A genius at your own level

The other day, Seth Godin wrote: If you're waiting for a boss or an editor or a college to tell you that you do good work, you're handing over too much power to someone who doesn't care nearly as much as you do.

We spend a lot of time organizing and then waiting for the system to pick us, approve of us and give us permission to do our work.

This somewhat ties in with something I've struggled with a good deal over the years: a kind of self-criticism that says what I do isn't good enough - because so and so does it so much better. The fact that so and so is some kind of genius has never impressed the self-critic in me. Because so and so is great/good/capable, I must therefore always be on a lower step on the rung.

It's nonsense of course, and what's worse it makes me criticise others, both those who really are better than me, and those who plainly aren't (though of course the critic doesn't let me say that without feeling guilty).

I realised the other day, after having discussed this at length with my supervisor on several occasions, that there really isn't some kind of magical 'bar' just out of reach that I'm always striving for....one that someone else has placed there. The only bar I need to worry about (if worry is the right word) is the bar I'm prepared to climb up to. If what I'm doing isn't good enough the bar is the one I set in place myself to make sure that what I do is good enough.

I need a bar, a kind of level to strive for. Otherwise, 'okay' is good enough - and of course it isn't; it's usually second-rate. But the other side of this is that when I do do well, or write something that's good, then that sets the standard for future work, and also satisfies the inner critic.

Furthermore, as Godin says, I don't need 'permission' from someone else, approval that says what I've done is good. Of course we all like to hear that other people appreciate what we create - equally we don't like to hear other people saying they don't like what we've done. However, reliance on that approval (or disapproval) is, in the end, counterproductive. It tells us nothing except that someone liked or disliked something.

The person who needs to like or dislike it is the creator of it. Ultimately I'm the judge of the work. If I think I've done my utmost with it, then that's the place to sit and be satisfied. If I realise that I can improve it (see the previous post) then I need to knuckle down and improve it. Until it's at that 'level,' that 'bar' I was talking about, it will make me feel dissatisfied.

But at least that dissatisfaction is within my own sphere, not 'created' by some false sense that someone else would/could do better, and that I'm a fraud to pretend I can do as well.

On an entirely different note, because different notes give variety, and monotonal music/writing is a bore, I have just discovered what pop displays are. I thought they must be something to do with pop-outs. Nope. The 'pop' stands for 'point of purchase' - that's not what we call them here in NZ where the term is more often 'point of sale display' - and it means all those little things you (or worse, your kids) can pick up at the last minute and throw into the bunch of stuff you've just spent an hour buying around the supermarket, or Bunnings, or The Warehouse, or wherever.

Bunnings opened its new store in Dunedin a few days ago - tonight they had about five minutes of full-scale fireworks blazing throughout the night sky, the second such display in a few weeks - the last was for the last match at Carisbrook, the famed sports ground that has been dumped in favour of the new Stadium Dunedin is building at enormous cost to the ratepayers - even though initially we were told it wouldn't cost us a thing! That ridiculously long sentence, with its muddled syntax and cluttered phrases is a prime example of something that should be fixed up (my inner critic is doing a poor imitation of weeping), but since the bar for this paragraph is just where I'm sitting already, I'm not going to do anything more about it!

[Picture of Mozart - a genius - for those who didn't recognise him.]

The Pickwick Papers

A couple of days ago I finished re-reading Charles Dickens' The Pickwick Papers. I think I last read it when I was in my late teens or early twenties, so very little of it remained in my head, except the odd and irrelevant stories that Dickens dots throughout the book. They're usually told by some character who has nothing much to do with the rest of the book, and who is invited by the other characters at that point to get on and tell a story. Few of these stories have any tonal connection with the book as a whole, and I can only assume they were put in to fill up space when Dickens was writing the novel in its original serial form.

The book has virtually no plot, and initially is little more than a series of episodes. However, gradually some form of over-arching story takes over, and gives the thing some (minimal) structure. The novel begins with Pickwick, a man on in years, retired from business and very well off, heading off on a adventures just for the sake of writing them up. And initially there's a narrator who gives the pretence of picking up Pickwick's adventures from his notebooks. This idea gets abandoned somewhere along the line.

