In this episode, we do things a little differently! We hear a story from Kelly Horan, Deputy Editor of the Ideas Section at the Boston Globe, and then she joins me for some conversation about logic, intuition, the creative process, and the thrill of eccentric adventures.
Resources:
- The Road Less Traveled, by M. Scott Peck
- Becoming Duchess Goldblatt, by Anonymous
- Whack on the Side of the Head, by Roger Von Oech
- Bathtubs Over Broadway
Transcript
Hey there, I’m Tricia Rose Burt, and I want to ask you a question. What creative work are you called to do but are too afraid to try? Are you in it but dream of doing stand up? A PR exec who longs to write a screenplay? Did the pandemic change your priorities and you want to leave your fully funded PhD MD program and go to New Mexico and paint. Or maybe you’re like I was in my early career, trapped in a lucrative but soul crushing corporate job when what I really wanted to do was tell stories on stage. In this podcast, we’ll hear from artists who took an unexpected leap, and found the courage to answer their creative call, so we can inspire you to answer yours, because this is no time to be timid.
Tricia:
Welcome to the show. In this episode, we’re going to explore the fifth principle of the No Time to be Timid manifesto: Logic can work against you. Now, don’t misunderstand me, logic plays an important role in our lives, but I’m not so sure it should be the only criteria when you’re making a decision, particularly a creative one. Because in my experience, logic — also known as doing the sensible thing — can sometimes sabotage a good idea.
I just ran across a great example of this in the memoir, Becoming Duchess GoldBlatt. In it, the author writes about when she created a fictional character on Twitter called Duchess Goldblatt. The Duchess is an elderly author living in a place called Crooked Path, who shares these little fragments of beauty and fun. The book’s author, who remains anonymous so as not to ruin the magic of the Duchess, created her during a dark time in her life. Her marriage ended, she lost her job, her father died. She wanted to heal and she felt like when she wrote she was the best version of herself. So she created the Duchess. In the book she says, “I hope someone wants to read this, but probably no one will. So it will have to be for my own entertainment. I’ll write whatever makes me laugh.”
Not everyone’s supportive. One of her friends ridicules her for doing this, tells her that she’s wasting her time, that she should do something that matters. She even says it’s stupid and that no one will read it. But the author sticks with her gut, and she ends up creating a community of 54,000 followers, becomes best friends with Lyle Lovett, and gets a book deal in the process. She also creates a new life for herself. It didn’t make sense to her friend, but it made sense to her. And fortunately, she persevered.
I can bring this idea of foregoing logic a little bit closer to home. I’m not sure it’s the most sensible thing for me to start a new podcast when there’s already 2 million in the world. I even overheard a friend saying, “Just what the world needs — another podcast.” But I thought the world did need another podcast, so I reached out to a dear friend, Kelly Horan. She’s the Deputy Editor of the Ideas Section for the Boston Globe. And she’s also produced two podcasts, so I wanted her opinion on my idea. I told her the premise — conversations about finding creative courage. And she said, “Tricia, you have to do this podcast.” Then she began telling me about her struggle to become a writer, while another person — in this case her father — wanted her to do the sensible thing. He loved Kelly and wanted her to have a sure path, so she wouldn’t struggle. And as I was listening to Kelly tell her story, I thought, “Okay, wait a second. People need to hear this.” And she let me record her. So now you get to enjoy her story too.
Kelly:
Okay, so St. Paul’s School is a prep school in Concord, New Hampshire. And it’s the kind of place where I think I knew about it, because I knew that some people got to go there. But we didn’t have the means to go to a school like that, so when I found out that they had this Advanced Studies program, I kind of set my sights on doing that. So I just wanted to work really hard and get into this program that was just for kids from New Hampshire who had kind of, I don’t know a little bit of academic aspiration. I got in, and I was so thrilled.
