Some Incomplete Thoughts on Elon Musk

Elon Musk

Elon Musk has reportedly completed his hostile takeover of Twitter. This joins companies like PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX that he has burrowed into, tick-like, to nourish himself off the product other people have previously built. But Twitter has a distinct character, an identity that makes it different than those other companies. Twitter doesn’t just provide a product or service; Twitter is a platform. Which opens very different implications.

PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX need customers to do business. If customers withhold their business, the business dwindles—though, admittedly, it’s rare for large businesses to dwindle to zero. Twitter doesn’t need customers; it needs content. Without users constantly creating content, and the lucrative controversy that content often provides, there’s no business, regardless of how many advertisers and daily viewers the site retains.

Social media networks essentially exist to resell user-created content to other users. Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok all exist to the exact extent that somebody keeps creating content, and if content creators start withholding their words and images, the business model dries up. Recall, advertisers kept pumping money into Friendster, Bebo, and MySpace for some time, but the business models all collapsed because ordinary people stopped creating content.

However, that content isn’t neutral. Musk has garnered right-wing support for his high-profile buyout by championing “free speech,” a coded term for loosening Twitter’s anti-hate speech rules. Likely beneficiaries of such loosening include Donald Trump, who used Twitter to incite violence; Jordan Peterson, who persists in aggressively deadnaming transgendered public figures; Alex Jones, who peddles lies for profit; and David Duke, banned for being David Duke.

As a free speech absolutist myself, I realize why being absolute is conditional. In my hometown, a bar owner needed to ban a handful of people for their language. They used hate speech, including the N-word, quite loudly, and picked needless arguments regarding politics. Any business owner knows that, if you don’t ban Klansmen and fascists early, other customers start avoiding your store; before long, you find yourself running a store for Klansmen and fascists.

Mark Zuckerberg

The same underlying principle drives social networks. Twitter and Facebook banned Donald Trump, not because his words were hateful and incited violence, but because they knew that if they didn’t, other users would leave. Content creators won’t create content if their content rubs elbows with Trumpist bullshit. And again, no matter how many code-writers or advertisers the parent company has, without content, there’s no company.

Serial entrepreneurs Alex Moazed and Nicholas Johnson describe Twitter, and similar businesses like Facebook and Etsy, as platform businesses. That is, these businesses don’t sell anything specific; they sell platforms users can utilize to tell stories, connect with friends, or simply air opinions. Moazed and Johnson regard these businesses as cash cows because they aren’t limited by warehouses or shelf space; given sufficient server storage, they’re hypothetically infinite.

After the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Moazed and Johnson’s description sounds remarkably naïve. Even beyond knowing that social networks profit by selling customers’ metadata, and customer contacts’ metadata, the hypothetically infinite business isn’t infinite. Without people posting thoughts, pictures, and petty quarrels, social media has no business model. This gives users greater authority than standard business models—though that authority often isn’t readily visible.

Other business models favor gigantism and consolidation. Five publishing conglomerates now control the book industry, except they don’t really, because all five do fully half their business through one vendor, Amazon. That’s why boycotts seldom work, because they require such massive commitment by millions of people over vast amounts of time that they usually stall faster than a Model A. It’s hard to fight monopolies of that magnitude.

The same doesn’t apply to social media. Sure, there’s a similar monopolist impulse; Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has bought out so many other social properties, including Instagram and WhatsApp. But it’s much easier for smaller numbers of customers, working concertedly, to submarine the business model. It took only two years of Rupert Murdoch’s total mismanagement to transform MySpace from Earth’s biggest website, into the Mary Celeste of the whole internet.

Therefore, I contend, Elon Musk will reverse his entire course within weeks. The very “free speech” he purportedly supports, will become economically toxic if not subjected to certain minimum restraints. Sure, Twitter is sometimes morally toxic, encouraging petty squabbles and polarization, but Elon cares more about economic toxicity. The minute content creators start jumping ship to avoid being contaminated by fascist twaddle, he’ll become as authoritarian as anybody.

Because rules exist for a reason, even for the rich.

The Process of Art, and the Art of Process

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 92
David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

From an early age, most people make art. Children love to draw, sing, tell stories, and stage theatrical sketches. Yet at some point, nearly all of us stop. We all have unique reasons for this surrender: lack of mentorship, bad experiences with critics, the need to focus on “useful” skills. But every expressed reason boils down to one deterrent: fear.

