There’s a profound gulf between knowing what this person is doing and doing what this person is doing.
I have no idea how a car gets made.
I mean, I have some idea. There’s an assembly line, a blueprint, some robotic arms working in conjunction with highly trained assembly line workers, wrenches, bolts, welding torches, paint. Somewhere there are designers. Somewhere else, presumably, there are accountants. But if I were tasked with articulating the process of actually creating a car, from scratch, I wouldn’t know where to begin.
This doesn’t imply that I don’t know what to do with a car: how to drive, where to go, which ones I like, how to buy them or sell them. I use them all the time, and have used them for decades. This is true for millions of drivers around the world, but knowledge about certain aspects of cars does not immediately confer knowledge about all aspects about cars.
Tell the truth: do you have any idea how frozen pizzas get made? Athletic shoes? How about the array of extraordinary COVID-19 vaccines that demanded equally extraordinary skills on the parts of the scientists who developed them? You probably hold general conceptual frameworks about each of these items and thousands more, but deep understand is something else entirely. Familiarity doesn’t confer ability, and it certainly doesn’t confer competence. Just because everyone has a body does not necessarily make your neighbor qualified to treat your appendicitis.
Consider the Netflix series you’ve been gulping down from your worn-out couch. At some level everyone understands that cameras were involved. There were people who made up the stories, presumably called writers. There were people who applied makeup to actors’ faces and other body parts, especially if the stories include zombies. There were so-called special effects teams who made elephants talk or spaceships fly by some sort of movie-making magic. There were probably a pile of well paid lawyers lurking behind the scenes somewhere, too: creating contracts, processing contracts, contesting contracts, and cappuccino-ing contracts. (That’s a thing, right?)
I’m not trivializing this, by the way. Millions of people now make all sorts of surprisingly sophisticated stuff with ubiquitous cell phones and inexpensive, often free, software. The qualitative distance, however, between point n’ shoot videos uploaded to social media and fully produced programs or movies is as gaping wide as my lack of practical car manufacturing smarts compared to those who actually make cars. The liminal space between casual consumption and expertise always feels easily traversable if you’re a consumer and galactically distant if you’re a creator.
Traversing that void is always the great challenge of creative enterprise. There is no clearly defined starting line to becoming expert at something, save for the first day in your life when you encounter something entirely new. Paradoxically, there is also an infinite distance to the finish line, a checkered flag you can’t really reach in space or in time. You can complete a project, but you cannot complete a creative discipline. As the Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff famously put it, metaphorically describing all creative work, “Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music.”
There’s practice, of course. Everything improves with practice. But practice doesn’t define expertise. It simply accompanies expertise. Practice is the inevitable thing someone does if a person pursues deep understanding. Practice happens on the way to creating. The great mystery exists in interstitial spaces, the voids between worlds and influences, the moments of insight that sneak in quietly or roar with sudden announcement to transform what you’re doing into something more. Practice alone, however, is no guarantee. Plenty of people practice stuff and never improve very much. There’s no crime in that: if I were forced to practice carpentry for the rest of my life, I suspect you’d still never want me to fix your house.
The thing about creative excellence is that it’s always an undiscovered country. You know it’s out there, you know it’s real, you’ve seen plenty of evidence. Maps to reach it, however, often stop at the edge of the world.
That’s when the real creative work begins. Belts get pulled tight, and bold footsteps cross boundaries into uncharted territory.