Transcripts
1. Introduction: Want to do your
best creative work, it matters how you
respond to adversity. It matters how you
respond to the criticisms that will inevitably
come your way. It matters how you respond
to those comments that will come when you finally share
your art with the world. My name is Mark Samples. I'm a writer, musician, and
professional musicologist. And in this short lesson, I'm going to share with you
a mindset that will help you deal with adversity in
your creative life. It's called making sandals. So if you want to do better, receiving criticism and have more mental resiliency,
let's get started.
2. Build Mental Resiliency: A Lesson from Joshua Waitzkin: Start with a quote. A man
wants to walk across the land, but the Earth is
covered with thorns. He has two options. One is to pave his road, to tame all of nature
into compliance. The other is to make sandals. I want to tell you a quick
story about Joshua Watskin. Joshua Watskin was
a chess prodigy. You may have heard of
him without knowing it, if you ever saw the 1990s film
Waiting for Bobby Fisher. Waiting for Bobby
Fisher was about the young chess life
of Josh Watskin. As a chess prodigy,
Watskin found himself competing at the highest
levels as a teenager. And Watskin learned that at the highest levels
of competition, there are always dirty players. As Watskin recounts in his
book, The Art of Learning, which is one of my
favorite books of all one newly immigrated
Russian player who was 15-years-old used
to kick him under the table hard when they
were playing chess games. He would do it just when
no one was looking so that only Watskin could tell
and the judges never saw. Then Boris would get up from
the table in the middle of a chess game and go discuss the positions
with his coaches, which is, of course,
blatant cheating. But because they were
speaking in Russian, no one knew what they were
saying, and, of course, they denied that they were ever talking about the chess match. Because Watskin and Boris were two of the top players
in their age bracket, they would always meet
in very important games. And the injustice of
these actions that Boris made inevitably threw Watskin off of his game at critical moments and would
lead to him losing matches. Boris had his number. The influx of young
Russian players in the early 1990s and their questionable
tactics had led other United States players
to quit the game altogether, indignant, they were so frustrated with the
injustice of it all. But it wasn't until
his second career as a martial artist that Watskin
was able to make sandals, to harness his emotions
in the face of injustice and turn the
tables on his opponents. Watskin tells a
story in the book of one particularly nasty
opponent who would throw head butts directly to the nose when he
started losing a match. This opponent did
exactly this twice to Watskin in the United States National
Tai Chi championship. Watskin went balistic
for 10 seconds. He was literally seeing red. Why did this opponent
take this strategy? Naturally because
it worked for him, his opponents would
lose their cool, make mistakes, and allow
him to win the match. Thankfully, Watskin came back to his senses in time
to win the match. But reflecting on his performance
after the championship, he realized a weakness in
himself and went to work on it. As Watskin describes, he spent the next full year seeking out creepy opponents in his gym, ones who would go for the eyes, for the throat,
or for the groin. Through this intentional
practice with injustice, he learned to neutralize these moves and
eventually learned the important skill of accepting his fear
of getting hurt. So when Watskin faced that same dirty opponent in the finals the
very next year, it was no contest. This is how Watskin
described it. I began by controlling him, neutralizing his aggression,
building up a lead. Then he got emotional and
started throwing head butts. My reaction was very
different this time. Instead of getting mad, I just rolled with his attacks and
threw him out of the ring. His attacks didn't
touch me emotionally, and when unclouded, I was simply at a much
higher level than him. It was amazing how easy it all felt when I didn't
take the bait. So what can we learn as creators from Joshua
Watskin's example? Just as Joshua Watskin
anticipated and adapted to unfair practices
in his competitions, creators need to prepare themselves for a
range of adversities. A critic misinterprets
your work. Someone steals your art
and calls it their own. Haters troll you relentlessly
on social media. How are we as creators supposed to respond to these
circumstances? Well, remember, at
the highest levels, there are always dirty players. If you allow them to
throw you off your game in critical moments,
they will have one. Instead, harness your own
emotions, play your own game. Instead of trying to
pave every thorny road with leather, make sandals.
3. Take Action: Course Project: Let's end this lesson
with a quick activity that can help you apply
what you have learned. Make a quick list of the
triggers in your creative life, the situations
that throw you off balance and leave
you emotionally raw. Maybe it's an unfairly
critical comment. Maybe it's harsh deadlines
or lost opportunities. Make a list of the
situations that you know affect you emotionally. Next, write down how these situations affect
your creative energies, affect your ability to
get creative work done. Write down how it makes
you feel and what the effects of these situations have been on you in the past. Awareness is the first step to understanding how to
make sandals for yourself, how to create mental resilience. Thanks so much for
joining me for this short targeted lesson on how to improve your
creative process. My name is Mark Samples. If you liked this lesson, I have many more on my website, and you can sign up for my
newsletter where I send out every Monday one
timeless insight or example of how to do
your best creative work. You can find a
link to my website in the resources
below this video. Or you can just search Mark
Samples creative process, and you'll find it. In the meantime, happy Creating.