Ted Orland and David Bayles teach photography at the University of California. As such, they’ve encountered every excuse aspiring artists use to justify not making art. Harsh criticism, especially from parents and teachers, often breeds a fear of making mistakes or being wrong. Lack of moral support after graduation leaves even accomplished artists feeling listless and alone. Hunger narrows the artists’ horizons. You name it, they've heard it.

The difference between successful career artists, and disappointed ex-artists, our authors insist, is how they approach this fear. Working artists have this fear, even learn from it, but don’t let it determine them. “When you act out of fear,” our authors write, “your fears come true.” Instead, they approach fear as an opportunity to continue improving, to grow as artists, and to create work that makes important conceptual leaps between pieces.

Yes, this sounds like a bromide. We all heard something similar in high school, and we’ve seen comparable fine-sounding axioms on motivational posters in workplaces worldwide. Bayles and Orland distinguish themselves from the mass of self-help books and creativity boosters (they pointedly eschew the word “creativity”) by focusing on how they, and artists they know and work with, translate these bromides into actions and outcomes.

The authors approach multiple aspects of artmaking with an eye toward keeping us engaged, even when the process seems overwhelming. Lack of goals, for instance, often impedes artistry: without an exhibition, pending sale, or letter grade, it’s difficult to create intrinsic motivations. That’s perhaps why so many artists stop creating after finishing school. They discuss the creation of meaningful goals to maintain momentum through down periods.

David Bayles (left) and Ted Orland

They also discuss education’s discouraging impacts. Though schooling is necessary for most people, its effects can often, inarguably, be discouraging for actual art. This includes both students, whose artistic expression gets subordinated to “skillz drillz,” and teachers, whose energy often goes into teaching rather than creating new art. The process of striking a balance isn’t easy or obvious, but our authors show ways it happens, and why.

Worst of all, of course, is fear of making mistakes. They write, “You find reasons to procrastinate, since to not work is to not make mistakes,” and I feel pangs of recognition. In childhood, our parents enthused wildly about us making something, anything; somewhere, though, adults around us became focused on identifying our mistakes. And not screwing up became more important than the act of creation.

No wonder so many of us stop creating… or bury our creations in a closet somewhere. Yet the importance of human imperfection remains a thread throughout this book. Without flaws, we have nowhere to go to make the next conceptual leap into further art. Just as important, without flaws, our audiences have no dissonance to resolve internally, and therefore little relationship with the art. Imprefection isn’t just inevitable, it’s desirable.

Even the simple recognition that we don’t have to face these fears alone provides motivation to keep creating. Many artists (including me) stop creating new art because we feel we’re alone, or because the rejection slips seemingly isolate us from others. The process of art is truly contradictory: we’re engaged in forms of self-expression, but cannot create strictly for ourselves. Our authors’ anecdotes reconnect us to our audiences, and to our peers.

As photographers, the authors draw the most references from photography. They probably cite Ansel Adams more than any other artist, talking about ways he bucked critics, maintained his vision, and stood fast against discouragement. However, our authors draw generously from other genres, citing Frank Lloyd Wright, Ezra Pound, and countless other artists from across the spectrum. This process really applies to all artists, not just one category.

I admit, this fear plagues me too. The fear that everyone will recognize me as a hack, or that the business aspect of art will overwhelm the creation aspect, or that I’ll drown in rejection slips and vanish, unnoticed. Therefore I read this book again every few years, to remind myself I needn’t face these fears alone. Art can be a discouraging calling. We must remind ourselves that this discouragement isn’t a barrier, it’s part of the art.

The Genius Industry

Danielle Krysa (with paintings by Martha Rich), Your Inner Critic Is a Big Jerk, and Other Truths About Being Creative

I don’t know if Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way was really first in the current creativity books boom. I certainly noticed it first. Books, and to a lesser degree video and audio recordings, encouraging aspiring artists to quit being their own worst enemies have become a major hustle for the publishing industry. Most, like this one, are pretty good. Yet I can’t help noticing: books for aspiring artists seem to be growing faster than the general art market.

