Table of Contents
- Plain Wisdom (Highlights)
- Introduction
- An Interview with David Bowie
- How to Be Your Best Self
- Sidebar: Playing to the Gallery
- Sidebar: Personas
- Remember Why You Started
- How to Be Better
- Take a controlled risk
- Conclusion
Plain Wisdom (Highlights)
- If you want to produce your best work or be your best self, it’s important to avoid “playing to the gallery.”
- David Bowie urges artists to remember why they started their work in the first place.
- In order to grow and create “something exciting,” he suggests that we make ourselves marginally uncomfortable–that we set goals that are just outside of our perceived capabilities.
Introduction
In a 1997 interview, David Bowie shared some, well, plain wisdom related to how to create your best work, or more generally: how to be your best self. For both artists and non-artists alike, his thoughtful advice is worth careful consideration.
He suggests that our best, most authentic work relies on us paying little mind to the thoughts of others. We can avoid this pitfall by remembering why we started in the first place.
Secondly, Bowie offers a strategy to maneuver ourselves into a place where we can create “something exciting.”
A titan of rock music and an artist who grew increasingly unobstructed by external influences, I often return to this advice when I stray from purposeful work.
An Interview with David Bowie
Bowie’s thoughts are sourced from a tight, one-minute YouTube clip sourced from a larger interview. Here it is:
It features some essential advice to artists but it can apply to anyone looking to guard against common psychological tripwires.
The clip is from an interview that took place in the mid-1990s. It was featured in a documentary called Inspirations, directed by Michael Apted, and released on January 7, 1997. (For context, Bowie celebrated his 50th birthday later that year at Madison Square Garden by inviting a number of special guests to play some of his songs.) The film includes several artists from a variety of disciplines discussing their views on creativity and art.
There are two essential pieces of advice that we’ll decompress a bit in this post. Both provide guidance not only to the artists, creatives, content creators that Bowie may have had in mind, but to everyone else too.
How to Be Your Best Self
How to produce your best, most authentic work. Or more broadly, how to be your best self. Bowie quotes an old idiom to support his view: “Never play to the gallery.” He further suggests that creatives often don’t appreciate this until “much later on,” as he puts it.
Sidebar: Playing to the Gallery
The idiom, “playing to the gallery,” may have been borne out of the late 19th century. In theater, it was an allusion to an actor that grew captured by the perspective of audience members in the gallery–“the cheap seats,” some may say today. It was the artist’s “playing to the gallery” that was believed to produce sub-standard performances.
Rudyard Kipling was a Nobel-prize winning British author. In his first novel, The Light That Failed, one of the protagonists (a painter) says the following:
“A great deal depends on being master of the bricks and mortar of the trade. But the instant we begin to think about success and the effect of our work—to play with one eye on the gallery—we lose power and touch and everything else.” ()
How to be your best self. How to do your best work. Kipling (and perhaps Bowie too) implies that you can wield the tools of your trade with mastery only to lose “everything” when you begin to concern yourself with the perspectives of others.
Heavy. (Likely because it’s over the target.)
Sidebar: Personas
Broadening our perspective to consider both artists and everyone else. We all “play to the gallery” to some extent. Further, that “gallery” changes depending on the particular environment for which we’re operating.
This outward focus on how we may be perceived by others likely plays a large role in our personality (maybe personalities) development. The root of “personality” is from the Latin, “persona,” which means “mask, or a character played by an actor” (Oxford Languages / Google)
By caring what others think – by playing to the gallery – we are acting, playing a character, or wearing a mask.
That facade approximates what we imagine others want it to look like.
When we modify our looks, views, opinions, behaviors to appeal to others, we are establishing–
and then reinforcing–a persona that is increasingly removed from the real us. If we begin to notice the quality of our art or work suffering, Bowie may advise us to create something that comes from within us.
Remember Why You Started
To create something rooted in us and without significant influence from others, Bowie urges artists to remember why they started their work in the first place. He implies that the art was borne out of introspection and curiosity–maybe a desire to better understand how to be your best self in the world.
He says, “there is something inside of yourself that if you could manifest it in some way you could understand more about yourself and how you coexist with the rest of society.”
To learn more about yourself, you create. You make something. It may be a piece of music, some poetry, a painting (or even a lowly blog post or two). It’s constructive work that means something to you. It serves a purpose. One that is yours.
How to Be Better
Moving beyond the pitfalls of playing to the gallery, Bowie offers some insight into how we grow as artists and individuals.
He says, “I would say that if you feel safe in the area that you’re working in you’re not working in the right area.”
He continues, “Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being and go a little bit out of your depth and when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”
However much others may enjoy it, have you painted that painting before? Have you recorded that song before? Have you written that book before? Are you acting like that guy or gal again because that is “who you are”? Do you feel safe and comfortable in your work? With yourself?
David Bowie suggests that, if so, you’re likely not best placed to do your best work or to be your best self.
Take a controlled risk
By suggesting that artists and people alike wade out into the waters a little further than they’re comfortable with, Bowie is asking us to take a controlled risk. While we may enter into an environment that is uncomfortable, it is ripe for you to create something great. To be better.
Radiohead moved beyond their comfort zone by following the release of the guitar-driven OK Computer–one of the greatest rock albums ever–with a genre-bending, electronic-heavy Kid A–a seminal record that is equally valued, if not more so by fans.
Alex Honnold climbed El Capitan in search of that same discomfort, in pursuit of that same growth.
Ryan Hall went from a lean marathon runner to a “muscular force of nature” by adding 60 pounds of muscle to his frame.
These are big plunges into discomfort by famous people.
However, they too started with small changes.
Likewise, Bowie suggests that we seek that discomfort by doing something that is “a little out of our depth.” A little. This is key. If you pick something too far outside of your capabilities, you may grow quickly discouraged.
If we challenge ourselves with goals that lay just outside of what we think we can do, we’re more likely to achieve them and grow stronger in that pursuit. We surprise ourselves. But then we build on those tiny successes and over time, the compound effect can take us somewhere incredible, often faster than we could have imagined..
Conclusion
David Bowie offers sage advice to artists and creatives that applies to everyone. In short, he says don’t change your work or yourself to appease others. Do this by remembering why you started that work in the first place.
It came from within you.
Secondly, you are more likely to produce your best work – more likely to be your best self – by doing things that are slightly out of your comfort zone. Hitting on a theme that may become a mainstay here for Plain Wisdom, you discover growth and success by way of discomfort.
In his 1972 classic, Moonage Daydream, Bowie says, “Don’t fake it, baby. Lay the real thing on me.”
I’m going to try a little more of that.