Lately in the Chinese newspapers, there's a lot of buzz of a musical on a whirlwind tour across Asia. And it's making a stop in Vancouver. Mom got our whole family tickets for it. Mom, in her history of motherhood, never gets us tickets to musicals. The musical didn't sound particularly exciting by the name of it - Pawn, (I prefer profound movies with titles like Fast & Furious, or 2 Fast 2 Furious), so I I didn't even bother figuring out what it's about, but was thrilled privately by the idea of all of us doing something artistic together.
The musical was written by a Chinese-Canadian girl, called Karmia Chan Cao, a creative writing senior at Stanford. I don't think Mom had a clear idea of what the musical is about either when she bought the tickets. But I don't think she cared. She liked the idea of a Chinese girl writing stories and sharing it with the world. I think secretly, she believes I'll be just like Karmia one day.
The theatre was packed with mostly Chinese-Canadians, brimming with anticipation. Unlike the usual anticipation that precedes the classics like Beauty and the Beast, or Mary Poppins, tonight there was a little something extra - a subdued pride that "one of their own" has made it this far. A Taiwanese journalist sat next to me, who kept on taking photos throughout the show. He was on assignment to write a report on it later in the newspaper.
The musical told a story of a young Chinese Canadian soldier, Abraham, stationed in Afghanistan, who joined the armed forces in bitter response to his elder brother's death at the World Trade Center on 9/11. The night before Abraham's scheduled return to Canada, he is caught in the middle of a bombing raid and must make the biggest decision of his life: saving his own life or the lives of Afghan children. When the last thumps of the drums subsided, the lights came on and the actors took their bow, my face was drenched in tears. I cried for the whole entire two and half hours. Every one of us in the audience was moved to a standing ovation.
Then Karmia herself went on stage and delivered a stirring speech about humanity and peace, how the play "addresses and dresses the wounds of 9/11, reexamining terrorism and the last decade at war", and how "we're all connected". The MC didn't really know what to say after that. We were all too awed and too humbled to speak.
I returned home feeling drained from all the crying. I marveled/shell-shocked at how she's a poet, a playwright, a singer-songwriter, composer of 19 original songs, director of a 29-person musical, and toured Asia, while still a student, at 21 years old!
"Don't you just hate people like that?!" said my friend Deepthi.
"Yeah!"
I felt so small. I didn't even come close. The distance between Karmia and me, it's like Earth to Jupiter. She cares about the world, war and humanity, and all I can think about is finding a boyfriend.
If I wanted to see Talent in the flesh, now THERE'S talent.
I sat at my desk all night trying not to feel defeated. I try to find reasons for me to justify becoming a writer. In business, we have models for everything: financial models, issue-based problem solving pyramids, quadrants, decision trees to help make sense of an otherwise overwhelming amount of information. To reassure ourselves we're doing the right thing. I thought it best for me to pull out one of these sturdy models to steady myself during this dark night of the soul. That's it! I'm going to do a SWOT analysis!
SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. We use it to assess if a business is pursuing market opportunities while playing to its strengths. Objectively speaking, compared to Calculus, my strength is in words. Compared to Karmia, my strength is in Calculus. But I have a feeling she'll even beat me at math. Next to her literary biceps, my arms are looking awfully feeble. If the market is rampant with Threats like Karmia, what kind of Opportunities does that leave me?
Am I creative enough, talented enough to make it? Because if I'm not, I may as well realize this sooner rather than later, cut my losses, find a decent job, make some decent money. What's the point of slaving away at something if you don't have what it takes to amount to anything? Why make life such a struggle, go against the big guns with my water guns, my youth going down the drain, for what? Only to end up left behind in the dust?
I'm gonna take a bow, and go bang my head against the wall now.
I remember I didn't used to feel this way about myself. I remember in school, I was confident. I was friggin' awesomesauce. Every time a creative challenge came up, in projects or case competitions, I always felt like I've got this. We're going to win this thing. Our project is going to be top of the class. I kind of just knew. I genuinely believed I was one of the best. I believed I was creative. When a problem is presented to us, I sensed this excitement inside. Not in a bubbly, over the top, spilling everywhere kind of way, but just a silent rumbling, deep inside the chest kind of way. I couldn't wait to roll up my sleeves and tackle this bad boy. I knew if I just spent some time thinking about it, think really hard about it, I'll come up with something really good. Other teams came to me to write tag lines for them.
But now I just don't. I don't feel like I've got this. I don't know how to do this. I don't know if what I'm doing is right. I feel like there could be a million ways to do it and I don't know which way is best. I feel overwhelmed and insecure and anxious and so excruciatingly aware of my ignorance. I don't even know what I don't know. With ignorance, you can at least cure it with knowledge. But with this elusive thing we call talent, how do you cure a lack of talent? Seriously, HOW do you GROW talent?
