TALENT AND TEMPERAMENT
Year End Thoughts on Creative Careers
Walking around Brooklyn in the last week, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why some of the artists I’ve encountered were able to build long, active careers with a fairly steady audience and others seemed stuck in place after early success. Since most of the artists I know intimately are black, it’s easy to ascribe their failures or frustrations to racism and, in many instances, the roadblocks they encountered were constructed by white gate keepers.
But I’d be lying if I didn’t point out that individual personalities was often more of a problem that external forces. A lot of folks faltered because of their ego. Ego corrodes humility. Ego empowers entitlement. Ego ends friendships, because bonds get abused in the name of “artistic vision.”
Instead of cultivating friends, the egotistical gather groupies, hangers on and syncopates who boosts artist’s egos and inoculate them from essential criticism and advice.
No one is immune to the way fame and early success warps one’s personality. Fame is a drug who’s first hot alters reality, both for the newly famous and those around them. Some people a balance between their visibility and their humanity. They don’t choose to live in a world of bodyguards or surrounded themselves in an air of self-importance. You need collaborators, not ass kissers, in your circle. If they aren’t bringing anything new – new art, new connections, new ideas – to your conversations, why are you talking to them?
Early success can also bring on a lingering bout of creative paralysis. Who am I now? What do I have to say? In the moment there are many – agents, managers, lovers – who will fill that gap with self-interested advice, often guiding the artists to deals or jobs that guarantee a big payday but may be ill suited for the artist’s sensibility. Saying “No” is more important that saying “Yes.” Your list of “No”s should be long and varied. Every offer is not an opportunity.
Very of often a songwriter, novelist or filmmaker has mined their childhood or teen angst for inspiration. That’s cool as a start. But that’s not enough to sustain a career, which is why some folks retreat to hack ideas and money gigs. It’s definitely a vision of the American way. Go Hollywood and move into a gated community. The isolation that fame can encourage leads the very successful to buy huge houses or build private compounds that actually intensifies the isolation, pushing them away from the audiences they need and the everyday observations that feed our shared humanity.
It's disappointing to see promise wasted and original voices muffled – often by the artists themselves. Ego, self-absorption and an obsession with statu
s are things I’ve seen around my time in Brooklyn, in ways big and small. I see people stuck in place, whether they moved out or own a brownstone. I try not to keep score. But I see and I’ll remember.
To avoid this fate takes a combination of temperament and talent. Of course you must be good at some discipline. You must have some mastery of something very specific, some skill that people know you for. That’s essential. But if your temperament is ill suited for the attention, for the pressure to deliver, for absorbing the blows of inevitable failure, for finding the value in criticism, and for the need to consistently add to your skill set, then you’ll be lucky to be a one hit wonder. How you move through the world is as important to a long career as what you give the world.