In 1939, a 25-year-old university student found himself running 20 minutes late for a statistics class. On arrival, he entered as quietly as possible, making himself as small as possible, and slipping into a seat incognito at the back of the class. While the class was going on, as he looked around to orientate himself, he noticed some scribblings on the corner of the board – the professor had left some statistics homework for the students to solve. The tardy student promptly scribbled down the problems in his notebook so he could work on them later.
Later, as he attempted to solve the problems, he struggled, and he beat himself up. If only he’d arrived early enough to the class, he wouldn’t have missed the crucial bits needed to solve the problems. Still, it was a problem of his own making, he was late after all, and not for the first time, so perhaps he could redeem himself by working hard at these difficult statistics problems, and perhaps make up for his tardiness. He toiled and toiled, racing against the clock – he had to have the problems solved by the next class after all – and applied himself as much as he could.
The day came for the next class, and the student approached the professor with his solution to the statistics problems. The student had finally come up with solutions, but there was no telling whether he’d done the homework the right way, given how difficult he’d found them. A few days passed and after the professor examined the student’s solutions, he called the student in for a chat and asked him how he’d solved the problems. At first, the student was baffled; it was homework after all, was he not expected to solve the problems?
It was only after a fair bit of back and forth, and consultations with other faculty colleagues, did the true story emerge. It turned out that the scribblings the student had noted down during the last class were not meant for the students, they weren’t even homework. The professor had scribbled down impossible problems that even the most respected mathematicians had been unable to solve for decades. The student didn’t know this at the time, and believing the scribblings to be homework expected to be solved by students like him, applied himself and resolved to solve them to save face, make up for tardiness, and avoid embarrassment. In solving those problems, the student had done something previously thought to be impossible, something even his professors and their professors had been unable to do.
If this story sounds farfetched, like something out of a fairytale, I assure you it is not. If, on the other hand, the story sounds familiar, that’s perhaps because it’s a well-known story, perhaps one you’ve heard many times before, because the student in the story is no other than pioneering mathematician George Dantzig, who fostered the simplex method as applied to linear programming, a mathematical method for determining a path to the ideal outcome to a challenge given a list of requirements. Linear programming is used in organisations to maximise profits and reduce costs, it is used in transportation and urban planning to come up with efficient routes, and it was even used during World War Two to keep military operations efficient and well-oiled. Needless to say, the ubiquity of this technique cannot be overstated, and its applications are endless.
Dantzig – who was later awarded a doctorate for his contributions to statistics – only persisted at solving the open problems because he’d missed the part of the lecture where the professor said the problems had been unsolvable for decades. In other words, they weren’t homework for students like him, but he didn’t know that, and because he didn’t know that, he didn’t have any preconceived notions of the barriers that stood in the way of the possibility of solving those problems.
If there’s one moral to this story, it’s that Dantzig probably wouldn’t have tried to solve the problems if he knew they were open problems. It was his misguided belief that led to the breakthrough; herein lies the power of mental barriers. Dantzig had it in him to solve a problem that had eluded the brightest minds for decades – that much is obvious – but who knows if he would have attempted to work on the problems if he knew that those who had come before him had tried and failed? We can’t know for sure if he would still have succeeded even in the face of difficulty. Still, we can surmise that a defining factor in his resolve to keep at it, was the belief that the professor wouldn’t have assigned the students some homework that was unsolvable. And so he persevered, and his efforts were rewarded.
I think about this a lot with my creative pursuits both on the macro and micro levels, on the big things and small things. On the macro level, there's no shortage of barriers that independent artists face, especially those that have ethnic minority backgrounds. I've written about how I've lost count of the number of rejections I've faced, and how I feel it's my duty to soldier on in the face of these rejections. The way I think about it, acknowledging these rejections is one thing, but I have to believe in the possibility that the next thing – the next book query or festival application or sync placement or BBC Introducing pitch – will be accepted. What's the point in putting in the effort to apply, if I can't even see fit to hold on to the smallest possibility that the efforts will pay off?
The same applies on the micro level, the day-to-day aspects of being an artist. For instance, a lot of the musical techniques and styles I play today are things I once thought impossible, or things I didn't even know to think of. The idea of simultaneously picking a guitar baseline on top of a melody was foreign to me until I was exposed to Travis picking. The idea of tapping the guitar body for percussive effects while simultaneously strumming the strings was foreign to me until I saw someone do it at an open mic. There's so much I do now that I wouldn't have thought to learn until I was exposed to them, and this exposure led me to the belief that they were possible, because if others could do it, then I could too.
This is all well and good, but we have no control over what we get exposed to. Call it luck, chance, fortune, or fate, but there's no way to know when to situate yourself in the right place at the right time. Still, we can increase the likelihood of exposure to cool things by adopting an open and curious mindset, going places we wouldn't typically go, trying new things, and deviating from our routines (this is a real struggle for me). If life is a net, and the purpose is catching fish, then adopting an open and curious mindset increases the surface area of the net, so that there's a greater chance of serendipitous encounters, which in turn redefine the scope of possibility (i.e. catching more fish). This, I believe, is what people mean when they advocate for 'networking’ in the context of corporate career success, or 'putting yourself out there', in the context of romantic success. I see no reason why this won’t apply to the creative realm.
In summary, we shouldn’t discount the role of time and chance and fate in our lives outcomes and results, but what would you do if you were sure you couldn't fail? How would you live if your success was guaranteed? What projects would you start, what risks would you take, and what problems would you attempt to solve if you knew that it was all possible? Now's a good time to go for it.