by Kevin Ashton
No choice–reward is the condition most of us are in when we go to work.
3 | THE CROSSROADS
People in America’s Deep South tell a story about a musician named Robert Johnson. They say one night when the crickets were quiet and clouds curtained the moon, Johnson stole out of his bed at Will Dockery’s plantation cradling his guitar. He followed the Sunflower River by the light of the stars until it brought him to a crossroads in the dust bowl where a tall, dark figure stood waiting. The figure took Johnson’s guitar with hands strange and large, tuned it, then played it so the strings wailed and wept with mortal emotion, making a music no man had heard before. When he finished playing, the stranger revealed his identity: he was the Devil. The Devil offered Johnson a trade: the sound of the guitar for Johnson’s soul. Johnson took the deal and became the greatest guitarist who ever lived, playing the Devil’s music, which was called “the blues,” all along the Mississippi Delta until he became legend. After six years, the Devil called in his due and took Robert Johnson’s soul. Johnson was twenty-seven.
The story is neither completely true nor completely false. There was a man named Robert Johnson. He did play the blues along the Mississippi Delta for six years. He was one of the greatest guitarists who ever lived. His legacy includes blues, rock, and metal. He died at twenty-seven. He did not make a deal with the Devil, but he did come to a crossroads where he had to make a deal with himself. Johnson married at nineteen and, despite his talent as a musician, planned a stable life as a farmer and father. It was only when his wife, Virginia, died in childbirth that he resolved to do what others described as “sell his soul to the Devil” and fully commit to playing the blues.
The story that arose around Robert Johnson’s life and talent is partly due to his early death; partly due to his song “Cross Road Blues,” which tells a tale about failing to hitch a ride, not a deal with the Devil; and mostly a mixture of ancient German legend and African American myth.
The German legend is the story of Faust, which dates back at least as far as the sixteenth century. It comes in many flavors but has one common theme. Faust is a learned man, typically a doctor, who yearns for knowledge and magical power. He calls upon the Devil and strikes a bargain. Faust gets knowledge and magic, and the Devil gets Faust’s soul. Faust enjoys his powers until the Devil returns and takes him to Hell.
According to hoodoo, the folk mythology of African slaves, you can acquire special skills if you meet a dark stranger at a crossroads in the dead of night. The voodoo traditions of Haiti and Louisiana also reserve a special role for the crossroads: they connect the spiritual world to the material world and are guarded by a gatekeeper called Papa Legba. Unlike the legend of Faust, this stranger at the crossroads demands no price.
Robert Johnson’s story blends these two mythic archetypes to illuminate a deeper truth: there comes a point in every creative life, no matter what the discipline, when success depends upon committing completely. The commitment has a high price: we must devote ourselves almost entirely to our creative goal. We must say no to distraction when we want to say yes. We must work when we do not know what to do. We must return to our creation every day without excuse. We must continue when we fail.
If any devil is involved, he is not the one demanding commitment. Whatever your higher power, whether God, Allah, Jehovah, Buddha, or the greater good of humanity, this is whom you serve when you commit to a life of creation. What is diabolical is squandering your talents. We sell our soul when we waste our time. We drive neither ourselves nor our world forward if we choose idling over inventing.
When Robert Johnson came to the crossroads at midnight, it was temptation that said, Do not practice, do not play, do not write, do not stretch your hands across the frets until they ache, do not press your fingers into the strings until they bleed, do not play to empty chairs and chattering drunks who boo, do not perfect your music, do not train your voice, do not lie awake with your lyrics until every word sounds right, do not study the skill of every great player you hear, do not invest your every breathing, waking minute pursuing your God-given mission to create. Take it easy, mourn your wife and child, get some rest, have a drink, play some cards, hang with your friends—they do not spend all day and night messing with guitars and music.
And Robert Johnson looked at temptation and said no. Then he took his guitar to the Mississippi Delta and for six years played music so great it changed the world, music so great it inspired every guitarist that followed, music so great we are discussing him now not because our topic is guitars or even music but because his story breathes life into the true meaning of creative commitment.
If you are fully immersed in your creative life and the crossroads has long left your rearview mirror, be affirmed. The friends, mothers, fathers, therapists, colleagues, ex-boyfriends, ex-girlfriends, ex-husbands, and ex-wives who said you were crazy and you work too hard and you will never make it and you need more balance were wrong, as are the ones who still do.
If you have not yet reached the crossroads, look around. It is here now. That stranger over there is waiting for the chance to offer you an endless supply of reasons why you should not create a thing.
All he wants in return is your soul.
4 | TWO TRUTHS OF HARRY BLOCK
Some say there is a condition called “writer’s block”—a paralysis that prevents people from creating. Writer’s block is alleged to cause depression and anxiety. Some researchers have speculated that it has neurological causes. One has even attributed it to “cramping” in the brain. But no one has found any evidence that writer’s block is real. It is the inevitable underbelly of that other unproven phenomenon, the aha! moment. If you can create only when you are inspired, then you cannot create when you are not inspired; therefore, creating can be blocked.
