The foolishness of pursuing a passion.
Alternatively: what to do when you're stuck in the second clearing.
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Only one person in the world has ever truly been cool, and that was the late, great Bernie Mac on stage in 1992 for Def Comedy Jam. The story of that night has many retellings, but it is generally agreed upon that a tough crowd viciously booed a previous comedian off stage before Mac was set to perform. Walking up to a hostile crowd is a death sentence, even for the best performers. All the same, the Emcee, Martin Lawrence, introduced Bernie Mac. Mac did what Mac does. He strutted out to the stage, grabbed the microphone, took one look at the crowd—
“I ain’t scared of you motherfuckers,” he began. “Imma tell you something straight off the motherfucking press. I ain’t come here for no foolishness.”
Mac then proceeded to do six minutes of impeccable stand-up. Through my decade of improv and public speaking, I’ve never seen an audience love a performance as much as this. Bernie Mac had them like no one has ever had anything before or since. If they were pins waiting to be knocked down, he was a cannonball shot out of an M1 Abrams tank. After he’d reach a punch line, he’d yell, “Kick it!” Hit a quick dance; the audience would start hollering while the DJ in the back of the room played a beat. Mac would then swipe his hand across the air, cutting the music off, and then— in an instant—hop right back into his material, saying—
“You don’t understand! I ain’t scared of you motherfuckers!”
Coolest shit I’ve ever seen. Watching that set for the first time gave me the same feeling you might receive watching a gold-medal Olympic performance—the feeling of total awe as someone’s years of pursuit of a singular, focused passion pay off to perfection.
I am not currently, nor have I ever been, an Olympian or an Original King of Comedy. I haven’t the drive or the extra set of lungs that helps Michael Phelps be good at swimming. Or whatever. But with half a decade of freelancing behind my sails, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to pursue a passion—the ugly mix of career and art, of focus and dithering talent. I think about the frequent response I give to college students who ask me if it is viable to pursue freelance writing. “Whose to say?” I say.
Behind my tepid answer is an acknowledgment that in a country with minimal social safety nets, luck, timing, and available resources are among the primary determining factors in whether you can even consider pursuing an unconventional career. Unromantically, I’ve always been deeply concerned with the practicality of art. One of my biggest grievances is when an established creative, suffering from the curse of knowledge, is unable to relay any practical steps of getting from A to B. Still though, I find myself so enamored when I see the fruits of focused passion, magical performances like Mac’s. In an interview, he once said about comedy, “My ultimate goal was to be the best within myself.”
Without further ado, I’d like to explore some of the types of foolishness, the mental traps, I’ve been through as I’ve endeavored to pursue a passion as a career.
Kick it!
Scheduling your birthday on Mt. Everest
One of the main types of foolishness I’ve been thinking through is a question of artistic stubbornness. Are you standing up for your creative integrity? Or are you simply unwilling to learn certain tools of the trade?
Imagine you’re planning your ideal birthday. You’ve spent hours whipping up a fantastic meal, crafting decorations that reflect your personality, and setting the perfect list of activities. Everyone who matters to you would love to be at this party. All is set. Then, at the final hour, you announce that the location is the peak of Mount Everest. The day comes, and not a single person shows except your weird friend Darry, who already had the proper equipment and an extra set of lungs that make him good at climbing. You’re shocked. A hot mix of embarrassment and betrayal floods your face.
If you’re down to just hang out with Darry, that’s great—more power to both of you. But if you did want more people there, you could have likely changed a few elements of your party while still holding onto your non-negotiables.
Creating great art but refusing to engage with the technical elements of putting it into the world is what I like to call Scheduling your birthday on Mt. Everest. You can have the most creative idea ever, but if you want to share it with people, potentially a lot of them, you unfortunately have to grapple with making it accessible. This means you may have to deal with elements such as self-promotion and marketing.
Now, I’d rather shoot a turtle in the head than sound like a LinkedIn post on here. But it’s true that the idea of pursuing a media career without a trust fund, inherently necessitates some meditation on cultivating an audience, and negotiating what that relationship means to you. The technical elements of a career are a drag, especially if you hold a nebulous definition of purity as an artist in your head. But pursuing art as a career is a job, and some element of every job sucks.
After the release of his book Infinitum, Afrofuturist graphic novelist Tim Fielder discussed this during our interview a few years ago. “If you are an author fortunate enough to get a book deal with a big five publisher, understand that you must be an active participant in the marketing, publicity, and selling of your book,” he said. “If you are one of those lucky few authors and your book comes out and just hits? That’s fine. But for the rest of us, we got to work. It’s a job.”
If you create video essays, you don’t have to change your entire style to chase the algorithm for what is popular. And you shouldn’t. But you must ask if it is inherently corrupting to learn how to title your video to be more engaging. Maybe it is for you. But you need to understand where your lines are.
Ask yourself, if you keep every element of the party the same, would you be willing to get a few more people there by scheduling the next one on the second-tallest mountain in the world?
