GREATNESS & SELF DOUBT

“You can’t make anything great without a healthy dose of self-doubt,” Larry Poons told me once when I was in NYC. This was one of the first big lessons of my painting career.  And though it seems straight forward, there is enough there to chew on for bit of time. As with all simple and powerful statements there is a duality that conjures up feelings of contradiction.

It is in this grey area – the murky, muddy waters that many artists lay waiting to feed.  For seeing in the darkness presents infinite opportunities for creative minds to connect and build associations between differing aspects of our world – both real and imaginative.

Greatness is an elusive property.  Many would argue a purely subjective notion that can only be concluded by an individual based on their personal experiences – biases, lessons, background and uniqueness of life. Others might portend that greatness is only an objective consensus of elite minds or based on volume.  The latter meaning that a certain threshold exists whereby the number of minds or bodies touched by a subject, a creation, an action, would propel things to greatness.  Think the GOAT argument here.  Who or what is the greatest of all-time in sport, science, or leadership? Can an argument be made for an alternate to the obvious choice? There is truth and falseness in both the objective and subjective arguments for greatness.  In art, perhaps a little more truth on the subjective side.  But it is in this grey area where I love to reside, to think on how both notions could be right and both could be wrong and that perhaps in the study of each, an entirely different conclusion is inevitable.  

The idea that any road traveled will bring to our beings a whole new set of observations to be learned and revised helps shed some light onto the unusual relationship between self-doubt and greatness.  After all, when thinking of great people in our world, the great athletes and leaders, we often see the projection of total confidence, mastery and conviction that we ourselves seem to lack.  So how is it this notion of self-doubt could be at the core of making something great when to hit the last shot you must demand the ball and be confident you will score?  The contradiction here is paralyzing.  

What I think Larry Poons, who leaked this idea in a rant during a studio session at the Art Students league of New York, was getting at, was, you can’t know.  If you miss the shot, which is a more probable outcome, you just can’t predict it.  And because you can’t predict it, you know that you are probably going to fail, even if you believe you could do it.  In that moment, time is fluid, and greatness irrelevant.  What truly matters in the pursuit of anything is that you start. You have zero opportunity for greatness without trying, without doing, without putting yourself and your actions out into the world.  That is where self-doubt is essential.  The sensitivity to the perception of others, as well as the sensitivity to our own limitations as individuals combine in a ferocious cocktail of nerves, fear, isolation, loneliness and nausea.  Do I put red on the canvas here or blue? Which is right?  We fear the mistake, the vulnerability of self on display, the smallness. For brief fleeting instances, you may visualize yourself making the shot, creating a masterpiece – even seeing it through your own lens after the fact, only to fall back into bouts of despair, insecurity and the notion that you have done something worthless.  

For hitting the winning shot only lasts a moment. And when you’ve finished the masterpiece you must start a new one, which, in all likeliness will not be as good. Revel in that.