And there were two programs there that really appealed to me. One was in French, and I had been studying French since I was a very little girl and dreaming of Paris as though I knew the place and doing insufferable things like wearing black eyeliner and sneaking cigarettes and wearing a beret and you know, being very moody, just like I thought all good French girls were. And there was also a media studies course, which was learning about television and radio and newspaper journalism and all the things that went into that. And both of those two areas were very exciting to me. And when it came time to choose, I made it clear which one I wanted. And my father said, “Well, no, you’ll be going for chemistry.” And that was just so, I mean, no one has ever accused me of being adept at anything in the sciences. I am science curious, you know, but I had a chemistry teacher in high school, who used to come up behind me and say, “Tell me what, through these giant hoops you wear in your ears, are you channeling because I know you’re not hearing me.” And it’s true. It was just my eyes would glaze over. I tried to remember the periodic table of elements I couldn’t. I tried to care about what happened in my petri dish. I didn’t. But my father was really adamant. And if I was going to go to St. Paul’s, and if he was going to scrape together the money for me to do so, this is what I was going to study.
And St. Paul’s, then, the Advanced Studies program was a six-day-a-week thing. So you had intensive courses, Monday through Friday, and every Saturday was an exam. And everyone also took a creative writing class, which was my salvation. It’s where I just relaxed, and found ease and flow, and all the things that I now know, when I recognize it, that that’s the direction I lean into. But then I thought, well, if it’s easy, unless it’s causing me pain and distress, it must be suspect. So the teacher and his assistant — it was a professor and a grad student from Princeton — and we were doing in a six-week course a semester of freshman level college chemistry. And I was so lost. And I would just sit in these classes, and they were very long classes. And I was surrounded by everyone much smarter than I was. And it was just murder for my self esteem in all possible ways. And then, every Friday night, I would be in — I wish I could remember his name, he was such a nice man, this professor — I would be in his apartment on campus at St. Paul’s weeping because I did not understand the material. I didn’t understand it. And he would try so hard to break it down. No one wanted to be my lab partner because I was feckless. I approached chemistry the way I do cooking — a little bit of that, a little bit of this, let’s see what happens. And you know, sometimes it tastes good and sometimes it doesn’t. So no one even wanted to be my lab partner. So my margin of error for my lab reports, because you also had to turn in a lab report once a week, was huge. I mean, whereas most people would come in with a .05 range, I was just “Well, let me tell you” and I began to approach my lab reports as though they were creative writing assignments. And I drew things in the margins. And I had little word bubbles, little dialog bubbles, explaining what had gone wrong. I described sort of like some of the Cheeto I was not supposed to be eating in class falling into the plate and that catching fire and that maybe threw off the results. And I would just write, basically, a long apology for why there was no science. And it turned out that he found these very amusing and well written.
And so the mercy of St. Paul’s is that they didn’t grade you — you passed or you didn’t pass, or you did really well. I can’t remember what the distinction was. But it was basically, like you knew if you didn’t make it, but they didn’t make a big deal about letting you know you failed. Most people pass. Some people had some kind of distinction. And I ended up getting a distinction in creative writing and that made me very happy. And to my great astonishment, and surely, because it was an act of pity, I passed chemistry. There’s nothing I did that merited passing chemistry. And there was even a graduation ceremony and my dad came. And I was holding my breath the entire time because I just knew how disappointed he was going to be when I didn’t pass chemistry. And then they called my name and I was like, there’s been a mistake and I walked up and I accepted my little, it wasn’t a diploma, but it was something like it. And then after milling around in the parking lot, the lovely chemistry professor came up to my father and me and he said, “I need to tell you something about your daughter.” And my father, who is such a lovely man and so well meaning, but who at the time wasn’t gonna listen to anything anyone said about his daughter, especially from his daughter. But said, “Okay,” and he said, “She is not going to be a scientist. What she should be is a writer. You have a writer on your hands.” And he handed, to my astonishment, the stack of my lab reports and he said, “This is not science, but it’s some of the most entertaining reading I’ve ever read.” And, you know, I burst into tears, of course, because I hadn’t always felt seen growing up. And it was a very new sensation for me. And I even could get choked up now thinking about it, because this man, his kindness, in his mercy, and just the fact that he understood, you know, that I had taken my failure in chemistry as just “I’m a failure,” and he had taken it as “you’re just meant to do something else.” And he gave me a copy of the M. Scott Peck book, The Road Less Traveled, and his parting words were “Read this, and do what you love.” It’s a moment that’s burned in my memory, a moment of gratitude. And it took me many years to, I think, have the courage to follow his edict, do what you love. But he was right. I was 16 years old. And it was, I think, maybe the first adult in my life who saw me and saw that I had a gift for something and wanted to encourage it.