Kick it!
Taking the modeling gig
An annoying aspect of unconventional careers is the circuitous paths they can take. That truth can lead you to a type of foolishness I’m calling Taking the modeling gig. Sometimes, we spend a lot of energy on things we don’t really care about.
Recently, a modeling friend kindly forwarded me a commercial acting gig opportunity in my area. On the off chance they cast me, it would have been a nice paycheck for the amount of work. Getting money is good for me, personally, so my alarm bells for interest started sounding. After receiving the message, I spent the next two hours reading through the audition process and considering which part of the commercial would be best for me. It wasn’t until I started drafting a text to borrow a friend’s camera for a self-tape audition that I remembered, “Wait, I don’t give a shit about this.”
Modeling comfortably falls outside the scope of what I’m trying to do with my career at the moment. While I was interested in the payday, by the two-hour point, I had already invested more effort than going down this unrelated path was worth for me.
In the excellent piece that inspired this one,
calls a similar idea gutterballing, or “excelling, but in slightly the wrong direction. For most of its journey, after all, the gutterball is getting closer to the pins. It’s only at the end that it barely, but dramatically, misses.”We can’t be spending our limited energy on opportunities we know we don’t want. If you don’t want to be a model, it’s probably fine not to take the modeling gig.
Kick it!
Getting stuck in the second clearing
Imagine you’re in the clearing of a beautiful forest. Before you are ten paths, well-groomed gates of shrubbery outline the entrance to each. Many are appealing. But after much deliberation, you finally pick one and step forward. After a few minutes of walking, you’re dismayed to find yourself in another clearing. As you get your bearings, you realize you are again surrounded by a dozen new paths forward; the only difference this time is that each appears narrower than those in the last set.
You’re again tasked with picking one, but exhausted from the weight of your first decision, you wander around in the clearing aimlessly, dipping a foot past each threshold but jumping back to the center when it doesn’t seem exactly right. You, at times, almost commit to trying one fully, but eventually, you flop on the ground and wonder how you ever got to the forest in the first place. You are Getting stuck in the second clearing.
This is what happens when you pick a passion to explore in the first place. You want to paint, dance, make music, write, act—but you’re spreading yourself too thin and burning out. You decide to focus on music. But as you learn more about your chosen pursuit, you notice there is more to the field than you initially realized. Making music can mean focusing on production, instrumentation, performing live, creating jingles, working in the games industry, commercial work, etc. You’re back to the same decision, just with nicher options.
In the second clearing, there is a lot of peeking into these narrow paths without ever making significant progress down any of them. It can be demoralizing. While this life thing can be rather long, and you can take multiple paths eventually, the benefits of having the wherewithal to focus on one path for a time can be substantial. You save energy by not learning about the niche problems of each micropath simultaneously.
Kick it!
Forgetting to look up
Recently, I went on a camping trip with some friends to Big Bend. Out there, the stars are said to be more vivid than most city folk ever get to see. When we arrived at camp, it was cloudy, so there were no stars in view. My friend doesn’t get to travel much and certainly never camps, so he went to bed disappointed to sleep under a starless sky. When he woke to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, however, the sky had cleared, and the stars were above. But, as he told me in the morning, he forgot to look up.
As we already said, turning a passion into work can make it a job, and jobs pound-for-pound kind of suck. That makes it easy to forget that we’ve set down this road, creating art, because we at least in part like doing so. When you have a goal in mind, like say, going to the bathroom in the middle of the night, you can’t forget to look up often and soak in the beauty.
When I am clawing my way through a draft, questioning why I would ever want to write in the first place, I recall that no one is making me do this. It’s just me. I want to be out here underneath the stars.
Kick it!
Fear
Thinking again on that Def Jam performance, I love that Mac’s ad-lib to start his set was a declaration of confidence. A rejection of fear. For me personally, I am often scared—sometimes even of you motherfuckers. More so, though, I am at times scared that my talent has withered away as I point further and further back to the work I am proudest of. That the great piece I wrote recently is now five years old. I am scared that the beat of my heart sounds like little more than a song of mediocrity. But this fear is perhaps my greatest foolishness. One, I don’t have an answer for. One, I instead have to live with.
I just moved to a new city a few weeks ago, overjoyed to finally close the gap with my long-distance partner of six years. We had a difficult time choosing the city as she searched for jobs, made harder still by the pain of leaving my hometown. But I told myself early on in the process that wherever my love and I landed, I would treat the life shift as a chance to focus on my craft, taking myself and my art seriously enough to give it my all. I’m in Charm City now, Baltimore. It is often a cloudy place, but as I write this, the sky is clear. I ain’t come here for no foolishness.
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The getting stuck in the second clearing hit me hard, especially as I'm navigating early career stuff. Brilliant.
"I want to be out here underneath the stars." I love that sentence and that perspective. Congratulations on the move for love! and thank you as ever for the sound advice :-)