Danielle Krysa, collage artist, painter, and prolific blogger, has written two previous books on working artists and their creative process. Both focused heavily on interviewing working artists and getting their views on how the creation process works internally. This one includes some interviews and dialog, but has a more personal, you-centered focus. Krysa apparently wants to reprogram your internal monolog away from self-sabotage, a habit common in creative aspirants everywhere.

Between the interviews she’s conducted with professional artists, and the responses her first two books received from readers, Krysa noticed certain prevailing patterns in how people think about creativity. She distills these patterns into ten aphorisms we would-be creative types can apply to our own process. These include, but are not limited to, “Excuses Are the Enemy” (how true), “Failure Leads to Genius” (certainly my experience), and “Your Inner Critic Is a Big Jerk.”

This sort of internal reprogramming matters for anybody who’d like to create. Not just full-time professionals, either; hobby painters, early morning novelists, and weekend woodworkers, of which I’m all three, need reminders that our fear of failure, our self-destructive criticism, and our facile self-justifications are our biggest weakness. We need to expunge these influences from our thinking if we aspire to create, even for our own mental well-being.

Consider why people don’t create. In my teaching days, students’ most-cited reason for not writing more was that they believed they couldn’t, that they feared trying something and getting proven wrong. This negative self-talk, which Krysa notes children writing doggerel or gluing macaroni to construction paper don’t practice, generally come from well-meaning but misguided teachers, peers, or sadly parents, who mistake fault-finding for constructive criticism. No wonder many artists can’t create something meaningful until their parents are dead.

Danielle Krysa

So far, so good. I wish Krysa’s personal exhortations included more action-oriented exercises; she has some, but not many, and not in every chapter. As scholarly writer Patricia Goodson noted recently, the leading block stopping academic writers (or other creative professionals) from actually creating, is that they don’t think of themselves as writers. And the surest way to overcome that block is to write (paint, sing, build) until you change your own mind.

Fine, that’s a personal opinion. Perhaps some people do better with self-talk before plunging in headlong. I don’t pretend to understand the varieties of psychology enough to dispute Krysa in this regard. And if creative people coordinate their actual creating with the kind of emotionally uplifting self-talk Krysa, and others, espouse, I have no problem believing they’ll increase their output quantity, and with it their output quality. Creating more is key to creating better, but we must first create.

Put another way, notwithstanding my nitpicking, I appreciate Krysa’s sentiments, and will likely incorporate reading several pages of this book into my daily creative regimen. But books similar to this one flood the market relentlessly. My favorite bookstore has more shelf space dedicated to such moral exhortations for creative professionals than to philosophy or world history, and almost as much as science or current events. Books for creators, especially writers, are a boom market.

It’s tempting to say something about the boom market in creativity books while pipelines for creative marketing are drying up. Admittedly, as I write this, both the New York Times and the Washington Post are experiencing subscription booms and expanding their newsrooms for the first time in years. And the explosion of basic cable TV networks have created unprecedented new markets for actors and directors. Perhaps the creative market is undergoing a transition, not a contraction.

But that still feels unsatisfying.

Much as I appreciate Krysa’s book, and feel grateful for having read it, it’ll probably vanish into a crowded pool of similar creativity manifestoes. I’ve received several similar review books that went through one printing and disappeared; only Martha Rich’s interesting, borderless paintings encouraged me to accept this book. Krysa does nothing wrong, but also nothing to stand above the crowd. Krysa’s principles deserve better. But frustrated creative aspirants are already at saturation marketing levels.

A Stick of Dynamite to Blast You Out Of Mediocrity

Alex Cornell (editor), Breakthrough!: Proven Strategies to Overcome Creative Block and Spark Your Imagination

I particularly like that Alex Cornell, a graphic designer himself, does not focus primarily on famous creative individuals in crafting this guide on overcoming the impediments to creativity. Of his ninety selected authors, only three—Douglas Rushkoff, Alexi Murdoch, and Daniel Dennett—count as even slightly well known. Even they have a primarily narrow, self-selecting audience.

Most of the creative professionals Cornell chooses are workaday creators, with a preponderance of designers and web professionals. These people have to create, in a regular and reliable way, if they want to get paid. These are not celebrities who can trade on their names to leverage years-long sabbaticals when the ideas dry up; this is creativity as a blue-collar enterprise, the way most of us experience it.

