Quieting the Judge
On his podcast, Ezra Klein recently interviewed songwriter Jeff Tweedy about his creative process. Klein lamented that writing poetry has been difficult for him, saying, “I can’t get over how bad it feels to me, how bad it feels to be so bad at it.”
Tweedy’s response was particularly compelling: “How much different would it feel if you were setting out to write the worst poem you could think of? Would you feel good if you succeeded at writing a poem that you thought was terrible?”
Tweedy continued: “Even today after writing [...] at least hundreds of songs — I know that I still have to go through being bad to get to something good. And I think people have this mistaken notion that people that do it in a way that they admire from the outside, they’ve somehow sidestepped that part of how it works.”
The point? Dude, stop judging your beginner self.
This very same point came up later when Klein asked how to make his Morning Pages routine more creative and not just an activity in list making.
Tweedy responded: “I don’t know. My first thought about a lot of things like this is that [it] sounds like you’re discomforted by the way your mind normally behaves. And my inclination when that’s the case is usually to not fight it. So maybe there’s a way to transform it from being [a] practical list to maybe make a list of wishes. Or if you like the idea, the feeling of making some to-do list, make a to-do list for the universe. [...] There’s a million ways to just kind of go with it. But also, just let it not knock you down into some sort of judgment about that being the wrong way to think about freewriting. I would advise you to accept it as being something your mind really likes and has habitually been drawn to, and still see if there’s some way to work within that in a more ambiguous and imaginative way.”
I love that. Not only is Tweedy advising people not to add a negative judgment to one growth area, he’s also saying that we can grow by building upon our adjacent strengths.
All this really resonated with me because this comes up in the workplace. It sounds and looks like describing our weaknesses (a judgment), rather than framing them as “skills I want to further build.”
It also manifests as not asking for help because we’re scared of others’ judgments—a sense that tends to come with its own set of judgments like:
Where I’m skilled, everyone else has those strengths as well.
Where I’m developing, everyone else is strong.
No one else of my experience level and profile has ever had this same development need.
Quieting those judgments is how we can lean into our development rather than cutting it off because it doesn’t feel good. Or, as I frequently say to my leadership group: Development is directly proportional to a willingness to be vulnerable, which is directly proportional to our courage.
Leadership Wisdom
“You can only be effective by working with your own set of strengths, a set of strengths that are as distinctive as your fingerprints. Your job is to make effective what you have—not what you don’t have.”
—Peter Drucker, in Managing the Non-Profit Organization
A Question for You
What’s the superpower upon which you build all of your other powers?