How practise so often makes (far from) perfect
Words & images © Paul Ransom
No.
For most artists – indeed for the vast majority striving for something beside a treadmill – this is a word we get used to. Sometimes we hear it directly, in the form of rejection, but often we are left to intuit it by dint of silence.
Now, at 60, I have a decades long back catalogue of no. As a writer with multiple manuscript rejections – some many times over – I submit work with little expectation. Or rather, expecting the chance of yes to be tiny. Make that, miniscule.
Thus, despite a smattering of wins, I have toiled at the typewriter since childhood for a grand total of zero acclaim, single figure audience numbers, and residual earnings in the tens of dollars.
The usual reflex for creatives & co is to resort to self-validating balms, ranging from delusions of genius and/or sacred purpose to less egotistical variants like process-over-outcome. Across the years, I have tried them all on.
However, when a publisher who had previously accepted two of my manuscripts recently ‘declined’ a third, I was prompted to stop. Reflect. I had been reasonably confident. The odds, I surmised, were better than lottery. After all, he had invited me to submit. But no.
Though I will confess to a few hours of deep hurt and shock, what jumped out was more profound. I kept thinking: Dunning-Kruger Effect1. Was I, like so many others, suffering from an illusory superiority bias? Had I simply overestimated my competence? Maybe, despite thousands of hours of practise over half a century, I had no special talent.
The common denominator in this long history of knock-backs is me.
This is why I have elected not to write about it. Rather, I have looked to the bench, and substituted my unengaging wordsmithery for the quicker, more palatable video version below.
(NB: Should you bother with said video you will shortly discover another example of my crushing over-confidence. I had mistakenly believed that I could successfully embed a You Tube video, but the measureable result – vid weirdly starts half way through – proves otherwise. Dunning-Kruger? QED.)
Even if the video above is as poorly executed as the massed tonnage of my words – and likewise fails to find an audience – I remain curiously undeterred. More than that, almost giddy with a sense of freedom. True, I could be seriously deluded, yet my ego is uninjured. Why? Because my self-esteem is not dependent on being considered ‘good’. Nor is the joy of creating gravitationally bound to notions of talent.
So, what if I remain a talentless hack still kidding himself he’s an artist? Okay, great. Click away now. I won’t be offended. In fact, I won’t even notice. And we can all ignore each other, and carry on being ordinary dreamers who imagine themselves as special…yet are not.
Here perhaps, we should offer profound thanks, for the ordinary is a window to great beauty.
PS: Elsewhere on this site I have opined on related themes. Feel free to ignore the following.
Surrender the need for success
1: The Dunning-Kruger Effect, which was formally identified/quantified in the late 1990s, is a specific cognitive bias, whereby people falsely estimate their competence in certain areas of expertise. In short, the disconnect arises when self-assessment is measured against observable performance.
As If You Were Listening 
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