4 – The Whetstone

MODULE FOUR

Core Question

Which is greater? Gift, grit, or grace?

Core Practice

Sharpen your tools, but don’t cut yourself in the process.

By now, I hope you’re starting to make some connections between the art you make and the life you lead. To recap: by now you should be tweaking your creed, have a good sense of what moves you, and have an arsenal of disciplines and practices to help you make better.

In Module Three we discussed the infamous “grindstone” – that thing you put your nose to and sweat. The grindstone is all about the work. The whetstone, however, is a bit more refined. After the blacksmith has pounded a rough shape into the red-hot metal, he now needs to sharpen the tool. He does this by placing it with precision, over and over again, on the whetstone.

 While the whetstone is more delicate than the grindstone, don’t expect this work to come easy – you should still expect sparks to fly.

 This week we’re going to talk about getting down to the essentials (in our ideas and our lives), how to actually share our ideas through the medium of pitching, and how, in the end, grace is often greater than grit.

NOTE: Because I know the halfway mark is a big deal and because I want to be sure you stick with the rest of the material, I’ve intentionally made this module shorter so that you can zip right through. I want you to feel accomplished. I also want to give you time to catch up on material if you need to.

Alright, let’s get on with it!

 REMOVE EVERYTHING BUT THE ESSENTIAL BITS

“It’s the stuff you leave out that matters. So constantly look for things to remove, simplify, and streamline. Be a curator. Stick to what’s truly essential. Pare down things until you’re left with only the most important stuff. Then do it again. You can always add stuff back in later if you need to.” – Rework, Jason Fried

We want our projects to speak to as many people as possible, so we add.

Layer after layer, we add.

Thinking that the more we add, the more attractive the project becomes.

Let’s make it bigger, better, slicker. Let’s make it’s reach wide and broad. The more, the better, yes? The more sales, the better, right? The more people, the better, right?

This is not faulty thinking and it’s where you should start, in fact.

“More” should always be at the beginning.

When you’re beginning something, blue sky the hell out of it. There are no bad ideas. Spitball your heart out till the day is long gone.

But then something else needs to happen with that pile of ideas in the middle of the table. And it this moment, staring at all the possibilities, that separates the real artists from the amateurs. What we do next with the bounty of choices separates the good humans from the great ones.

You see, to the untrained eye, a table full of “more” suggests that the project is done.

Ever been in a brainstorming meeting, the clock is winding down, the whiteboard is full of ideas, and you end up going with the last one that was thrown out there? We don’t want to do the real work of paring down to the essentials, so we just go with the latest addition and call it a day.

This is not a great strategy for art making and certainly won’t help you much in making a better, or more whole life.

In fact, it’s possible that more may be getting in the way of saying exactly what it is you want to say.

Paring down your projects (manuscripts, blogs, designs, songs, creeds) to their absolute essential bits, is the mark of truly mature work.

You must find what is essential, or your amazing message – your amazing life – will be lost under a pile of more.

So, how do we know what are the essential bits and what are not? How do we go about this process of editing? 

Make space

For the longest time I kept my desk and living space in complete chaos. This was especially true in college. I never hung up my clothes. I’d open the mail and toss it aside. Taco bell wrappers and Papa John’s boxes started to look like intentional floor coverings.

And then one day, I cleaned my room. That’s it. I just cleaned it. And all of a sudden, almost miraculously, I could focus on what was important. My desk was clear and so was my mind.

This rather benign scenario can be really powerful if you don’t overlook it.

I’ve heard countless stories of artists who made incredible breakthroughs in their work by simply washing the dishes.

Now take a second and look around…

What’s in your physical space, in your mind, or in your heart, that’s clouding your ability to focus – your ability to find that which is essential?

TIME OUT

Head over to the Facebook group and tell us what’s junking up your space.

Another great way to make space is by simply being quiet and letting all the nuts and bolts sort themselves out. Just like our messy spaces, our minds get clogged up if we don’t give our heads a rest. Here’s a lovely little piece on solitude as recommended reading.

Know what story you want to tell

You can beat your head against the wall playing around with all sorts of ways or mediums to tell a story. It should be a dance, a novel, a movie, we say. Or when we put this matrix against our lives, we spend countless hours worrying about what school we’ll go to, whether or not we should go to school, what town we should live in, do we buy or do we rent?