This slim book claims to offer “90 proven strategies,” but if you read it as a how-to, you’ll get frustrated in a hurry. The contributors’ essays run very short, most only a page or two, some barely longer than a Tweet. The main body of the text runs only 155 pages, and is so brief, you can flip through it as needed for inspiration. Some essays describe the techniques the authors use to break creative block; others speculate on ways you can break your blocks.

But I doubt even Cornell expects you to merely follow these prescriptions. All the newest research reveals that “creativity” is a complex melding of mental processes, always, changing, and always unique to the individual. If you find your creativity growing stagnant, the best way to fix that is to surprise yourself and try something new. These essays give you ideas how to do that, but more important, they provide new ways of seeing an age-old problem.

Some of the advice is good: reframe the problem. Get away from it for a while so you can see it with fresh eyes. Keep a running portfolio of successes (yours and others’) to delve into when you need to shake up the sediment. Get something on the page, screen, or design table, because having raw material you can refine or discard is better than having nothing. When all else fails, get some exercise.

Some of the advice is jokey, and suggests the authors were winking at Cornell. Hitchhike to Mexico? Check into an expensive hotel? I’m pretty sure you’re not meant to take these very seriously, and the authors mean to rattle your cage. But surely Cornell knew that too, so I wonder why he put them into a book for which he expects truly blocked creative professionals to pay their scarce money.

Alex Cornell

Some of the advice is downright bad. Several writers suggest pouring a glass of wine or popping a beer. I cannot recommend highly enough against alcohol or drugs for creative professionals. Drunken minds produce many ideas, but remember or record few. As for drugs, study your history: amphetamines made WB Yeats and Philip K Dick immensely productive, but led both into irretrievable death spirals.

Let me offer a few quotes I think embody some of the best suggestions in the book. These are not necessarily the sexiest, though you’ll find those easily, since the book designer has an eye for good pull quotes. (The book itself is a masterwork of “less is more” design, as much fun to look at and hold as to read.) Herewith some very worthy nuggets:

Creative block is the result of too much thinking.
—Camm Rowland

I am a proponent of practicing multiple disciplines.
—Shaun Inman

Try pen and paper. It forces you to focus on the basics, on simple solutions.
—Marc Johns

The more mistakes you make, the more you learn, the more you grow as an artist and person.
—Tim Navis

Today increasingly merciless capitalist competition demands that an artist be primarily an entrepreneur.
—Ulrich Schnauss

Creativity requires conditioning, intellectual skills, discipline and preparation.
—Nice Collective

If you’re stuck in the middle of the design, it probably means that you’re not asking enough questions.
—Robert Andersen

Learning can be a great way to generate new ideas and to make sure you don’t overuse old ones.
—Deru

Take notes, constantly.
—Aaron Koblin

The era of the romantic artist, alone in a garrett with a candle and a notebook, sketch pad, or staff paper is gone. Today’s media-saturated society cannot stomach the self-indulgent showmanship that artists once cultivated. As an artist today, you have a responsibility to create with professionalism and purpose. That, more than anything, is the lesson this book teaches, if readers are willing to learn.

The Grit That Makes Good Schools Great

Paul Tough, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character

Every four or five years, another study comes out claiming that American schools have hit rock bottom. Seniors can’t find their hometowns on a map, name the elements that comprise water, or parse “Dick and Jane” grammar. Each time, a flurry of “reformers” manhandles the school system, kids’ experiences change little, and we wait for the next study. Surely there must be a better way.

Of course there is. Ex-New York Times journalist Paul Tough investigates several schools that have bucked the downward trend, producing upwardly mobile graduates from adverse circumstances. Avoiding the sort of moddish educational philosophy promulgated by professors who mainly work with graduate students, Tough goes in the field, and reports only what he can back with real-world results and scientific research.

He finds that the traditional academic disciplines seem to matter less than habits of character. Anyone who has taught will agree this seems obvious, yet so much educational theory has emphasized the memorization of subject matter. Standardized tests and the GED reward students for book smarts; but higher-order skills, like self-discipline and diligence, have more to do with students’ success in school, and in later life.