Woody Allen makes fun of writer’s block. He wrote a play called Writer’s Block, and he wrote, directed, and starred in a movie, Deconstructing Harry, in which the protagonist, Harry Block, tells his therapist: “For the first time in my life I experience writer’s block.… Now this, to me, is unheard of.… I start these short stories and I can’t finish them.… I can’t get into my novel at all … because I took an advance.”
Allen took the role of Harry, but only as a last resort, two weeks before filming began, because other actors, including Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Elliott Gould, Albert Brooks, and Dennis Hopper were not available. Allen was afraid people would assume Harry Block was autobiographical, when, in fact, he is antithetical: “He’s a New York Jewish writer—that’s me—but he’s a writer with writer’s block—that immediately disqualifies me.”
Writer’s block immediately disqualifies Harry Block from being Woody Allen because Woody Allen is one of the most productive film makers of his—and possibly any—generation. Between 1965 and 2014, Allen was credited in more than sixty-six films as a director, writer, or actor—often all three. To take writing alone: Allen has written forty-nine full-length theatrical films, eight stage plays, two television films, and two short films in less than sixty years, a rate of over a script a year, despite directing and acting in movies at about the same rate. The only other moviemakers who come close are Ingmar Bergman, who wrote or directed fifty-five films in fifty-nine years but did not act in any of them, and directors from the “factory” studio system of the 1930s, like John Ford, who directed 140 films, sixty-two of them silent, in fifty-one years but did not write or act in any.
Allen’s productivity tells two truths about writer’s block. The first is about the importance of time:
I never like to let any time go unused. When I walk somewhere in the morning, I still plan what I’m going to think about, which problem I’m going to tackle. I may say, this morning I’m going to think of titles. When I get in the shower in the morning, I try to use that time. So much of my time is spent thinking because that’s the only way to attack these writing problems.
A victim of “writer’s block” is not unable to write. He
or she can still hold the pen, can still press the keys on the typewriter, can still power up the word processor. The only thing a writer suffering from writer’s block cannot do is write something they think is good. The condition is not writer’s block, it is write-something-I-think-is-good block. The cure is self-evident: write something you think is bad. Writer’s block is the mistake of believing in constant peak performance. Peaks cannot be constant; they are, by definition, exceptional. You will have good days and less good days, but the only bad work you can do is the work you do not do. Great creators work whether they feel like it or not, whether they are in the mood or not, whether they are inspired or not. Be chronic, not acute. Success doesn’t strike; it accumulates.
Woody Allen learned this early, writing jokes for television, saying: “You couldn’t sit in a room and wait for your muse to come and tickle you. Monday morning came, there was a dress rehearsal Thursday, you had to get that thing written. And it was grueling, but you learned to write.” And:
Writing doesn’t come easy, it’s agonizing work, very hard, and you have to break your neck doing it. I read many years later that Tolstoy said, in effect, “You have to dip your pen in blood.” I used to get at it early in the morning and work at it and stay at it and write and rewrite and rethink and tear up my stuff and start over again. I came up with such a hard-line approach—I never waited for inspiration; I always had to go in and do it. You know, you gotta force it.
Writer’s block is not the same as getting stuck. Everybody gets stuck. The myth of writer’s block may exist partly because not everybody knows how to get unstuck. Allen:
I’ve found over the years that any momentary change stimulates a fresh burst of mental energy. So if I’m in this room and then I go into the other room, it helps me. If I go outside to the street, it’s a huge help. If I go up and take a shower it’s a big help. So I sometimes take extra showers. I’ll be in the living room and at an impasse and what will help me is to go upstairs and take a shower. It breaks up everything and relaxes me. I go out on my terrace a lot. One of the best things about my apartment is that it’s got a long terrace and I’ve paced it a million times writing movies. It’s such a help to change the atmosphere.
Allen’s second truth about writer’s block is a confirmation that intrinsic motivation is the only motivation. Inspirational lightning bolts are external—they come from without and are beyond our control. The power to create must come from within. Writer’s block is waiting—waiting for something outside of yourself—and just a shinier way to say “procrastination.”
Much of the paralysis of writer’s block comes from worrying what others will think: write-something-I-think-is-good block is often rooted in write-something-somebody-else-will-think-is-good block. Woody Allen’s indifference to other people’s opinion about his work is one big reason why he is so productive. He is even indifferent to what other people think of his productivity: “Longevity is an achievement, yes, but the achievement that I’m going for is to try to make a great film. That has eluded me over the decades.”
Not only does Allen not go to awards shows, he does not read any of his reviews and has not even been to see all his own movies. The work, specifically the satisfaction he takes from it for himself, is its own statuette: “When you actually sit down to write, it’s like eating the meal you’ve spent all day in the kitchen cooking.”
Cook to eat, not to serve.
5 | THE OTHER HALF OF KNOWING
The largest island in the Philippine archipelago is Luzon, which reaches like a wing from Manila toward China and Taiwan. In the east, the Mingan Mountains climb to wild green peaks six thousand feet high. Until the eighteenth century, these mountains kept a secret: an indigenous people called the Abilaos or Italons or, most commonly in English, the Ilongots.
