Onstage, Greg Saunier looks like a man drowning.
Behind the drum kit, his knees jut up like he’s sitting on a chair made for a child, at times threatening to pop him in the chin. He grimaces and flails, his wrists bent at uncomfortable-looking angles. His head and its generous mop of hair loll from side to side.
But despite his Animal-esque demeanour, Saunier is in perfect control. In fact, the drummer, whose band Deerhoof has been a cult favourite for over twenty years now, is revered by fans for his abilities behind the kit. He speeds around his drums, interjecting an off-kilter flourish every few seconds. He improvises fills at a breakneck pace. He never drops a beat unless it’s to slip up his sleeve and pull out again unexpectedly, like a coin from behind your ear.
He isn’t the only member of his band with chops. Reckless and unpredictable, Deerhoof’s noisy, punk-inspired pop is a feat of technical mastery. But if the group operates like a single body, Saunier is its heart. He plays his instrument with the kind of reckless abandon that makes others want to pick up some sticks and start playing.
I know—I’m a drummer myself. I started in my early teens, playing in school bands until college, where I spent two years studying music performance. While high school had been all about fun and experimentation, at college, we worked on technique—practicing the perfect stroke, learning how to angle our wrists and arms for maximum efficiency, tracing a quarter-sized circle on a practice pad and training ourselves never to strike outside its borders.
So when I got my ticket to see Deerhoof play live, I expected to be wowed by Saunier’s technique. On record, he blazed through songs with such dexterity, I could only imagine him as a cold, classic disciplinarian. Naturally, I was surprised when I got to the front of the stage and saw not a man with perfect posture and a robotic sense of control, but a gangly guy in bright green sneakers, hunched over an unusually tiny kit, pounding with clenched fists like a caveman.
Saunier is beloved by his fans, but according to the experts, he does not do what he is supposed to. His playing style is what some musicians would call “unorthodox,” and others might call “completely fucked up.” His hunchbacked technique would give someone with a lesser spine whiplash, and in many musical circles, his improvisations would be considered (at the very least) impolite.
Yet he’s played on dozens of records, performed in front of crowds of thousands, and been described as “trailblazing” by Modern Drummer magazine.
Greg Saunier is exceptional because he is doing it wrong.
The problem with conventional wisdom is that it’s conventional. It can help you do what others have already done, but it cannot teach you to find the strange, half-broken solution that is intrinsic to you and only you.
We live in an era of best practices. The road to success, we’re told, is paved with strategies, its walkways adorned with tips and tricks and how-tos and hacks. Countless books, articles, and Ted Talks have ingrained in us a philosophy of success: there is a right way to do everything.
Yet the people who catch our attention are often the ones who veer wildly from the road.
Greg Saunier isn’t the only one. While teachers, bosses, and Hollywood directors tell us that we need to achieve the right goals in the right ways, most people who transcend expectations do it by ignoring the narrative of “supposed to.” Athletes, writers, tech leaders, artists—the best of each of these tend to burn their maps and wander off into the foliage.
In 2012, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a profile for the New Yorker of Alberto Salazar, the marathoner who dominated in the early 1980s. Salazar won the New York City Marathon an impressive three times in a row (1980, 1981, and 1982), and was ranked the number one marathoner in the world by Track and Field magazine. Yet Gladwell’s article focuses not just on Salazar’s athletic triumphs, but on his physical shortcomings.
“Salazar shuffled like an old man,” he writes, “His college coach said that he looked as if he were sitting down and running at the same time. His college teammate Rudy Chapa was biomechanically perfect: if you saw the two of them running side by side on the track, you would assume that Chapa was the champion and Salazar the journeyman.”
So if Salazar’s secret to success wasn’t his method, what was it?
Perhaps it was the same thing that once made him crawl out of his window and run in the snow when he had strep throat, the same thing that made him run so hard in a race when he was 19 that he collapsed and was administered last rites. The ability to push himself beyond what most people would consider their limits. Or, as Gladwell puts it: “Salazar’s greatness lay in his desire.”
Training programs for marathons will teach you about a lot of things—schedules, nutrition, hydration, recovery—but they will not teach you about desire. The kind of intangible knowledge that comes from within. Salazar achieved greatness not just through his training, but through a will so strong that it allowed him to ignore his own pain.