Tricia:
I love that story so much, for a lot of reasons. But because I had a similar experience, like many of us did, trying to meet someone else’s expectations of what they thought made sense for us. And it made me want to talk more with Kelly about the logical path versus that road less traveled. So I invited her over to my studio for some conversation.
Tricia:
The thing about logic is, it’s the safe choice.
Kelly:
Yeah, and it’s the looks good on paper choice. And it sounds good at the dinner party choice. It’s a socially acceptable choice. And it quells the parental anxiety choice. But I think the choice you have to make is the one for your soul. And I’m still in my own life in this moment, edging my toes up to the precipice, and still trying to take certain leaps, because I’m listening to my soul and my soul is going, “Help me.”
Tricia:
I’ve been reading a lot about this, because this whole idea of logic versus intuition fascinates me.
Kelly:
First of all, what do you mean by logic?
Tricia:
I actually had to look it up. And it says, the real definition of logic is a proper or reasonable way of thinking about something.
Kelly:
Doesn’t that just make you feel like there’s no air in the room?
Tricia:
Someone is choking me.
Kelly:
Proper and reasonable. Two words I never want applied to myself personally.
Tricia:
And I tried so hard to be proper and reasonable. And it just never worked. There was at one point in my life, where I could do what was logical and keep my job working with Fidelity Investments. Or I could quit my job. Sell my car, divorce my husband, get rid of my apartment, cash out all my retirement savings and move to Ireland, which is what I did. On paper, it made no sense at all. Nothing about it was logical. But I just knew I was supposed to do that. And there were so many people around me letting me know the flaw in my logic, why that doesn’t make sense and why should be fearful. But I thought, I’m more scared of staying at home. I’m more scared of doing this life. You know, I had created this life that required me to have a job I didn’t want anymore. And the only way I could see myself getting out of that was to completely remove myself from where I was. It just wasn’t working out.
And there was a big faith component for me in there as well. The God I believe in is like, Would you quit doing it the safe way and let’s go take a risk. I mean, don’t get me wrong. Logic is a very important part of life. But it’s a very different process. When I was in art school, they said there are two different kinds of processes. You can’t create and analyze at the same time. They’re competing processes. There’s a time and a place for both of those. And there’s a book called Whack on the Side of the Head by a man named Roger Van Oech and he talks about soft and hard thinking. And hard thinking is like analysis and logic and numbers and data, you know, and then there’s the soft thinking, right? And it’s intuition it’s going with your gut. It’s metaphor.
Kelly
It’s the full body yes. It’s when you feel yes in your whole body.
Tricia
Yes, in both of the types of thinking have a place in the world, but in the creative process, you really don’t want a lot of logic in the beginning, you want to be like, what happens if I do this? What happens if I do that? A lot of just freewheeling and if you try to put, “well, this isn’t practical,” when you’re trying to do a drawing or, or “what’s going to happen with this?” when you’re trying to create a character when you’re writing, I mean, you’re sort of doomed.
Kelly:
Well, logic is sort of the, I think, you know, natural enemy of creative freedom. Because if you hem yourself in too much by thinking, How will I make money from this? Is this going to sell? Is this going to get me to the next place? You know, how am I going to pay the mortgage or you think any of those things, while you’re just in the act of creating, you’re going to kill your flow, you’re not going to create anything, but you’re going to give yourself a complex. And I think that for me, when I get into that thinking, I realize that I need to go take a walk, I need to go take a deep breath, I need to go be in nature and just shake it off because it happens often. Or I will start to feel like I’m in my 50s and I have $14 in retirement and my vast shoe collection is not going to get me there in old age and how has this happened? But I think that I soothe myself by saying for the most part I have tried to follow my passions. And I think there’s a lot to be said for that.
