JamesCronen.com

I’m interested in everything. Seriously. The more esoteric and useless the activity or subject, the more interesting it is to me.

In high school, I played the bassoon, an awkward-sounding double-reed instrument that most people only know about because Rick Schroder’s character on Silver Spoons played one. I love the instrument, but “bassoonist” is not usually synonymous with “chick magnet”.

I once fiddled around with Esperanto, a fabricated “universal” language. The grammar and words are ridiculously simple, and I love the idea of the Pasporta Servo (stay for free with Esperanto speakers worldwide). But the problem with Esperanto is that you can only speak it with the kind of people that have bothered to take the hundreds of hours required to actually learn Esperanto.

The total of all the knowledge in the universe increases every day. Well, actually, each subject just increases in depth — we’re not inventing entirely new fields of knowledge every day. This means that the forefront of what is known in each field keeps expanding towards more and more useless knowledge.

Clearly this is trouble for me. Looking up anything on Wikipedia is like walking too close to a black hole.

I’ve realized I need to create a “Things I Will Not Do” list. With a family, a career or two, and a desire to actually catch up on the social life that a former bassoonist missed out on, I can’t do or learn everything I might want to do or learn.

Here are a few of the entries I’ve come up with so far.

Learn another language. I love languages; I really do. I’ve dabbled in learning French, German, Russian, Japanese, and Esperanto. I’d love to be bilingual. But honestly, learning a language really isn’t worth the time for me, considering what I’ll get out of it.

I don’t travel internationally. I’m too old and too well-connected at home to do something crazy like backpacking across Eurasia for six months. I don’t make enough money to have a considerable travel budget, so the vast majority of travel I plan on doing is within the United States or Canada. Most people in off-the-beaten-path places I would venture to would immediately recognize me as an American anyway and try to speak English with me. So, I’m not going to waste my time.

This would completely change for me if ever planned on relocating to a non-English speaking place, or if I found a compelling reason (e.g., a child eventually marries someone who doesn’t speak English). I just don’t have that reason yet.

Take voice lessons. Yes, I sing professionally. Well, I used to until very recently, when I decided to take some time off of music to spend with my family. I should take voice lessons to improve my craft.

I’m not going to, for the simple reason that there are few tenors of my caliber in this town. I get as much work as I need, for the most part. All that taking lessons would do for me is to build a repertoire and connections, and therefore allow me more opportunities to audition. But in a small music world such as Albany, I don’t have to audition for anything. Jobs come through connections and experience.

Taking voice lessons would allow me to potentially get opportunities with higher-caliber groups, but most of those groups are looking for musicians with actual degrees and years of experience. There’s too much of a gap I’d need to summit for not much additional pay. Not for me.

Fantasy football. I like football. I like games. The idea of trying to maximize a set of players’ statistics is really attractive to me, while enhancing my own Sunday-afternoon experience by giving me a stake in games I might not care about.

No, I need to walk away. Unlike a pick-’em tournament where one can spend as little as two minutes weekly choosing game winners, actual research is required to do well in fantasy football. I’d need to follow more teams than just my New York Giants. I love watching football, but I don’t want each Sunday to be a nine-hour marathon of watching television.

Play Scrabble competitively. As previously mentioned, I like games. I played Scrabble with my mother growing up, and received a set as a Christmas gift right out of college. I played a ton with friends, and realized that I was pretty good at it (by living-room standards, anyway). I read and enjoyed Stefan Fatsis‘ Word Freak, and I’ve watched the documentary Word Wars by competitive Scrabbler Eric Chaikin. I really want to try to play competitively.

I won’t. Too much memorization. Too many hours spent staring at index cards memorizing sequences of letters that lose their identities as words. Going to hotel ballrooms to spend eight hours a day shuffling tiles around seems a bit depressing to me. I can still play at home if I don’t play competitively. Actually, I’m more likely to be able to play at home if I don’t play competitively.

MMORPGs. Massively-multiplayer online role-playing games. World of Warcraft. EverQuest. EVE Online. I spent a good amount of time on various MUDs (multi-user dungeons) while in college and beyond. I should completely be into these games.

I know I will be completely into these games, and that’s why I just can’t do it. I want to stay married, to see my son, and to still have a job. These games are wonderful but they can be life-wreckers, and I’m a little too wary of trying the first hit for free for fear that I’ll be an addict. Just say “No.”