Researchers call these “noncognitive” skills, since they have to do with principles that cannot be quantified on cognitive tests. Having discretion cannot be measured like one’s ability to complete analogies; conscientiousness is not essentially similar to mathematical reasoning. Yet people who have these character traits are more likely to learn the academic skills in school, and more likely to apply them in work, family, and social life as adults.

Schools have been reluctant to teach character skills. In part, this is because character and ethics have often kept company with religion, which is dynamite in public schools. But also, character can be political: conservatives tend to favor traits like “individualism” and “self-reliance,” while liberals like “justice” and “equality.” Whose values do we teach, so we don’t offend others?

Paul Tough

It turns out, many researchers have spent much time and effort finding values that transcend politics, religion, and history. They’ve successfully pinned down several that not only have clear definitions, but which teachers can incorporate into their lesson plans. The traits which researchers identify have different names—one list may include words like “ambition” and “professionalism,” another may name “courage” and “grit.”

But, no matter what we call the virtues, they share a few important traits: they transfer from the school out into the adult world, and they have concrete qualities which mentors can teach. In families where parents teach these virtues to their children, success seems to run in the family. That’s why the well-heeled seem to remain rich from generation to generation. But some parents don’t know these virtues, and thus can’t pass them along.

The bad news, then, is that character virtues, or the lack thereof, are generational. The good news is that conventional classrooms can close the gap when parents don’t know how to teach values. Transformational teachers do not convey information; they instill character. Paul Tough observes ways in which teachers successfully teach virtues, and follows the research on what we still need to learn. He does not bother with high-minded hypotheses; he shows where and how schools succeed.

This book is not entirely original. Tough not only cites Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, he even revisits one of Gladwell’s sources. Much of what Tough says overlaps recent work by writers like Susan Cain, Jack Hitt, Charles Duhigg, and the disgraced Jonah Lehrer. Some of his final chapter recites claims John Taylor Gatto has made for two decades. Not that this is bad; it probably means these ideas’ time has come (I think it has). But be prepared to rewalk some roads you’ve traveled recently.

Tough also sometimes contradicts himself. For instance, he says high school GPA is a more reliable indicator of college success than standardized tests, then admits some high schools pass students who merely show up and stay awake. He says parents who soothe kids through stress empower them for the future, then praises chess teacher Elizabeth Spiegel, whose blunt style seems stress-inducing, if not downright scary. So which is it?

Notwithstanding these limitations, Tough’s readable book combines the latest science of developmental psychology, with exposés of schools that actually turn disadvantaged youth into successful graduates. He gives we who teach real hope that our actions can make a difference, not just now, but throughout our students’ lives. It reminds us why we became teachers, and restores our hope that we can make a difference.

Short, Sweet Steps to Build Talent at Any Age

Daniel Coyle, The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills

Current society worships child prodigies and assumes that, if you had the potential to excel at something, you already would excel. I can’t count the number of times I tried to persuade my students that they need not rely on some “gift” to improve their writing and reasoning skills. I often failed to convince them, because they were immersed in the cult of innate talent. Plus, I lacked the skills to ease them through the process of self-improvement.

In his prior book, The Talent Code, Daniel Coyle traveled to several different schools, camps, and academies that exist to cultivate talent in particular areas. He observed a wide variety of fields, from music and art to sports to technical trades. And he found that most of these schools used the same small handful of techniques. Now, in this follow-up volume, Coyle distills those techniques to a handful of brief lessons that fit inside a pocket-sized volume for easy reading.

Talent, says Coyle, is not the exclusive domain of prodigies to whom success comes easily. Such crackerjacks tend to burn out early, or get discouraged when what seemed easy turns increasingly difficult. Instead, the best talent, and most impressive success, tends to accrue to those willing to work hard, make incremental gains, seek out the best teachers, and invest aggressively in their own growth. Coyle shows how that’s done.

Some of Coyle’s pointers seem obvious. When he tells us to “Learn Hard Skills First” or “Break Every Move Down Into Chunks,” he says little our grade school teachers didn’t try to tell us first, if we’d cared enough to listen. Yet how many of us actually do this? It’s easy, for instance, to want to skip the “hard” technical skills and race headlong into the “soft” expressive skills before we have a firm foundation. I know how common this is, because I have both seen and done it.