Tricia
I don’t know what your experience was but in my experience growing up a lot was that what was valued more was reason, what was valued more was proper thinking and then somehow creativity was an inferior skill. There was an imbalance.
Kelly
How did you do with logic in college?
Tricia
Well, so I made three Ds in college. The first D I had was in Econ. I actually withdrew passing before I could actually be given the D. I was savvy about that. Guns and butter I couldn’t do. The second D I got was in calculus and I think our professor — it was either Mrs. McGeehee or Mahaffey — even tried to drop one of the test grades to see if I would get a C. Alas, I still got a D. And then I got a D in logic. I can remember the book was navy blue. Just so unaccessible. There’s a place for logic, but not when you’re making.
Tricia
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Tricia:
Okay, have you seen the documentary “Bathtubs over Broadway”? Okay. I love this documentary so much. Everyone needs to go watch it. It’s written and directed by man — I don’t know if he directed it — but I know a man named Steve Young wrote it and it’s about industrial musicals. There’s a whole industry where they did musicals for like Hardee’s and John Deere. I mean, that would be their annual meetings — these huge Broadway musicals that would cost like $3 million to produce for one night. So he found all of these musicals, he researched all these industrial musicals. It’s just fabulous. And at the end of it, though, I mean, this was not something he planned on doing. He was a comedy writer for David Letterman and got kind of just obsessed with these industrial musicals and just followed it down this trail that led him to a world he would have never imagined if he hadn’t taken that risk. And at the end of it, he says, this is his quote, “Life can be so rich and wonderful when we step off the logical path and embark on eccentric adventures.”
Kelly:
I love that so much. I think it really also squares with how I want to age. I see people aging without an abiding passion and I see their loneliness. And I realized that if you don’t nurse an abiding passion when you’re younger, you won’t have one later. Well, chances are you won’t have on later. And I think that it’s the abiding passion that keeps us alive. I help oversee the Ideas Section of the Boston Globe and one of my favorite contributors, who came to me out of the blue a year-and-a-half ago is a 94-and-a-half-year-old man who writes like a dream and who has a crystalline memory for the details of his life. And he was being named man of the year last weekend. And I went back to the party at his house that his kids were having, grandkids were having for him. And he was sitting in front of his computer with all the Word files there in the background. And I said, so his name is Tom Sheehan. And I said, “So Tom, is writing keeping you alive?” And he said, “Oh, writing is keeping me alive.” And we talked about how important it is to have a creative act to turn to when you can’t sleep, when you have a trouble. There has been loss in his life and it hasn’t felled him. The through line has been his creativity. And so I weave the eccentric adventure, and weave that into my own way of thinking too, about, what happens when my son has grown up and has left the house? I don’t want to make the mistake of trying to live vicariously through him. I don’t want to live for him. I don’t want to try to crowd his choices because I haven’t made mine, because I was timid, too timid to live my own bold choices. I don’t want to try to steer him.
Tricia:
I think if we try to be logical, it doesn’t always work for us.
Kelly:
I think that you’re a very intuitive person. And I think that you have a deep faith, which I admire, I wish I had it, because I feel like people with a deep religious faith, there’s something calming about their presence and inspiring. And I just wonder, even with this doing this podcast, this was another leap. I mean, I remember when you first came to me talking about this, you’re like, “I want to do a podcast, and I want it to be about the creative process. And I’ve got a manifesto.” And I was wow, you have to do this. It was so clear, you had to do it. But what drives you through uncertainty, through scarcity? Because scarcity is a trigger for me— knowing that I don’t know how to pay the next bill scares the heck out of me. So what is the precipitating force in your life that makes you say, I’m going to do this? I don’t know how I’m gonna get it done. But I’m going to do this.
Tricia:
I just feel really called to do this work. I can honestly tell you, since 1993, I have not made any choices that were made with the conventional criteria. That has been my blessing and real challenge to follow this sort of different set of criteria, which has been more about being led to and saying yes to the risky places. Every single thing that is good in my life is because I decided to become an artist.
Kelly:
That’s everything.
