In episode 1481 of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Fred Rogers talks about how crayons are made, and then sits down at an easel to do a bit of drawing.
“I’m not very good at it,” he says. “But that doesn’t matter. It’s the fun of doing it that’s important.”
Years ago I read a book by John Holt called How Children Fail, and in the book Holt observes that our society—whether we are talking about education or parenting—is very efficient at rooting out the parts of childhood that are based around play and replacing them with perfectionism:
When children are very young, they have natural curiosities about the world and explore them, trying diligently to figure out what is real. As they become "producers " they fall away from exploration and start fishing for the right answers with little thought. They believe they must always be right, so they quickly forget mistakes and how these mistakes were made. They believe that the only good response from the teacher is "yes," and that a "no" is defeat.
One of the things I love about Mister Rogers is that he was very diligent in creating spaces where children could be children. In other words, he created spaces that gave them permission to explore and make mistakes. That is to say, he invited them to play.
Years after I cut my teeth on Mister Rogers, and around the same time I was reading John Holt, I stumbled upon another wonderful book, called Finite and Infinite Games, by the philosopher James P. Carse.
I will tell you now, it is one of the most helpful and important books I have ever read.
When John Holt observed children, he saw them trapped in the chasm between the approving “yes” and the disapproving “no” of the parent or teacher. In a similar manner, Carse observed adults, and found them trapped in a gulf between what he called “playfulness” and “seriousness”:
To be playful is not to be trivial or frivolous, or to act as if nothing of consequence will happen. On the contrary, when we are playful… everything that happens is of consequence, for seriousness is a dread of the unpredictable outcome of open possibility. To be serious is to press for a specified conclusion. To be playful is to allow for unlimited possibility.
To the serious-minded adult, obsessed with the approving yes and terrified of the disapproving no, the words of Mister Rogers can only sound like madness:
“I’m not very good at it, but that doesn’t matter. It’s the fun of doing it that’s important.”
A couple of weeks ago I began to line out some rules I use when I start any kind of creative project. The first of those rules is, Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.
That line did not originate with me. Near as I can tell, it was coined by G.K. Chesterton, though I arrived at it not by reading his works, but by reading books like Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, which features a version of the wisdom as more of a wisecrack (“It is better to live on your feet than die on your knees”).
If we follow John Holt’s insights as he talks about the children he observed in classrooms, we see that teachers instill in their students an unspoken expectation that they should do something the correct way the first time they attempt it - or else they should not attempt it. This expectation, moreover, is often communicated nonverbally. In fact, it is rarely if ever explicitly named by the teacher or the student; nevertheless, they both understand the weight of the expectation fully well.
Holt’s conclusion is that this is not only disastrous for our educational institutions, but for society as a whole, and our humanity and even our very souls, in particular. Or, as Carse would put it, we have traded the open-endedness of playful discovery for the deadly seriousness of the known quantity, the assured outcome.
What does this have to do with discussions of the creative process?
Well, if Holt and Carse—and yes, Mister Rogers—are correct, we do not “become” creative. Rather, every human being is already inherently creative, and the creative process is not a discovery of some foreign land, but rather a recovery of a lost mother tongue that speaks within each of us.
In other words, it is learning to say again as adults what we once said when we were children: “I’m not very good at it, but that doesn’t matter. It’s the fun of doing it that’s important.”
Our Zen Buddhist friends refer to this state of renewed childhood with a phrase I quite like. They sometimes call it “beginner’s mind.”
Probably the best example of beginner’s mind I know comes from no less a model of the creative process than Pablo Picasso, when he said, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”
The danger for us is to misunderstand “painting like a child” to mean crude or common or useless. This harsh evaluation comes to us from the voice of our internalized teachers, with their disapproving no.
So what did Picasso mean—what could he possibly have meant—when he said that he learned “to paint like a child”?
I think it means he re-learned how to be playful, and how to be open to starting a process where no one was at all sure of the outcome. As Carse reminds us, “to be playful is to allow for unlimited possibility.”
Now the danger for our well-trained ego, of course, is that unlimited possibility contains within it the possibility of sucking. The internalized voices of our teachers have made us wary of these possibilities. We want to avoid any potential negative outcomes, before they even happen.
But Carse and Holt and Mister Rogers and now even someone as successful as Pablo Picasso are telling us the exact opposite of this truth we were so carefully taught. Instead of “anything worth doing is worth doing well” (the insistence on perfection before one even begins), this alternate path trough the universe whispers that “anything worth doing is worth doing badly.”
Badly. Not because we don’t care about the quality (you would be hard pressed to find a more rigorous defender of the quality of his art than Picasso), but rather a willingness to make a mess and figure it all out in the middle.
Doing badly means starting where you are, before you are fully prepared, with a sense that the quality will come as you get your sea legs under you.
It’s a willingness to say, “I’m not very good at it, but that doesn’t matter. It’s the fun of doing it that’s important.”
I will come back to the question of how broadly we might define “fun” in that statement, but the main point stands: any creative process demands that we leave behind the destructive idea that perfection is our starting point.
We must have the mind of beginners. We must recover that part of us that knew how to play. We must become more and more open to unlimited possibilities.
Which means that, sometimes, we are going to suck.
(We’ll talk about ways to leverage the suck to our creative advantage in future columns.)
For right now, however, that’s the price of admission if we want access to the truly brilliant things that are inside us, longing to be brought into the world.
Thank you to my friend Rick Lee James for reminding me about that episode from Mister Rogers. He curates the wonderful @MisterRogersSay feed on Twitter.
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