As recently as fifty years ago, the Ilongots had a ferocious reputation. Popular Science described them as “savages, treacherous murderers, and wholly untamable.” They were known to be headhunters—people who murdered and decapitated their neighbors, keeping their victims’ heads, and sometimes heart and lungs, as trophies.
In 1967, Michelle Rosaldo, an anthropologist from New York, went to live with the Ilongots. The Ilongots were doing much less headhunting in the 1960s, but this was still a brave step. The last anthropologist to live with the Ilongots, William Jones, had been there less than a year when three Ilongots, including the man he shared a hut with, killed him with knives and spears.
What Rosaldo found was a culture with a distinct view of human nature. The Ilongots believe that everything human is the result of two psychological forces: bēya, or knowledge, and liget, or passion. Success in life comes from tempering passion with knowledge. Passion with knowledge brings creation and love; passion without knowledge brings destruction and hate. Passion, they believe, is innate and dwells in the heart. Knowledge is instilled and found in the head. The purpose of each Ilongot’s life was to develop the knowledge they needed to focus their passion into creation for the common good. Headhunting and other forms of violence were the result of too much passion and not enough knowledge. Amazed, Rosaldo captured the Ilongots’ insights in a book, Knowledge and Passion, now an iconic work of anthropology.
Stories like Woody Allen’s and experiments like Teresa Amabile’s show us that passion matters but not what passion is. The wisdom of the Ilongots fills that gap. Passion is the most extreme state of choice without reward. Or, rather, it is its own reward, an energy that is indifferent to outcomes, even when they include missed sleep, becoming poor, losing your friends, bleeding and bruising, even death.
This is not a new definition. The word “passion” comes from the Latin passio, for “suffering.” In 1677, Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza defined passion as a negative state in his masterwork, Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata, or The Ethics: “The force of any passion or emotion can overcome the rest of a man’s activities or power, so that the emotion becomes obstinately fixed to him.”
Spinoza thought passion was the opposite of reason—a force for madness. French philosopher René Descartes had a different view: “We can’t be misled by passions, because they are so close, so internal to our soul, that it can’t possibly feel them unless they are truly as it feels them to be. Even when asleep and dreaming we can’t feel sad or moved by any other passion unless the soul truly has this passion within it.”
Or: passion is the voice of the soul.
The two definitions of passion dueled until the twentieth century, when the positive view became more popular. But is passion always good? The Ilongots show us the answer. Passion is energy; if it does not create, it harms.
6 | ADDICTION, SORT OF
As the Ilongots and their headless victims know, passion that does not create destroys. We are all creative, and whether we have found it yet or not, we all have passion. But so many of us, for one reason or another, do not put our passion into action. Unfulfilled passion creates a cavity between our present and our potential—a void that can drip with destruction and despair. It stagnates. It manifests as might-have-beens. If we do not chase our dreams, they will pursue us as nightmares. Unfulfilled passion creates addicts and criminals.
Daquan Lawrence celebrated his sixteenth birthday incarcerated at the Elliot Hillside Detention Center in Roxbury, part of Boston, Massachusetts. His parents were drug addicts. His Nana Charlesetta rescued him from their home when he was five. He was arrested for the first time at thirteen, for dealing marijuana and crack on the streets of Mattapan, Roxbury’s troubled neighbor, known in Boston as “Murderpan.” (Roxbury itself has a marginally better reputation. Bostonians only call that part of town “Roachbury.”) Lawrence careened from one prison to the next for the rest of his childhood, known to all, including himself, as a repeat offender and maker of trouble.
Then, soon after that jailhouse sweet sixteen, a pipe-thin stranger came to Elliot Hillside. His name was Oliver Jacobson. He carried heavy black boxes into the detention center’s staff room. Lawrenc
e peered shyly through the door. He saw Jacobson unpacking a piano. Trails of cables connected microphones, keyboards, speakers, and headphones.
Encouraged by Jacobson, Lawrence approached a microphone and tried to rap. It was a moment of revelation for all who saw it: Lawrence, the hopeless young pusher on a treadmill of crime and punishment or worse, had the gift the hip-hop world calls “flow.” His rap was fluid, on time, and in tune. He ad-libbed—or “freestyled”—using a range of poetic tricks, from rhyme and repetition to assonance and alliteration:
It’s the strive from inside that reveals the pride,
But the message from the sky that shows me the guide,
We are leaders, overachievers,
Stuck once in the vision and precision of believers,
Keep looking up to the sky, you keep flowin’,
Never stop in the dark, you are glowing.
Lawrence spent months writing songs with Jacobson. He gave himself the rap name “True.” He studied acting, playing Romeo in Romeo and Juliet and Othello in Othello.
When he got out of jail, at seventeen, he took his first-ever job to pay for acting school—as a door-to-door salesman for an energy company. He passed his General Educational Development test, earning the equivalent of a high school diploma. He started thinking about college and told the Boston Globe, “The arts taught me to have a direction, to have a goal, be the best you can be. It feels like I’ve been productive in every way. I feel like right now, it’s real right for me. It’s meaningful.”