The Pressure of Perfection

Currently watching Bones Brigade: an Autobiography and just got completely ambushed with a profound thought from revolutionary skater Rodney Mullen.  He's speaking about a period when Tony Hawk was having kind of an existential crisis as it pertains to constantly winning.  Mullen at one point won 34 out of 35 competitions in a year, so he knows what he is talking about here:

"He'd won everything, or close to it.  That creates this ...so much more pressure, because there's no more gratification in winning. There's only upholding something so that you don't lose it and it is staggering.  It usurps the joy of it.  It, its like a Kafka short story.  You build something but you can't live in the house because you sit around guarding it."

 Later on, talking about leaving competitions:

 "...My sister had gotten anorexic, and I had started down a path that way and uh, I was just mad.  Mad.  And so (my father) just said, "this is it."  And he goes "you're going nowhere in this life, and I'm doing this to save you. Stop. I think skateboarding is making you crazy."  And so I just couldn't focus.  Thats the only contest that I lost.  My mind was gone.  I just...when I came back he goes "you now, I want to see how you bounce back from this.  How you handle this is what will define you."  I remember I was super thin.  And I was falling apart in school because I just really didn't care anymore.  I remember he couldn't do anything about it.  It wasn't acting out...it was...I withered in a way that you could not control.  And I was spinning...

...When I found skateboarding, it was the first thing I loved.  I mean truly loved.  And that being pulled away from me  hardened something inside of me, where nothing mattered.  (months later) He came to me in the garage and he said, "you know, I think that this is been hard on you.  You can skate, because I think you need that, but I think that in a sense whats wrong with you is the pressure of contests, so you can't compete."

Contests gave me the ability to do what defined me, but what they came to represent was "Don't Fail.""

This just blew the top of my head off.  Not that I ever even got in the same zip code of the accomplishments of their skating careers, but this is exactly the pressure that drove me out of graduate school and music performance.  I got so obsessed with refining my technical abilities and the constant addictive need to progress that I forgot what I loved so much about it in the first place. 

I just wish that, at the time, I had been able to recapture that feeling you get when you lock in on a part and you're so happy it feels like your heart is just going to explode and be able to pair it up with the ability that I had gained.  Looking back it just seems such a waste that that internal, almost authoritarian, pressure dragged my joy out in the back yard, murdered it and buried it. 

I think the definition of true greatness is the ability to devote the kind of selfish martial determination to completely master a pursuit and yet be able to sustain the kind of enjoyment that prevents your own obsessive pressure from consuming you.