In Buddhism, technique is the canoe that gets you across the river. Once you've made it to the other side, you don't drag the canoe across land. What was a vehicle in one setting becomes an obstacle in another.
Artists who are insecure feel compelled to protect every technique that has ever worked. And now the gift has become a curse because they're stuck. It helped them once, so it must be an eternal truth. When a colleague says, "We're on the freeway now. You can leave the boat at the shore. It's too heavy," ego — that brilliant, paranoid little gremlin — whispers back: " No. Keep dragging. What if we hit another river? Remember how smart you were back there? So they exhaust themselves dragging this vehicle with them. And they get very angry at anyone who tries to point out that they're hauling a canoe down the 405.
Part of agility is looking forward. Where do you want to go? Future tense. Yes, some past experiences are useful. But honest, rigorous assessment has to win out over nostalgia for the glory days. Where do you want to go? Study other people who have gotten there and the vehicles they've used, and be willing to experiment, combining past trailblazers with your own preferences to create your own new style.
Here's the other side of agility that nobody talks about, because it sounds like a contradiction and contradictions make people uncomfortable: you also have to look back. Not to live there. Not to build a shrine. But because the lineage is the vocabulary. You have to know how other people did it before you, not as a blueprint to follow but as a shared language that lets you skip the part where everyone's describing the same thing from scratch.
In a preproduction meeting, a director described a tracking shot he wanted — following a waiter through a restaurant, continuous, immersive, the whole thing. I said, "The Goodfellas shot." He smiled and said, "Yes. But fifteen seconds." And that was it. We knew the scene. We knew the texture, the rhythm, the feeling we were after. And we both knew he wasn't going to Xerox Scorsese — the reference was just the starting coordinate, not the destination. From there, the scene found its own shape.
That's what lineage does. It's not nostalgia. It's not "we should do it the old way because the old way was better." It's the shorthand that lets two people point at the same invisible thing and then go make something neither of them has seen before. The canoe isn't the goal. But knowing what a canoe is — knowing who built the first one, how it moved, what it couldn't do — that's how you eventually build a boat that moves across land on four wheels, or a boat that flies in the air. Or whatever insane thing comes next.
Then there's fear. Doing something new is genuinely unnerving. You will make mistakes. You might make them in front of your peers, which is significantly worse. This is normal. What's not normal — or at least not useful — is mislabeling that crackling, electric sensation as just fear. That's what ego wants you to think, so you stop exploring. But there's a difference between the fear of the unknown and the butterflies you get when you're falling in love. One is a warning. The other is an invitation.
Follow the butterflies. Where are they taking you? Don't ask. They're butterflies. It's mystical, it's illogical, and when you demand immediate concrete answers, you disperse the very energy that was about to lead somewhere interesting. Art is one of the last remaining things in our culture that involves the genuinely unexplainable. Let it be that.
Fear will try to reinstall itself. Recognize it. Talk through it. Say: yeah, this is terrifying. And I'm going anyway.
Now. The peer group.
There are people who are perpetual kayakers — canoe carriers who will offer detailed instructions on how to build your own vehicle based entirely on their past journey. Rather than learning, they've built a dogma. A monument to the one river they crossed in 2003. When you show them the car you built for the highway, they squint at it and say, "That's a terrible boat." When you try to explain you're not building a boat, they don't hear it. And you know what? Don't argue. Arguing implies you need to justify your car. You don't. Also, they genuinely don't know what a car or plane is. It's not strategic silence. It's just useless.
One-hit wonders deserve their own category. The world is full of people who fondly, obsessively recall their greatest triumph. They've become prisoners of their own scrapbook. I've been in conversations with moderately successful people where the entire discussion gets shut down by a resume recitation. "I was in the best production of Hello, Dolly! in 1987 and everyone agreed it was extraordinary." Okay.
What happens to one-hit wonders? They wake up one day in the Mojave Desert. No friends, no car, bridges burnt behind them. Just a canoe from a decade ago, used to help them cross a river that no longer exists.
A few years ago I was in Milan, and the biggest revelation hit me in a mansion in Lake Como filled with wax and plaster models: Renaissance artists did multiple versions of everything. Of course they did. It makes complete sense. And yet I had somehow believed Michelangelo spent one very intense year creating David and handed it in. No. He sketched it repeatedly. Made wax models. Submerged those models in water and drained it slowly to use as a horizontal grid, then re-sketched the proportions. He was a certified genius, and he was still making corrections. Still revising. Still building practice versions.
I wonder if Michelangelo, three years in, started doubting himself. I wonder if some colleague swung by and said, "You're still on that statue? I've finished five since you mentioned David." Maybe some older sculptor told him to keep going. In Florence, the streets are essentially lined with practice. All of it was practice.
The finished work you're trying to protect? Someone else's practice led to it. The thing you're about to make? It'll probably be someone else's floor. That's not depressing. That's the deal. Make the canoe. Cross the river. Leave the canoe at the shore. And when someone hands you the keys to a car, don't ask if it floats.
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