At age 25, Pablo Picasso radically changed modern art with his invention of Cubism. I believe that’s around the same age I was finally getting the hang of doing my laundry correctly.
Picasso's quick ascent to extraordinary is what many would expect from someone with his talent. He just got it, and huge successes happened early and often for him.
But there is a large subset of the world’s most outstanding creators—musicians, architects, businesspeople, poets—for whom that’s not the case. In fact, it’s the opposite.
David Galenson, an economist and professor, describes two types of creators: conceptualists and experimentalists.
Picasso is the poster child for Conceptualism. A Wired article explains:
“Picasso thought through his works carefully before he put brush to paper. Like most conceptualists, he figured out in advance what he was trying to create. The hallmark of conceptualists is certainty. They know what they want. And they know when they’ve created it.”
On the flip side, experimentalists are more inclined to "just start" and see where the art takes them. They live and work by trial and error and have a hard time determining when their work is truly done.
During an episode of Revisionist History, Malcolm Gladwell tells the story of “The Deportees Club,” an “unlistenable” Elvis Costello song that evolved to Greatness through experimentalism.
Gladwell, not one to dance around the truth, describes the first version of the song as “angry and loud and upsetting,” a review that’s in line with the broader consensus. But it had an unexpected comeback. Costello, a classic experimentalist, re-released the album in 1995 with a new version of “The Deportees Club,” this time with a shorter title: “Deportee”.
It was revered. It went from unlistenable to exceptional.
"Deportee" was 11+ years in the making (the original was on the 1984 album Goodbye Cruel World), but the world would have missed out on a lot of beauty if Costello hadn't gone back to iterate on the original version.
Another creator, a conceptualist perhaps, may have arrived at “Deportee” after meticulous planning and preparation. But Costello got there through his own process, and that’s just as good. Both result in Greatness.
So, if there’s something you’ve put into the world that feels a little “meh," you might owe it to that work or to yourself (or if you’re feeling ambitious, to the world) to revisit it. There might just be some Greatness waiting to be discovered from the mediocrity.
~ From Jessa, and The Team at Clique
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