In 1982, Salazar and another young runner, Dick Beardsley, ran one of the closest races the Boston Marathon has ever seen. Mile by mile, they fought for the lead, often so close together that they could hear one another breathing. A video of the final minutes of the race shows the two sprinting towards the finish line in visible pain, Beardsley with an expression of grim determination, Salazar’s arms flapping from side to side. What the video doesn’t show is that after the race ended, Salazar started to shake, developing a fever that required him to be rushed to the hospital and rehydrated. He hadn’t drunk any water for the last eight miles.
Did he do it wrong? Absolutely. But he also won.
The problem with conventional wisdom is that it’s conventional. It can help you do what others have already done, but it cannot teach you to find the strange, half-broken solution that is intrinsic to you and only you. Conventional wisdom says that drummers should keep their knees at right angles to their bodies, that marathoners shouldn’t push themselves too hard. It also says that writers shouldn’t try to publish incoherent, stream-of-consciousness novels with no mass appeal—and yet a writer did. His name was James Joyce, and the book was Ulysses (according to the Modern Library, it’s the best modern novel ever written).
But even though many exceptional people tend to be rule breakers, our culture is still obsessed with doing things “the right way.” Social pressures push us to conform, movies and pop culture bombard us with aspirational images of the lives we’re meant to wish for, and legions of self-help gurus finish the job, telling us about hacks and techniques for living life optimally. Spend a few hours watching TV or browsing the internet, and you’ll find there is a right way to fall in love (monogamously, heterosexually, and for life), a right way to work (towards retirement), even a right way to defecate (squatting, not sitting).
The desire to live the right kind of life has found a firm foothold in our collective unconscious. But what is the desire to do things “correctly” doing to our creativity? And why are there so many people out there eager to tell us how to live?
Part of the answer may lay with the institutions that have been teaching us how to do things for centuries: schools. More specifically, our post-secondary schools. While higher learning in ancient Greece was a tuition-free extravaganza of wrestling and arguing about ethics, universities and colleges these days are, first and foremost, businesses. And the first rule of business? Fill consumers’ needs.
Our needs, these days, include learning proper procedures, getting the right boxes checked on our resumes, and learning to slot neatly into the ever-more-specific needs of our employers. And schools have evolved to teach us how to do that. Not only have universities started offering short-run programs to teach specific, practical skills, but independent businesses have popped up to educate us on every niche practice imaginable. While fifty years ago, most journalists had never been to journalism school, these days you can take classes in how to send an email newsletter. With more certificate and diploma programs than ever before, you can enroll in programs that teach you how to stage houses, how to manage golf courses, even how to answer phones.
This has its benefits and its drawbacks. Teaching people, step by step, how to complete a task does result in an overall higher level of competence—but it also results in a lot of people who think in the same way. We’ve turned even basic tasks into a series of steps. Creative problem-solving and spontaneous creation are giving way to rule-following (not to mention anxiety when we are, finally, left to our own devices). Slowly, we’re forgetting about the time when the only best practice was “figure it out.”
But despite what productivity experts might tell you, “figure it out” is the approach that makes the world interesting. Certification programs and step-by-step lessons can be incredibly useful, but they won’t lead anywhere new. They won’t serve the drummer who feels drawn towards an unusual playing approach, or the novelist whose prose vibrates at unconventional frequencies. They won’t teach the importance of listening to one’s own desire.
Desire can lead to some pretty strange places. It led Karl Ove Knausgaard to write a six-volume memoir with the same title as Hitler’s autobiography (it sold half a million copies in his native Norway and was published in 22 languages). It led Miranda July to make a movie introducing the world to the concept of “pooping back and forth, forever” (it won the Caméra d’Or at Cannes). And it led Yayoi Kusama to devote her life to polka dots (at 86, she’s been called the world’s most popular artist).
People who have changed how we view the world rely on themselves first and foremost. At some point, they leave the manicured path and do something they were never told to do. They accept—even welcome—confusion. The one-line most often repeated by people who’ve accomplished something unique? “I didn’t know what I was doing.”
Of course, these days, “break the rules” has almost become a rule in itself. It’s a cliché we see plastered over photographs of landscapes on social media. But breaking the rules doesn’t just have to mean cutting the occasional corner, or using “life hacks.” It can mean radically reimagining your goals or how to reach them—rejecting the expectations of jobs, social groups, and artistic communities, and looking instead for inner motivation, even if that means flailing wildly for a while.
Learning from those who have gone before us is important, but it is not everything. Procedures and best practices and diplomas and tutorials and advice columns and Ted Talks and Hollywood ideals might (or might not) be able to help you get to where you’re going, but they cannot stand-in for your own will.
You may not be able to run a marathon on desire alone, but you certainly can’t run one without it.
