other week I ran into a local musician for the first time at two consecutive open mic nights and I had the pleasure to see him play both nights. On the second night, after I'd watched him play a killer set that left the audience mesmerised, we had a chat and expressed mutual appreciation for each other's songwriting. Thinking back to that conversation, what I really appreciate, perhaps even more than the compliments, is how specific he was in giving feedback. He isolated the things that he thought worked really well in my music, and he didn't hold back in his praise for how I applied them and made them work for me.
The conversation stayed with me for days because some of the nice things he mentioned were things I hadn't even considered; they were things I just did without a moment's thought. These aren't things that I deliberately apply in my songwriting, they just come naturally to me, and before that conversation, I'd assumed – wrongly, I now know – that they come naturally to other songwriters.
It took a while to make sense of this. For days, I wondered what got me to this place where I possessed a set of skills that I wrongly believed to be ubiquitous, a set of skills I took for granted. The best explanation I've come up with is that these "skills" are simply manifestations of several aspects of my lived experience that come through in my songwriting. This "lived experience" is the sum total of all the things I did when I wasn't learning the scales as a child or winning prize money for my writing as a teenager.
This tells us something about the way time works. Time spent doing something is time not spent doing something else. I've previously written about this; the idea that time is a resource like any other and is therefore subject to the concept of opportunity cost. In this context, there’s a whole lump of time that I didn't spend learning the guitar as an adolescent or writing stories as a teenager, and all that time was spent doing other things and amassing life experiences that I now draw on in my songwriting and storytelling. In other words, even though the time may not have directly contributed to honing my art techniques, that time was not wasted.
And this is partly why there's no shortage of articles pushing "success stories" of people that "made it" later in life. They always list the same case studies too, like how Bill Withers didn't have a hit song until after his navy career in his 30s, or how Harrison Ford only got his big break as Han Solo at 35 after many years as a carpenter, or how Morgan Freeman’s first major role came in his 50s after many years spent in the air force. These stories are everywhere, and while they're meant to be inspirational, I'd like to push back slightly on the idea that success in the arts has to mean "making it big" (see last week's post for more on this point). As for the other idea behind such articles, that we each have our unique timelines, and there's no set time by which a person must have achieved something, I couldn't agree more. In fact, I have a song dedicated to this idea, it's called Special Is What You Are.
This is all to say that the “what if” game is counterproductive, and if this isn’t enough of a reason to dispense with the practice of fixating on the road not taken, then consider that we don't have a time machine and we can't turn back the hands of time. We can agonise over the road not taken all we want, but we can't go back and re-do it. We have the path in front of us now and the decisions that lie ahead. We can only trust that we're exactly where we need to be and we're right on time. There may be forks in the road up ahead, but armed with the benefit of hindsight, we can trust that we've made the right decisions to get us to where we are and that we'll continue to do so going forward.
Now, when I think of whether I should have started earlier, I pause and think, no, I'm right on time, right where I need to be today. All the things I've done have gotten me to where I am today, and perhaps more importantly, the things I do today are preparing me for where I need to be tomorrow.