Daniel Coyle

But others of Coyle’s pointers seem to come from out of left field. How many of us would think to “Embrace Struggle” or “Pay Attention Immediately After You Make a Mistake”? Most of us avoid struggle, which is painful, or flee mistakes, which we regard as failure. Considering how many of our schoolteachers made us feel stupid if we had to work hard, holding our flubs up for public scorn (or was that just me?), we probably have much to unlearn.

I especially appreciate Coyle’s insistence on risk-taking as a learning endeavor. Too often, we associate risk with imminent failure, and retreat into our shells. I've written before on the importance of taking risks and being willing to look dumb as necessary to our growth. But Coyle backs this up with evidence from diverse experiences and difficult discoveries, explaining not just why risk is good, but how to tell valuable risk from wasted time.

If your school days were anything like mine, your life followed two parallel tracks. In the “school track,” you faced hours seated in a chair, facing forward like a soldier in a regiment, while an authority figure talked past you, then rendered judgment on your ability to perform “skillz drillz.” In the “life track,” you pushed yourself to improve at something you loved, even if it meant giving up something else, working through pain, or practicing in solitude.

Like me, you associated the tedious “school track” with learning, and the exciting “life track” with fun. You never thought of your “life track” activities as a form of study and practice, because study was boring, and life made you feel alive. But Coyle describes how the best schools don’t allow you to follow two separate tracks, keeping life and learning hand in hand. This means that, as long as you remain alive, you still have the opportunity to learn and improve.

Coyle does not bother with windy explanations of how and why his pointers work. Though he throws in real-life examples where it helps, he keeps his pointers brief and energetic (only a handful run over two pages). If you must understand the process, recent books like Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit or Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success explain the science and sociology, but you don’t really need them.

Rather than explicate how learning works, or why learning matters, he delivers short, workable guides to how you can learn any skill, at any age. You’re never too old, too established, or too creaky to improve your skills. You just need the opportunity, which Coyle provides in spades.

America, Land of the Do-It-Yourself Self

Jack Hitt, Bunch of Amateurs: Inside America's Hidden World of Inventors, Tinkerers, and Job Creators

Andrew Carnegie never went to school. Thomas Edison had no professional credentials whatsoever. America’s greatest innovations have come from the hands of people who the “proper officials” said had no business getting involved. Journalist Jack Hitt asserts that amateurism, the pursuit of a field out of sheer love, without expectation of reward, sits at the heart of American identity.

Amateur derives from a French term for love, and signifies that we have a passion for some subject that no amount of money can approach. And that’s what makes America strong. We made a country without relying on kings or popes. We advanced science sometimes in the face of proper scholarship. Our best businesses started as shoestring operations. We are a people that has built ourselves without waiting for someone to rubber stamp our enterprises.

Amateurism stands, for Hitt, against “credentialism,” the dogmatic belief that externally bestowed endorsement makes somebody an expert. Credentials often impede innovative thought—a point that isn’t even new this year, since it played so large in Jonah Lehrer’s book Imagine. The very process of becoming a professional insider instills habits of thought that ensure the thinker can do the job exactly how it’s always been done, and not one step beyond.

We can see this in Hitt’s book, when professional ornithologists wear blinders that keep them from seeing what even an amateur birder can see: that ain’t an extinct bird returned to earth. Or in the chapter on amateur astronomy, when the professionals have to keep doing work that will produce results. The amateurs have the liberty to study the sky, looking for the kinds of discoveries that rarely come, but actually move human knowledge forward.

We know this, just looking around. We can see that business school graduates make lousy entrepreneurs. Journalism school graduates seldom do meaningful investigations, preferring to repeat official statements with the agreeability of bobblehead dolls. Most physicists’ best work is done before they turn thirty. Outsiders, guerillas, and eager neophytes make the actual inroads that keep America’s greatest disciplines thriving.

Jack Hitt

Hitt notes an important study showing that compensation actually sucks the life from pursuits. From an early age, pay changes the equation that drives our actions. Small children will draw or write or play for the sheer joy of the process; but when rewards, or grown-up approval, gets into the equation, creativity and productivity go through the floor. That’s why, when you get a job doing what used to be your hobby, the joy goes out of whatever you used to love.