Pickwick sets out with three younger men - Winkle, Snodgrass and Tupman. These three are virtually indistinguisable from each other, although something is made of Winkle's propensity to fall in love with any woman he meets. But they all suffer from Dickens' inability to make characters out of his young heroes and heroines - the young women in the story are equally indistinguisable, all being beautiful, delightful, charming and so forth, but totally lacking in personality.

But this hardly matters when put beside the people who do come alive in the story. Jingle, the 'villain' of the piece, initially, eventually almost comes to a sticky end; though we don't have great sympathy for him. However, his manservant, Job Trotter, becomes increasingly interesting as the story progresses, and is a reflection of the most vital character in the story: Sam Weller, who, along with his father, has most of the best scenes in the novel. Sam takes a while to arrive, but once he does the book never looks back. The later scenes with him and his father, a man gifted in his ability to mangle the English language almost beyond recognition, are the height of comedy.

Pickwick himself is a bit of an enigma: seen as the 'wise head' in many parts of the story, he's actually a total innocent, a cherub unfamiliar with the ways of the world. Much is made of his rotundity, and is inability to move quickly enough to get himself out of some situations (Sam usually has to hoist him along), but his rotundity is nothing compared to that of the 'Fat Boy' whose obesity causes him to drop off to sleep without blinking an eye - even while knocking continually on a door. Obviously neither of them have read up on the latest diet pill reviews.

The way in which Sam Weller becomes utterly loyal to Pickwick, his master, is almost a foreign thing to us these days. That someone should be employed yet virtually live no life of his own is a concept we barely understand. Job Trotter acts in a similar way to Jingle, with far less reason to do so.

And the other thing which is perhaps foreign - in some measure - is the constant drinking that goes on throughout the book. Pickwick is no late starter in the drinking sessions, but he's regularly accompanied by his three proteges, as well as a host of other men (and sometimes women) in drinking sessions that frequently put them all to sleep. And the two medical students - characters who are among the more unpleasant in the book - are basically alcoholics. Their antics are amusing, yet verge on the frightening.

There are two things that make this book stand out for me. Firstly there's the superb command of language - Dickens was only 24 when he began the book - and secondly, there is the wondrous array of minor characters. This book is loaded to the gunnels with them. Some get no more than a sentence, and yet still come alive. Others have several pages given to them, or are scattered at random moments throughout the book, and retain their individuality in extraordinary measure. Admittedly Dickens had a genius in this regard, but walking into the world of The Pickwick Papers is not like coming into the world of a novice writer. The major skills in which Dickens would be pre-eminent are there fully formed even at this early stage. Furthermore, his descriptive abilities are almost equally fully formed. In later books he uses this aspect of his gift in a much deeper way, so that description is not there just for entertainment but carries metaphor and theme and much more. Nevertheless, if Dickens had never developed beyond this point in terms of his writing style, he would still be regarded as one of the world's great novelists.

More on David Tammet

Just a little more on David Tammet and some thoughts on his ideas on creativity and autism. He quotes a professor of psychiatry called Michael Fitzgerald at one point. Fitzgerald, who has an autistic child, has a theory that such creative geniuses as Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, and Mendel 'may all have found their genius through autism.'

This idea comes from the point that autistic people appear to have less inhibitors between certain sections of the brain, inhibitors that appear more regularly in people who aren't geniuses. This lack of 'inhibition' gives the brain synapses in autistic people the means to make connections that would otherwise be forestalled. This would tend to suggest that most creative people have less inhibition between the sections of their brains, but I suspect that this isn't a case proven as yet. Perhaps what might be closer to the truth is the point that people in general are on a continuum from very dull brained people (for whatever reason) to ones whose brains perform fantastically - and creatively.

People are on continuums in all sorts of spheres: look at men and women in terms of their innate masculinity or femininity: the spectrum is enormous from men who are so male that any hint of emotion or softness seems unlikely, to men at the other extreme who are all softness and have almost feminine characteristics. The same applies to women, who range from females who seem to be almost masculine in their outlook on life and their body language to women who are the epitome of softness. These are very loose generalisations, of course.

Perhaps autism isn't quite the illness we've thought, but something closer to a kind of extreme ability to use the brain that most of us don't have. But then, autistic people, like 'ordinary' people range over a wide spectrum too.