Tricia:
It made no sense at the time. It didn’t make any sense for me to start a podcast right now. For me, logic comes into it after I’ve gone through the creative process and I’m trying to figure out how to execute the creative idea.
Kelly:
I would even argue, though, having watched, behind the scenes, this podcast come together, that you put a hell of a lot of logic and methodical practice into putting this together. It wasn’t like, I’m going to do a podcast! You have gone, you’ve interviewed people behind the scenes about how they do that, you came to me, “how you make a podcast?” You went to a convention, meeting other people who make podcasts. You’ve been reading books. You’ve been doing all this work and I think that that’s a really important point that I want to make, which is that creation should be about abandon, and it should be about your intuition. But before you set pen to paper, which is my art, before you set brush to canvas, I think that you do have to have followed some logic in getting there, but it’s woven into the fabric. It’s not the final result.
Tricia:
And well, it’s not what you lead with.
Kelly:
And it’s hard work.
Tricia:
It is hard work.
Kelly:
You know, I think that there’s this notion that artists swan around in silk kaftans with cigarettes and maybe they smoke them, maybe they don’t, on the end of a long filter and just you know, dabble. No, it’s such hard work. The scariest place for me to be sitting is in front of a blinking cursor.
Tricia:
The hardest work I do is the 50 feet it takes to get from my house to my studio. Well, you know, I think there’s a lot about return on investment. Well, if I’m going to put in this much effort, I have to have something to show for it sort of immediately. I mean, we live in this world of not “what’s the process?” It’s “what’s the end product?” And if I start thinking about return on investment in a traditional way it’s just going to thwart me every time.
Kelly:
But the ROI on what you give to yourself — it makes you probably a better partner, a better human, a happier human. You’re able to experience gratitude and all of the world’s gifts. I think that the return on investment is not the traditional one and it’s so important to think about things that way. There was a linear path set before me and I have had a circular path. I’ve had a doodle of a path. I’ve been all over the place in my life. And in the moment, I think, what am I doing? How does this make sense? And then I look back on it. And I think I had to do that thing, in order to be able to meet the person who led me to do that thing, in order to be able to have the experience that inspired me to do that thing.
Tricia:
So it does make sense!
Kelly:
So it ultimately makes sense! And that’s when I think you have to have faith in yourself. That is gonna work out.
Tricia:
Yeah, absolutely. Hey, thank you, Kelly, so much for joining me in the studio.
Kelly:
You’re welcome. Thank you for having me.
Tricia:
I’m so glad Kelly stopped by for the visit. Now, here’s a couple of questions for you to ponder:
Do you want to step off the logical path to embark on an eccentric adventure? If so, how can you make that happen?
Are you nurturing a creative passion that you can carry with you in your older years?
And a reminder to all of us in the first phases of a creative project, make sure to allow time to explore and imagine, we need to save the logic for the practical phase, when we’re trying to execute our ideas. As Albert Einstein said, “Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.”
If you haven’t had a chance to download the No Time to be Timid manifesto yet, make sure to visit my website triciaroseburt.com. And while you’re there, please reach out and give us some feedback about the show. We’d love to hear your thoughts.
And if you feel like this is no time to be timid in your own life, then maybe I can help you with that. In my private coaching practice, I help my clients to tell and live better stories. Some of them are artists and creatives who want to express themselves in a new medium. Others are leaders who want to motivate groups to take action. And many of them are business professionals who want to better communicate with their customers and employees. You can reach out to me at triciaroseburt.com.
Thanks for tuning in. And I hope you’ll join us for Episode Six: Practicality is overrated. We’ll be talking with Rachel Perry, an award-winning visual and performance artist who started art school in her late 30s while raising a first grader. Her risk paid off. Next year, she’ll be participating in a performance at Carnegie Hall.
And remember, this is no time to be timid.
No Time to be Timid is written and produced by me, Tricia Rose Burt. Our executive producer is Mia Rovegno and our sound engineer is Adam Arnone of Echo Finch. If you like what you hear, please spread the word, subscribe to the show, and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. No Time to be Timid is a presentation of I Will Be Good Productions.