Someday I’ll try this.
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Chapter 6: Learning to Juggle
Notes
To learn to juggle, don’t focus on catching; focus on throwing. If you focus on catching, you end up lunging for the ball, leaving you off balance and making the next throw much harder. “If you get good enough at throwing, the catching takes care of itself.”
This is challenging because it’s awkward to just throw and let the ball drop, ignoring the outcome and focusing only on the process.
And while he means this literally, he also means it metaphorically: “Our work is about throwing. The catching can take care of itself.”
Thoughts
I’ve heard Seth riff on this simultaneously literal and metaphorical lesson before. Even so, I’ve been drafting and re-drafting my thoughts about it, and I don’t think I fully understand it.
I mean, I understand the literal lesson. Someday I may even try it; I have juggler’s balls somewhere, and next time they turn up I’ll see how it goes. But I can’t figure out how to apply the lesson metaphorically. “Our work is about throwing” sounds so clear and straightforward. (Maybe I’m trying too hard….)
At one level, it echoes the fairly common advice that the work is all we can control; we can’t control how people respond to it. This is why it’s so easy to get caught up in the wrong metrics, for example, or to take people’s criticism too much to heart. But I think it’s just an echo; even though metrics or criticism can interfere with the work, I don’t think that’s what Seth is talking about here—at least, that’s not all he’s talking about.
For one thing, if “catching” is analogous to reception (e.g., by an audience), then I think the metaphor breaks down. In the end, a juggler is responsible for both throwing and catching, even if learning to throw makes it so the catching takes care of itself.
If I think about my music, then, what is the thing that leaves me off balance, if I focus on it too soon?
Well, here’s a possibility: when great mixing engineers are asked about how a record came out so well, many say that the song was so well recorded—the performance and tracking were so solid—that the song “practically mixed itself.” Maybe I need to pay closer attention to that: I always want to be done, which often leads to sloppy performance and clumsy oversights in the recording.
I’m not sure that Seth means me to take this metaphor so literally, but this is a good reminder, especially as I’m getting ready to start recording again: get the performance right, and record it well. I have a lot to learn about mixing, but it will be easier if I get the foundation right—if I learn to throw before I try to catch.
Just an aside: Seth’s lesson rhymes with a literal/metaphorical object lesson that I’ve experienced myself: in PE class, I was a pretty fast runner, so I was often open for a pass in flag football. But I had a bad habit, in that I’d get so excited about scoring the touchdown that I’d start running in earnest before I caught the ball.
You have to finish the work—ship it—or there’s no chance for any kind of reception.
This series is meant to capture my thoughts as I work through Seth Godin’s The Practice. It’s a book with over 200 (very short) chapters, which I hope to work through and, I further hope, to implement over time.
If you’re interested in more of Godin’s ideas, or my thoughts about them, you can check out this collection of posts. Note that if you’re more interested in the former, you should probably get Godin’s book and read it yourself; my notes will be both incomplete and idiosyncratic, and my thoughts will relate to my own experience.
But if my thoughts resonate with you, or if you think I’m just silly, I welcome your comments.