‘How do you do that?’
We were at tag rugby training and I had just thrown a particularly long pass but to my dismay I couldn’t tell the curious onlooker how I did it.
I had been doing it for years. I couldn’t remember the last time I thought about it, it had just become second nature.
I stood there desperate to give a helpful answer but struggling to turn the unconscious, conscious.
I think the same is true for many masters on ‘Masterclass’. I’ve watched a few successful celebrity expert’s lessons and found their advice somewhat lacking.
It feels like, they too, are grappling to articulate the abstract.
But in a valiant attempt to help they give what I would consider tactical advice.
For example I recently watched one lesson with the title ‘Growing as a writer’ and the author listed lots of tiny potentially misleading tips.
The suggestions included:
Go to readings
Know what you’re going to read before approaching the mic
Don’t bring up a big stack of pages to the mic
Be better dressed than your audience
Write thank you letters to as many people as possible
Be nice to people
The reason why I call these tips potentially misleading is that I could easily see someone writing hundreds of thank you letters thinking it’s going to make them a better writer and yet see the sales of their books remain stagnant or receive just as many rejection letters as pre thank you letters.
For me, it’s the crucial bit of advice to follow.
These tips are more tactical than strategic.
I can’t blame the masters, I too struggle to accurately describe what I intuitively do.
Just while we’re on the subject, if you’re interested, from what I’ve read so far, ‘Be remarkable’ (Seth Godin) is the best advice I’ve heard to the question of how do I make it?
Be worth remarking upon is strategic advice.
It covers all manner of things.
It encompasses your choices on prose, cover art, punctuation, grammar and on and on and on.
It’s also much easier to remember than a long list of tiny tips.
Thomas Duggan 