1/30: There is Art Inside You

My fourth grade science teacher brought a rubber ball to class one day. He explained to us that if you dropped the rubber ball, it would never bounce back as high as the height from which you dropped it.

I remember feeling disappointed that my teacher – someone who was supposed to teach me, after all – was so dumb. Of course the rubber ball could bounce higher than the height from which you dropped it. That's what makes rubber balls fun. They bounce off of walls and floors, and you never know where they're gonna go next.

We were then put into groups with our classmates, and we conducted an experiment. I held the ball next to a meter stick one classmate was holding perpendicular to the floor. The other classmate in my group noted the height I held the ball – one meter. I let go of the ball.

I watched eagerly as the ball dropped, as if in slow motion, and made impact with the floor. I was glad we were conducting this experiment, because I couldn't wait to prove my teacher wrong. Just as I had suspected, the ball bounced to ninety centimeters.

Wait. What?! Ninety centimeters is less than one meter. That's not what I expected at all. My classmates were equally shocked. Surely there must have been something wrong. So, we tried it again. And again. And again.

Each time we tried, the ball bounced to the same height of ninety centimeters. We thought maybe something was wrong with our ball, but we checked with the groups next to us, and they had gotten the same results.

This was my introduction to the laws of physics. There was no way for the ball to bounce higher than it was dropped, because too much energy was lost on impact with the floor.

It was much later that I realized that you could, in fact, know exactly where the ball would go. It would all depend upon the angle of impact, and velocity, and the properties of the surfaces the ball hit.

Just like there are physical laws in our world – such as the laws that govern a rubber ball – so too there are laws to art. These laws govern whether or not your work will stay within you, or whether you'll bring it into the world.

If you throw a rubber ball into the ground with all of your strength, it will bounce well beyond the height from which you threw it. If you drop it, it won't bounce very high at all.

Every once in awhile, you may be inspired to make something. It comes out of you easily. But, just like the rubber ball, without effort your output will trail off into nothing. Your art will get drowned out by everything else in life that commands your attention: Getting a steady paycheck, answering emails, or bingeing on the latest Netflix series.

As we'll learn in the next few chapters, these distractions aren't always what they seem. There are complex forces at work that keep us from making our art.

We feel it when we sit down in front of a blank canvas. It pushes us to decide, once again, to try to fit in.

We feel it when we go to the gym, or sit down to write, or when we daydream once again about opening a café in France.

I think Stephen Pressfield nailed it when he identified Resistance in his book, The War of Art. Making your work real is a constant battle with Resistance. It's the force that keeps your ball stuttering on the floor, instead of flying into the sky.

With this book, I want to give you practical ways of breaking through that Resistance to bring your work into the world.

But first, you need to understand the laws of art – like laws of physics – that govern whether your work lives, or dies along with you.

Law #1 of art: There is art inside you.

Everyone has art inside of them. It's just hard to see sometimes.

It used to be that every artifact was made by an artisan. If you had a spoon, an artisan made it. If you had a gun, an artisan made it.

Then, interchangeable parts were invented. Now, if your musket broke, you could order a new part from Eli Whitney's factory, and your gun was fixed.

But this system of interchangeable parts started to shape the way that people worked together. People, too, had to become interchangeable parts. If this Regional Manager of Operations quits, we have to replace her with a different Regional Manager of Operations. Both of them have MBAs and have been through the same educational system, so while they may be different in many ways, they're similar enough to replace one another.

This has gotten humanity far. There's still no shortage of great art being made by people who are able to overcome the pressures to fit in. But now we're in the midst of another revolution. Automation and Artificial Intelligence may soon be able to do the job of a Regional Manager of Operations.

This scares the heck out of a lot of people, but it's actually a great opportunity. Just as agriculture allowed us to spend less time chasing food, and more time thinking abstractly, the automation of jobs will move what we call "work" up Maslow's hierarchy of needs. We can reconnect with our humanity, and our humanity is what makes us all artists.

So, there is art inside of you, and now you need to get it out of you. It's the only way you can really know who you are.