The bottlenecks to greatness
Where do I have to grow? Not just as a writer, but a thinker, and more importantly, a person? It’s dangerous to stop asking this question; it’s too easy to see yourself as fully matured, individuated and at your edge. Even the self-labeled "curiosity seekers" may unknowingly confine themselves to a shape. We identify with our skills and clumsiness, our knowledge and gaps, and assume these as static traits of our nature. From the other end, someone once told me there’s nothing they could learn from fiction, since they have no doubts on who they are. Can you not have both? To propel forward with confidence on your proven strengths, but also with the humility that you have much to learn? I am grateful for how architecture school set off an explosive inner drive in me, and certainly do feel I've cultivated a unique way of seeing things, but surely I'm blind in ways I can't see, with some habits I must have gotten very wrong, and if continued unfixed, will clamp me down from greatness.
Greatness! I shouldn't be shy to admit what I strive for, to feel the subtle pressure to play down my quest for complete, utter, spine-chilling mastery as a cool and casual endeavor. What is the root of this? Maybe I can tell you but I will likely be guessing and justifying.
One guess is that I've been receptive/perceptive to feel the viscerality of great works—in architecture, music, writing—and it feels to me there's no greater ability than being able to do that myself. This isn't unique to me of course, it's possibly what drives at least half of artists, but I imagine many people are content experiencing art in all its fullness with no desire of making it themselves (no desire to make, or to recreate that experience in others).
I know it’s vain (and dangerous) to want extrinsic fame, and more measured to do things for the love of it, intrinsically. But if it were purely intrinsic, would I not just journal and take my words to the grave? I could riffed on the intrinsic benefits—ie: it simply feels like great to pick something you enjoy and commit to improving through your whole life—but also, if you take that idea seriously, it’s not enough to just enjoy it uncritically, because your blind spots may prevent you from reaching your greatest internal heights.
This makes it worthwhile to understand the caliber of the minds and lives around you, and throughout history, to estimate yours in relation to theirs. Of course, "comparison is the thief of joy," but there's a way to get feedback without letting it consciously or subconsciously crush you. I imagine a reasonable person just makes an assumption, that someone they're inspired by is just made differently. Instead, we each have a range of extreme and unreasonable actions available to us, that if we act upon consistently for years, can evolve us out of one head and into another.
There’s a level of contradiction here, where I’m totally happy writing in obscurity as a suburban dad, and it’s fine if no one but my daughter ever reads my work, and also I want to unblock all my obstacles so that it increases the odds and eliminates the luck of becoming “a figure,” someone beyond my local Dunbar limits, outside my audience, and if I'm being honest, outside the 21st century. I realize this might be a confession of vanity, but I don’t think it’s for the sake of being known or idolized, for I’d do the whole thing anonymously or pseudonymously if that’s what it took. I’m an introvert and very much appreciate my solitude. But to rise above the filter of obscurity from great work is to offer others the experience that triggered me to make stuff in the first place. There's a sense of paying it forward.
Again, I'm not sure here if I'm trying to justify an inner, hidden vanity of mine, or if there really is a paradox worth sitting with. A different and possibly wiser point of view is to be indifferent to outcomes. Mastery is all you need: sometimes it gets recognized and sometimes it doesn't. Figures without mastery are idols, influencers, farces. What matters is the inner quest to transcend your limits.
So back to the original question, what are my limits? I am under-studied compared to Huxley, under-lived to Kerouac, unexplored compared to Pessoa, inarticulate to Woolf, unwise to Christ. And so half the battle is in trying to sustain conversations with these people, through their work, for a full decade, until you absorb their particularities into your own essence; but also book knowledge is useless unless you live and integrate it; that involves courage, which is not something you absorb in prose.
That is the bottleneck to everything, to life and art: courage. We each have to overcome our sheepishness and strive to live in Third ways. And while I have extreme courage in some areas, I am a coward in many others (I will spare you the accounting). How do you wring that out of your nerves? It is the limiting constraint in everything. It is the weakest link. In each sport I played as a kid, I had one trait of excellence that was rendered useless by a handicap: the hardest shot in soccer but I could not dribble; the best rebounder who could not lay up; the golden glove with a wimp’s arm; lightning legs but Super Mario sprinting form. Likewise, I can’t write or live without courage.
And so really I’m six years into writing, the same length of time I spent in architecture school, but as if I built my own curriculum. I am only at square one with everything ahead of me.