So Work

Everyone has talent. What is rare
is the courage to follow the talent
to the dark place where it leads.
–Erica Jong

The art of writing
is the art of applying
the seat of the pants
to the seat of the chair.
—Mary Heaton Vorse

It’s Labor Day, and I’m thinking about work.

I’m going to tell you it’s beautiful.

What? No, no, no. Work? Beautiful? You must really need a day off, Laynie. Today is for goofing off, having a barbecue. You’re not supposed to think about work today. Maybe think about the importance of unions, child labor, working conditions, trafficking. You can think about that. But it’s really a day to kick back and relax.

I don’t think so.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I like a good party as much as anyone. But I also believe in work. Way more than talent. Let me explain.

Once, when I was a little girl, my sister and brother and I were quarreling about something. My mother said, “These are our lives going by.”

I’ve taught writing for years, and I’m thinking of a writing student we’ll call, “Wally” and another we’ll call, “Bob.”

When he came in, Wally was a pretty good writer. A year later, Wally was–a pretty good writer. He never got any better because he didn’t do the work. He was happy to coast where he was.

This is the subject of Carol Dweck’s vital book, Mindset.

Dweck talks about a gifted violinist who achieves some success. But she watches others, less gifted to start with, pass her by.

Many people complain because others seem to be getting all the breaks.

“People are always going on about circumstances,” wrote George Bernard Shaw. “The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for those circumstances and if they can’t find them, make them.”

Before you jump down my throat, please remember I’m a working artist who also works with creative people.

In the wider world, before I started my first business 29 years ago I waited tables, worked as a cook, a hotel desk clerk, a street “peddler” (selling jewelry) and a street musician (same license; thank you, Burlington!), did brief stints as a children’s counselor and bartender (separate gigs), and was a temp, on and off, for ten–count ’em, ten–years. Oh, and I was, for not quite short enough a time, a mother’s helper in Greenwich, Connecticut, where the mother in question followed behind me as I swept and told me that everything I was doing she could do in two minutes.

So I know very well how hard it is. And I also keep the phrase “20 year overnight success” in mind. Because a lot of people do succeed. Sure, the statistics are daunting. But in addition to luck—which no one can control—there’s another factor.

You.

And how hard you will work to get there.

It isn’t dumb luck that causes the other violinists to pass the “talented” one by in Mindset. They make more of an effort to develop their craft. They learn how to market.

They do their work.

I once babysat for a boy. He said he wanted to be an actor. I told him about a friend who was then in the Big Apple Circus, and that some people worked their way up from circus. Maybe I mentioned school plays, too.

No, he explained patiently, he wanted to be Laurence Olivier.

When Bob came in, he was not a very good writer. The usual: flowery language that covered over everything, borrowed feelings, grand statements about life without the images that make you believe it.

After a couple of writing coaching sessions, Bob stunned me with a gorgeous piece of writing I told him was publishable. Vivid images of his childhood Christmas gathering with not a trace of sentimentality—well, okay, maybe a teeny bit, but mostly humor and people that came to life as they spoke. And this was no fluke: everything I’ve seen of his since then has been equally strong.

Wow. You must be a good coach.

One would hope so. But it’s not about me. I tell all my clients—in art and those who come in for help with business matters—“I have no control over what you do when you walk out that door.”

Sometimes I tell them about Wally and Bob. I almost always tell them about a woman we’ll call, “Betty.”

Betty teaches piano. She came in because she wanted to teach more piano students. I helped her understand what made her approach to teaching valuable, and I gave her an action plan based on her goals.

Every time I saw Betty after that or talked to her on the phone, she’d say, “I have three new students.” Or “I have five new students.”

“Betty,” I told her (using her real name, which is classified), “you’re amazing.”

Toward the end of “Arielle” http://soundcloud.com/ira-marlowe/arielle, a song about untapped talent (among other things), Ira Marlowe’s narrator begs the song’s namesake, “Please amaze me.”

He sees her drinking with her friends in bars—as my mother would have it, he sees her life going by—when he once heard her songs and knows how good she is, how much talent she has.

But will she end up like Wally or Dweck’s violinist, very good and nothing more? Or will she end up like Bob and Betty?

Will she push herself? Will she do the necessary work?

Remember, I’m not talking about fame and fortune. Those are out of our hands. I’m talking about achieving excellence. I’m talking about having the courage to follow through, to show up, to take your talent, as Jong would have it, “to the dark place where it leads.” (By the way, maybe it’s dark just because it’s unknown territory.) To do what it takes to take what you’ve got as far as you possibly can.

There’s an old-fashioned word for what Bob and Betty have, and the good news is it’s not genetic.

It’s called, “discipline.”

And it’s a beautiful thing.

So work.

(Originally published in “From Strength to Strength,” ideasmadereal.blogspot.com.)

©2011, 2017 Laynie Tzena. All Rights Reserved.