Not every chapter supports Hitt’s thesis. Indeed, his chapter on amateur archaeology, with its implications of sublimated racism and pseudo-intellectualism, suggests that amateurism contains the roots of powerful abuse. Even in his largely laudatory chapter on amateur genetics, he never quite addresses the risk he brings up of some exuberant teen warping the common cold into the next Black Plague. These serve as cautions against unbridled amateurism.

The do-it-yourself ethos taps into the best America has to offer, but also the worst. It forms the lifeblood of cultural development, allowing those truly passionate about their field to make substantial contributions. But it allows ignorant crackpots to go off half-cocked, propogating ideas that are dangerous or wildly offensive. But maybe that’s a fair description of America and her people: a nation of unrecognized geniuses and wild-eyed fanatics.

How, then to counter the worst impulses of amateurism? Hitt has no suggestions. Instead, he simply reminds us that, for all its risks, amateurism has contributed more to our national well-being than we can possibly calculate. It falls to us to ensure that we keep up the passionate immersion of amateurism, without lapsing into the dangerous extremes of moronic crankery.

Hitt overlaps with several other recent books. In addition to Lehrer, mentioned above, Hitt shares many themes with Susan Cain’s Quiet, Charles Pierce’s Idiot America, and Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers—must be something in the water. Sometimes they correspond almost verbatim, since they’re quoting the same sources. While Hitt doesn’t necessarily bring new ideas to the table, he brings new and interesting context.

Hitt makes a strong case that Americans’ frontier ethos, where we do it ourselves, and where we make our own expertise, makes us the people we are. He sells his point with careful insight, unexpected dry wit, and spirited narrative panache. If he can get just a few people out of their TV-induced comas and out doing what they love, he will have done a good service to this great land.

The Joy of Middles and Unfinished Ends

Lloyd Alexander

I discovered fantasy literature as a kid when I read Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain. Derived from Welsh myth, and utilizing the episodic story structure of The Mabinogion, Alexander created an arc in which the dreams all children share (what if my destiny looms larger than my circumstances?) come true for one youth. Though laced with magic and adventure, these elements really matter mainly as they help our hero discover his true adult identity.

The first four volumes each ended with the promise that the story would continue. The hope of more, that somehow this epic could unfold in any direction. So it came as a shock when the end came. Narnia ended, I felt, when the story had played itself out, but Prydain wasn’t done. Alexander even made that plain in his explanation that more took place after the final chapter. We just didn’t get to see it. The story was done, and all the possibilities closed down.

This was the first time I spotted a reality that eventually became the largest concept in my treasury of literary axioms: middles are the best part of any book. I will go to the mat with you on any book you name. Beginnings carry the need to explain character, situation, and conflict, while endings have the burden of putting a bow on all those concepts. Middles simply revel in untrammeled possibility. When we imagine books we love, we always recall the middle.

Since I’ve already mentioned fantasy, consider Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings. Though arguably the Twentieth Century’s most influential book, it lags in both the early and late chapters. Tolkein felt the need for such intricate introductions and explanations that the Council of Elrond runs nearly as long as some entire novels. And observe how filmmaker Peter Jackson elided Tolkein’s long, talky denouement. Only the middle doesn’t suffer from either scene-setting or resolution.

Joseph Conrad

If you want a more mainstream example, consider Joseph Conrad. Heart of Darkness and Nostromo, acknowledged classics both, present us with lush stories that probe at the inner recesses of the human soul. They also don’t so much resolve as peter out. By his own admission, Conrad had difficulty writing endings, but this didn’t stop him feeling the need to close every door he opened. Thus these masterworks sputter in the final pages.

Many classic writers understood this truth, and thus didn’t try to enforce pat endings. Shakespeare left so many doors open in Hamlet that uncounted authors have tried to write sequels. What happened to Horatio and Fortinbras after the final curtain? What happened to the state of Denmark after every claimant to the throne killed every other claimant? The very unsolved nature of these questions gives it power.

Unfortunately, most sequels have been undisputed stinkers. I blame the authors’ evident need to solve every debate definitively. Only Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which butters its bread with existential ambiguity and, if anything, asks even more questions, merits our time. Nor is this problem unique to Shakespeare; consider all the authors who write sequels to the Odyssey or Pride and Prejudice—and how few are actually are worth reading.