These are truly great questions, but back to Module One, they focus on “how” and “what,” instead of the all-imporatant, “why.”

If we want to remove everything but the essentials, we must know what story we’re telling before we decide how we are going to tell it. We’ll get into this much more deeply in Module Seven, but take a moment now and think about the themes of your life.

What is the story you want your life and art to tell?

For a bit of in-your-face inspiration, here is some wallpaper my friend, Keaton Price, created:

Download the entire set of wallpapers for your desktop and mobile device here.

Personal, Specific, Moving, Honest

Even after I’ve made space and I know what story I want to tell, often I still have trouble weeding out what is most essential. It is then that I need to go inside. As we’ve said before, the best art comes from someone who has herself been moved. When I need to get to what’s essential – whether it be a table full of creative ideas, or a life filled with options – I ask myself the following:

 The following is a story I tell in UNTITLED:

When it comes to editing down the essential bits, sometimes we take radical action.

This is something my wife taught me when we were in college and something she learned from an incredible woman named Firenza Guidi, who heads the European Live Arts Network, a performance, training, research, and production company from Wales.

They were working on a performance art piece based on the famous German play, Woyzeck, in a hidden, underground market beneath the streets of Indianapolis. Towards the end of their rehearsals, each small group responsible for telling their part of the story was asked to perform it for the whole group.

My wife’s group went and their scene was met with applause.

Firenza leaned in and said, “Close. Now do it without words.”

Sometimes when all else fails, you need to make radical, life-altering choices about what to keep in and what to cut. As Stephen King has famously said:

“Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”

Pitching isn’t just for baseball

An often ignored part of the process of making moving art and a better life is the pitch.

This is what separates us from an idea we have to an idea we get to do.

In life, the pitch is what separates us from being clear to others who we are and what we’re about and being filled with righteous indignation because people “just don’t get us.”

If we’re honest, most of us have gatekeepers of one sort of another.

They are the people that hold the checkbooks, they are our bosses, or our parents, or our spouses, or our community.

There’s no easy way to deal with the gatekeepers, but here’s what I found to be true:

We get around the gatekeepers by getting inside their hearts.

We often forget that they are our first audience (outside of ourselves) and they must be moved as well.

After you’ve paired down your idea, or your story, or a theme for your life, and you’re ready to share it with a gatekeeper, the same principles named above apply. If you want to move the gatekeepers you must be personal, specific, moving, and honest.

Don Draper as we all know is a masterful pitcher.

Here he does exactly what I’m saying we all should do as he pitches the execs from Kodak.

He takes a product he’s trying to sell and turns it into moving drive down memory lane – his own memories and his own life.

TIME OUT

Head over to the Facebook group and tell us one thing you’re pitching or wanting to pitch. Extra credit for those who share a life example, instead of a work one! Then tell us how you’re going to make it more personal, specific, moving, and honest.

Gift. Grit. Grace. The greater of these is grace.

If you’ve made it this far, and by that I mean, the fourth week of Make Better, you deserve a huge round of applause. Hooray for you! This isn’t easy work, but here you are halfway through the course. That’s amazing and I think you should do something this week to celebrate.

Trying to make good art and good lives is the greatest task we can put our energy towards. When done well it changes us from the inside out. And as we change, as we become more whole, so does the world around us. This is what you’re doing through the work of this course and if we were in person, I’d give you a way-to-go hug!

And so we come to our final thought of the week.

In Module One and Two we learned that our gift to the world is our unique calling and creed and the way we are uniquely moved. In Module Three we learned that it takes discipline and practice to grit our way through to truly great work.

And today I want to simply remind you that when you’re feeling down and out, when you’re stuck, when you can’t get that creed just right, or you’re confused by what moves you, or when you can’t stay on your knees or buns for more than just a few minutes, or when you can’t whittle your  ideas down to their essential bits: be kind to yourself.

Being a human being is tough stuff. Being an artist is not for the faint at heart, but you’re doing it. And in the midst of all the work, take some time to be gracious with yourself.

As I said at the very beginning of the lesson:

Sharpen your tools, but don’t cut yourself in the process.