I slumped back into the chair and sighed. I don't know how to make myself confident about writing. My confidence in school, it didn't come from blind faith. It grew bit by bit, through every win, every project, every praise, every validation. And now I don't have any of that.
Sometimes I so wish I could behave more like Kanye West when it comes to confidence. Kanye believes. Oh he believes big time. He thinks he's "the number one rock star of our time", and that God has chosen him to be "the vessel."
"When someone comes up and says something like, 'I am a God," Everybody says 'who does he think he is?' I just told you who I thought I was. A God. I just told you. That's who I think I am."
That's Kanye for you.
I am a GOD.
I practice saying this to myself.
I am a GOD.
I am a GOD.
I'm a GOD.
Nah...
I am a HUMAN.
By the time it was dawn, I still couldn't convince myself I'm talented or I'm a god. I just felt exhausted from the circular line of questioning. Then I slept.
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One day as I was enjoying a nice relaxing lunch with my friend Kuba, sunshine streamed through the trees, making our whole cafeteria look like a crystalline glass of mojito sprinkled with mint leaves, I was feeling so happy and so summery, I myself could've have disappeared into a Champaign bubble. Then the topic of writing came up. Now folks, Kuba is a very good writer. He's way better than me. He's sharp and keen and packs a punch in just a few words. He also went to Harvard, I'm not sure, that may have helped a teensy bit. (It's not a bad school, I hear.) Kuba says, "Sometimes reading up the masterpieces, they are just so good. You feel like you're so far away. No matter how hard you try, you just can't catch up. You almost feel this... despair."
As soon as he said the word "despair", my heart zinged with recognition. Like a fierce little poke with the tip of a needle. I know precisely what he means. More precisely than I even knew how to articulate it myself. l creased the corners of my mouth into a sad smile. I didn't know what to say to comfort him, but I felt comforted at the knowledge that he too, experiences this helplessness, this thing I didn't even dare to call... despair.
Like a good nerd, every time I'm super confused, I go to the library. I borrowed tons of books on writing. One of them, on the very first page, blatantly announced: "Talent is a self-sabotaging question." It goes on to explain that every writer, at one point or other, ask themselves this very question. It's self-sabotaging because it's out of your control. It's not like you can go back to the womb and ask your mother for more talent. So what if we're not as talented as Shakespeare or Dante Alighieri, or even Karmia Cao? Are we going to jump off buildings or stop creating art, even though we really really want to? It's much more productive to tell this Talent question to F off, and ask other, better, questions.
Like, when will I finish the next chapter?
There's a funny cartoon I came across on Facebook the other day. It went like this:
Are you an artist?
Make some art.
Does it look good? —->Yes / NO —-> You're an artist
Now make more art
I laughed, feeling relieved that I don't have to create poetry in every line, or agonize over every word. I'm allowed to forget this relentless quest for quality and just make SOMETHING. But the message of the cartoon rolled off so fast it's like water rolls off the back of a duck, I'd forgotten it before the day's over. Soon enough, the talent question returns like an annoying telemarketer.
Some people like to believe we're all given some talent. Some get a bit more. Others get a bit less. But we all have it. So even if what you make isn't good enough for the Guinness World Record, it's still a good idea to make it. Because holding it all in is going to give you the spiritual equivalent of constipation.
More elegantly put, Elizabeth Gilbert wrote, "the word 'talent' comes from the Greek word for a sum, a balance, or a weight. Any talent you don't put to use becomes a weight. It will burden you, and sit heavily upon your shoulders until you shed that weight...
By using it."
But even if I'm doing it for my own well-being, I'm shedding weight, the Achiever in me still wants to believe what I make will be special. That it will be good. That's why the Talent question haunts us all. Because we're afraid without it, it will never be good, no matter how hard we try.
I cannot NOT care about the result. All those years in business, we always always think about the result. We never invest without thinking about the result. I thought this kind of fearful uncertainty is the price you pay for being in the creative field, something you have to swallow, no matter how severe your discomfort, until I came across a recording from Ira Glass, host of the acclaimed radio show "The American Life". It was this little passage from him that finally gave me the reassurance I needed.
It's a bit long, but I want to include it here because I couldn't have said it better myself.
"All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it's like there's this gap. For the first couple of years you're making stuff, what you're making isn't so good. It's not that great. But it's trying to be good. It has ambition to be good. But it's not quite there yet. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, your taste is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell, that what you're making, is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people, at that point, they quit. Everybody I know who does interesting, creative work, they went through a phase of years, where they had really good taste, and they could tell what they were making wasn't as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. It didn't have the special thing that we wanted it to have. Everybody goes through that. It's totally normal. The most important possible thing you can do, is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline, so that every week, or every month, you know that you're going to finish one story. Because it's only by going through a volume of work, that you're actually going to catch up, and close that gap. And the work you're making will be as good as your ambitions. It's going to take a while. It's normal to take a while. And you just have to fight your way through that."
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