When I was a young kid I thought that successful people had some kind of magic that made them permanently successful. Their decisions were right about 98% of the time, and the other 2% was choosing salad over soup.

When I got older I started to realize just how random the world was. I saw how many folks’ success was based more on the timing of a win than on the the quality of their wins. But overall, they would be successful about 52% of the time and unsuccessful 48% of the time.

Now as I continue to look at those successful people around me, I can’t help but notice if the act of failure contributes to success. Most of those who have really hit it big have had some long periods of adversity. Now, I believe that

Those amazing people in our lives who are the most productive, creative, and world-changing are actually successful about 20% of the time, and unsuccessful 80% of the time.

Sure, it’s counterintuitive, but if success was intuitive everyone would be doing it.

Today I stumbled upon Daily Routines, a blog that highlights the daily rituals of the world’s most creative people past and present.

I was curious — do creative geniuses work harder than we do, to become creative?

Simone de Beauvoir, 7 hours
Michael Lewis, (ideally 9 hours)
Jonathan Letham, 5-6 hours
Robert Caro, “long hours”
Winston Churchill, ~6 hours
Barack Obama, ~10 hours
C.S. Lewis, 6 hours
John Grisham, 1-2 hours (as author, before continuing to work as a lawyer)
Gerhard Richter, 9 hours
Gustave Flaubert, 9 hours
Alaa Al Aswany, 10 hours
Gunter Grass, ~8 hours
Anthony Trollope, ~3 hours (before day job)
Charles Darwin, 3 hours
Joseph Campbell, 9 hours
Franz Kafka, ~3 hours (after day job)

It doesn’t seem so. While the typical vision of success (conveyed by corporate America) may appear to be fourteen-hour days chained to a desk, it seems that the truly creative don’t need nearly that amount of time.

Nor is creativity fueled by whiskey or drugs. Most of the truly creative lead lives that almost seem boring. While many enjoy an occasional cigar or tipple, the most productive and inventive artists are decidedly steady people.

One thing that struck me as I read the accounts of these geniuses, is their need for personal, unstructured time. Just about every person on the above list spent at least an hour per day on a walk, a bath, or meditating alone.

Perhaps the key to creativity is not the ability to put in more hours than the average person, but to take just a bit of time to cultivate the imagination without distraction.

A few of my students read this blog, though not as many as I would like. If I were a different kind of teacher I’d make it required reading, but even I don’t have the required overinflated self-esteem for something like that. (Actually, as I write this, I realize it’s advice worth having, so I’m going to ask that my students read this post.)

My students completed their midterm exam yesterday, and overall some of the grades were good. Some of the grades were not. Some students will leave the school building today questioning their worth as a student.

Many people complain about young adults’ sense of entitlement, all the while praising little Joey for actually getting up and going to school in the morning. Students should feel entitled to their basic human rights: dignity, respect, honesty, equality, security, and freedom from persecution. Students should not feel entitled to get a perfect score on every homework assignment, four hours of review sessions, an allowance of $50 per week, and a pony.

But one human right that isn’t often granted, in my opinion, is the right to a fresh start. Every single person in the world should feel that they are entitled to a fresh start if they are willing to work towards it.

As a society we’re obsessed with punishment. From a young age we’re threatened by authority who note that our indiscretions will “go on our permanent record.” Adults who have been convicted of a felony are effectively barred from most gainful employment. A GED won’t get you into some four-year colleges. It’s been made harder to declare bankruptcy, even if you got into that position legitimately. Even Google can bring back bits of information you’ve chosen to forget. The number of ways in which one can find a situation in which you effectively destroy the life you’ve worked hard to build is increasing. As more information becomes public and databases get cross-referenced, it’s easy to find excuses to hold people back from things they might legitimately want to do.

Students don’t have that limitation. Each year is a brand new fresh start and a new opportunity to do the things one wants to do. Better yet, the indiscretions of one academic marking period disappear before the next begins. “Real” life doesn’t revolve around nine-week quarters with a report card and a blank slate at the end. Take the opportunity to start anew before that opportunity goes away.

As of tomorrow, my grade book empties. I’m not holding onto the past — my students shouldn’t either.