There Is No Peak, So Climb With Care

I'm an occasional stand-up comedian. You won't have heard of me, I don't have a social media following, and I'm largely inactive throughout the year. My day job and my life get in the way of doing regular weeknight slots around town and that's just the way it is. I also play djembe in a band a couple of times a year. I like putting on a good show with my friends! I don't perform all that often, partly because if I do commit to participating in a live show, I want it to be excellent. Everyone has bad gigs, but I don't want my next bad gig to be because either I or my co-performers didn't have the resources to commit to all the required practice time. 

A jerkass truism about putting on a performance for others is that you need to Be Good Or Get Better. It's both very good and useless advice to offer to a performer. The good side first. Your absolute aim should be to give your audience the best show you can in return for their taking a chance on you and your show. They could have just as easily stayed at home with a cup of hot tea. It's tough to beat a cup of tea at home when the alternative involves leaving home and traveling to something which might be a shit time. I don't know about you but I take that kind of responsibility over someone's evening entertainment very seriously. So yeah, if you're not good enough to put on that show, you need to get better before you do, no ifs no buts.

The shitty part of the Be Good or Get Better advice is that it's not very constructive, is it? For one, what is Good Enough? All you can do with Be Good or Get Better is to seek continuous improvement. Perpetually seeking out imperfection and destroying it. Finding great things about what you can already do and push it even further. On the face of it, this isn't a terrible game plan and it is how you improve but the real issue is that there's no tangible end to this climb. There is no hard maximum. There is no peak. Just more slope and sheer cliff face and at some point, you have to abandon or at least temporarily cease the pursuit of ever greater skill. 

You have to stop climbing. If not simply for the practical reason that there's a performance coming. The one you're about to be in. Climbing time is over. You have to be comfortable with the level of performance that you are currently able to give and believe that is good enough, even if just for one show. As a sidebar, if you truly don't believe that what you're doing will be of any value to the audience that you intend to perform to, then you should have a serious conversation with yourself or your team, but that conversation should happen in good time to cancel or postpone the performance. Otherwise, just get out there, put a smile on your face, and have at it. You would be astounded how much your audience will adore your terribly imperfect skills that are secretly very good actually. Once the performance is over... sure, you can look at the data and beat yourself up about it. You can find ways to improve and resume the endless climb again. But that's for later. Enjoy your performance and the after-party, you've earned it!

The performers I've met in my life tend to be lovely, hypercompetitive, and relentlessly self-critical people and I try to say nice things to them. Especially stand-ups. The competition there is especially fierce, and the experience of being a stand-up can be devastatingly lonely at times. Going it alone can be a bad time! More often than not you're only able to compare notes with yourself. Most of your fellow practitioners are also rivals, and you're extremely lucky if you have a congressive, collaborative space within which you and other acts can offer candid and useful advice to each other in an equitable way. In practice, you don't often have a good support network there. Your friends and family can be a great source of emotional support but chances are you don't come from a legacy community of stand-up comics. Even then, the journey of stand-up is a solitary one. It's the best and worst thing about it, complete authorial power with complete responsibility for the performance.

Any work that you intend to submit for subjective criticism is affected by this. Years ago, I submitted my PhD thesis (it's about secret intelligence-gathering operations if you were wondering) and I also know quite a few people who are in the business of writing books. If you've ever tried to write something that breaks the 50K word count, there's a good chance that you're the world expert on whatever you're writing about and it's almost certain that nobody on Earth knows your specialist topic better than you do. This can put the writer at risk of entering a toxic headspace. Even great acts of self-encouragement and forgiveness can ultimately fall on your own deaf ears. It's terribly easy to talk yourself down to the point where you're wishing for an end to the torment of putting the beastly words together. You might even want to quit outright. You will almost certainly have a crisis of confidence about your ability to inform, entertain, and enlighten your prospective audience. Personally, I don't think I could trust a writer who claims that they have always written with an unflinching sense of purpose. I'd simply smell a rat.

So sure, I've so far come to the conclusion that creativity is hard. Big whoop, not much of a takeaway. We're all vulnerable to the mental health pitfalls associated with simply putting ourselves out there. The impulse to pursue that challenge in itself is fine. Better than fine actually. I respect anyone who picks up a paintbrush, a word processor, or whatever with the intent to create and share something. But when the healthy self-criticism tips over into ritualised self-loathing, it becomes unsustainable.

You need to regularly free yourself from the stress of self-criticism if your work is going to have any positive outcome. Choose to believe it for that reason if you don't think preserving your own personal well-being is reason enough. You have to be able to say to yourself  "This is my current level. I know what it's going to take for me to take my performance to the next level, and I know that I can't do that right now". Even reading that thought again to myself I can hear how much that sounds like compromise. It is. It's supposed to be. It has to be. 

You have to care about your performance, but you also have to care about yourself. I know there's a temptation to romanticise a do-or-die mentality. To leave it all out there on the field. To be the most dedicated artist possible. Sure, there are some exceptional artists and art that have been wrung out of that kind of approach but just as many artists have been chewed up and spat out by it too, successful or not. People like that will have not read this far. You are most likely not one of those people who can put everything about the performance ahead of themselves. You, my friend, have things that you care about. And people who care about your wellbeing.

You have to grow where you can and maintain what you need. Performance literally has no skill ceiling, and therefore there is no strict effort ceiling beyond what kills you. There is no peak to that mountain, just endless and ever-steepening slopes. I advise anyone still reading that the mountain has an infinite number of ski lodges for rest and relaxation. It's also perfectly okay to retreat back down the mountain if that's what you need. It's just not worth it otherwise and hey, if you still think rest is for the weak, please climb with care. It's a long way down.