Shakespeare, Homer, and Austen knew that, if they left important plot threads open, we would write our own stories. Even if we don’t literally put pen to paper, we tell stories to ourselves. We ask questions, we speculate on possibilities, and we put ourselves into the shoes of our favorite protagonists. We make meaning not from the completion of every concept the authors put on the page, but in the ability to join the story, which we can only do if the story remains open.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Based on that, I will make one exception to my axiom about middles. Perhaps you’ve thought of favorite stories that only ramp up in the final pages, like Virgil’s Aeneid, Goethe’s Faust, or Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. All these books have earned their reputation over the course of generations, even millennia. And they share one common trait: all three were left incomplete at their authors’ deaths. They don’t have endings, only middles.

Perhaps that’s why ongoing series novels dominate the current publishing domain. Maybe audiences like middles so much that they want stories to hang on. Though one particular conflict may resolve, our characters’ arcs remain intact, and continue to live in a world where anything can happen. Because we want to believe anything can happen in our world, as Lloyd Alexander taught me to hope so many years ago.

New Year's Revolutions

The delineation of the “new” year is completely arbitrary, based on calculations made by Vatican mathematicians half a millennium ago, adapting even older Roman numbers. Yet, based on the human desire to find patterns, it actually makes a good time to consciously evaluate the past, and plan for the future. Based on my recent personal inventories, let me invite you to join me in the following three self-improvement efforts:

1. I will build a specific place for creative work.

I have gone to museums in the past where I have stood amazed at recreations of spaces where our greatest minds have done their best work. Scientists like Charles Darwin, artists like Pablo Picasso, and writers like Virginia Woolf have always had dedicated spaces in which to create. Some, like Jackson Pollock, have had an entire dedicated building for their own. Others, like Jane Austen, had only a desk in a corner of the room.

No matter what kind of space they had, they shared a sense of dedication: this was the space they entered to create, and they only entered this space to create. Even Emily Dickinson, as she came to occupy only one room in her house, reserved a specific corner of that room for writing. Reserving that space as a “studio” creates a psychological bond, permitting the thinker to enter that space and immediately enter a creative state of mind.

By no means do all creative people have a dedicated space. René Descartes and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe reputedly did their best work sitting up in bed. But for people like me, subject to life’s distractions, a dedicated territory in space lets me stake out a dedicated territory in time, and a dedicated territory in my soul, for specific creative work. Like great minds of the past, a specific space will help me do more and better work.

2. I will not let fear of failure limit my horizons.

As an undergraduate, I spent an extra year in school studying art, not because I thought I’d ever be very good at it, but just for self-improvement purposes. That time spent exercising my senses and correlating what I see with what I create had a discernible effect on my writing. I really improved as a writer—and my stabs at painting, like Ball Lightning in Space (pictured here) aren’t half bad as art, either.

But I have scarcely touched my pencils or my paints since. I don’t know when I learned that failure was a worse consequence than not even trying; maybe in school, or maybe from parents who taught me to plan for failure more than success. Who can say? I still have all my art supplies, many still unopened and ready for me to apply myself. but my fear of failure has paralyzed me.

And not just as an artist, either.

Children, left to themselves, will take profound risks, challenge themselves, and learn. About the age when they enter school, they learn that risks are bad, because adults reprimand them for failure—and so, eventually, do their peers. But if fear of failure is a learned reaction, I believe it can be unlearned through effort and exposure. And only when I take that stab will I cross into the heights of accomplishment.

3. I will seek out a wider range of new experiences.

I produced my series on modern mythology after reading books applying Joseph Campbell’s principles to popular media franchises. That opportunity to see something new and different challenged me to see in new and more inventive ways. Likewise, accepting a factory job while continuing to teach part time at the university has encouraged dynamic new insights into what education should accomplish.

Now that it looks like my teaching career has temporarily ended, I have time to seek new experiences. I’ve recently confronted my fear of math, and begun self-guided study in spatial geometry. I would also like to learn new skills: for instance, as I approach forty, I will soon qualify for Masters athletic competitions. Now would be a good time to start training for the triathlon. That’s just for starters.

Diversity has the obvious advantage of making me a better artist. I can write better about humanity if I’ve lived a wider cross-section of experiences. But more important, as I venture forward into a complex and increasingly fractious world, learning a few new experiences will equip me to learn even more new experiences. I will simply be better prepared for our strange, innovative world.