Читать книгу Creative Synergy - Bunny Paine-Clemes - Страница 53

You have to put in your apprenticeship. The Beatles practiced in tacky venues and sweated seven-hour nights in Hamburg before they burst onto the popular music scene. Mozart produced juvenilia before he created his masterpieces. Michelangelo apprenticed briefly to a sculptor with lesser talent.¹⁴⁶ You have to learn, even internalize, the formulas of your craft before you can let go of your ego, contact the Unified Field, and cooperate as a co-creator of some work. The process entails not passive surrender but alert receptivity, and the field uses your preparation to find the formulas for expression.

Weisberg cites a number of studies establishing the importance of knowledge and practice. Hayes, for instance, was interested in the amount of “preparation” necessary for a creative breakthrough. When he investigated the careers of seventy-six composers, he discovered that among five hundred masterworks, only three had been composed before the tenth year, and those had been created a year or two before.¹⁴⁷ Mozart himself, the archetype of the prodigy, composed his first significant work, Piano Concerto 9 (K.271), in 1777, more than ten years after he began composing.¹⁴⁸

In his investigation of 131 painters, Hayes discovered a similar pattern. An apprenticeship of least six years preceded a sudden six-year spurt of productivity, followed by twenty-five years of solid work and then a slow falling-off.¹⁴⁹ Even prodigies such as Pablo Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Paul Klee had to learn their craft. Pariser’s study of their juvenilia reveals that they struggled, as all children do, to translate concrete objects into recognizable and well-limned forms on paper or canvas.¹⁵⁰ Similar patterns appear in poets. Gruber found the same rule in the development of Darwin’s work, and Gardner found it in the histories of eminent creators from seven major intelligences: Pablo Picasso (visual-spatial), Mahatma Gandhi (interpersonal), Albert Einstein (logical-mathematical), Sigmund Freud (intrapersonal), Martha Graham (bodily-kinesthetic), Igor Stravinsky (musical), and T.S. Eliot (linguistic).¹⁵¹

A major characteristic of world-class creators is that they engage in “deliberate practice.”¹⁵² Jazz musicians improvise so skillfully because their repertoire is full of formulas derived from imitating recordings.¹⁵³ Concert pianists repeat, hour after hour, the scales and exercises that most of us would abandon as tedious and boring. Olympic ice skaters begin as early as three or four years of age and clock so many hours on the ice that they often resort to tutors or home schooling to steal practice time from what would otherwise be seven or eight hours in a conventional classroom.

John Lennon used to become irritated when people expressed amazement at the speed of the Beatles’ development. They didn’t know, he said, of the many years spent assembling the band, doing practice sessions, earning their dues in out-of-the-way dives. In his study of the Beatles’ creative development, Weisberg meticulously documents what all their fans know: that a long, hard apprenticeship preceded the first hit record. Weisberg estimates that between 1957 and 1962, the Beatles spent over two thousand hours on stage performing, including four hundred jobs besides their marathon sessions in Hamburg. The creativity of the Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership also exemplifies the ten-year rule. Their most celebrated album was Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, recorded ten years after the formation of the original band, the Quarry Men. Their other greatest hits were composed in 1965-1966.¹⁵⁴