Two Books to Help you Continue to Evolve as an Artist
There’s a point you may have reached in your progression as an artist: you’ve become so familiar with your craft that you may find yourself coasting. When you’ve reached that point, how do you continue to evolve? Maria Popova, curator of Brain Pickings (a great repository of wonderful ideas) writes an article in which she recommends two books to help creatives better themselves: Maximize Your Potential and Moonwalking with Einstein.
“Any sequence of mental action which has been frequently repeated tends to perpetuate itself,” William James wrote in his influential meditation on habit, ”so that we find ourselves automatically prompted to think, feel, or do what we have been before accustomed to think, feel, or do, under like circumstances.” As we’ve seen, one of the most insidious forms of such habitual autopilot — which evolved to help lighten our cognitive load yet is a double-edged sword that can also hurt us — is our mercilessly selective everyday attention, but the phenomenon is particularly perilous when it comes to learning new skills. In a chapter of Maximize Your Potential (public library) — that fantastic guide to making your own luck, the sequel to 99U’s blueprint to mastering the pace of productivity and honing your creative routine— science writer Joshua Foer explores the mechanisms that keep us from improving and the strategies we can use to disarm them.
And so we get to the so-called “OK Plateau” — the point at which our autopilot of expertise confines us to a sort of comfort zone, where we perform the task in question in efficient enough a way that we cease caring for improvement. We reach this OK Plateau in pursuing just about every goal, from learning to drive to mastering a foreign language to dieting, where after an initial stage of rapid improvement, we find ourselves in that place at once comforting in its good-enoughness and demotivating in its sudden dip in positive reinforcement via palpable betterment.
