March Madness For the Creative

It’s the final week of March Madness, the men’s and women’s national college basketball tournaments, which means people will glue themselves to televisions and watch with bated breath to see whether their favorite team makes it into the championship or desperately hoping their bracket holds up enough to win their office pool.

You may not be a sports person (I haven’t filled out a bracket or watched too many games over the past couple of years) and so maybe you’re wondering what all the hype is about or more importantly — what does a college basketball tournament have to do with living a creative life?

Well, it all comes down to one word: underdogs.

We’re Obsessed with a Good Cinderella Story

One of the biggest reasons these tournaments are so popular is because there are typically a lot of upsets. There’s always some under-ranked team that makes it into the tournament and ends up winning games they were never expected to win. These games are amazing if that happens to be the team you’re rooting for, but these unpredictable moments are completely frustrating to many others - hence the phrase — March Madness.

This year in the men’s tournament, one of the biggest upsets was NC State (No. 11) who beat Marquette (No. 2) 67-58 to advance into the final four and have a chance to play in the championship this weekend. On the women’s side, Middle Tennessee (No. 11) pulled off a close victory, 71-69, over Louisville (No. 6) to make it one the biggest upsets in that bracket.

Not Always About Numbers and Rankings

Now, back to the topic of underdogs. The biggest takeaway for us during this season of March Madness is that it’s not always about the rankings and value assigned to you by others that determines your success.

As creative-minded people, this isn’t a new concept and many of us understand it all too well from real-life experience, maybe so much that we’ve come to relish in our roles as the underdogs of society.

We’ve learned stories from history such as a group of artists who were constantly rejected by the French Salon but would later pave the way for a new style of art that we’d come to know as Impressionism, or a band that was rejected by George Martin and Decca Records only to go on to become one of the greatest rock band of all time: The Beatles, or finally, an author who was turned down by 12 publishers before her best selling novel series Harry Potter took over the world: J.K. Rowling.

But if we know the stories and the power of the underdog concept so well, why do we so often forget and sometimes shy away from applying it in our daily lives?

Comparison Trap

One reason might be the comparison trap. In this day and age of social media, it’s easy to get swept away seeing what other people possess and have achieved and begin thinking we haven’t done enough or don’t possess enough. We think thoughts like, “I should have done such-and-such by now so maybe I’m not cut out for this” or “If only I had this tool, or these supplies, or that training then I would be able to [fill in the blank]”.

The Blessing of Limitation

In times like these, it’s important to keep practicing gratitude and grit. As we slow down and evaluate the resources we do have, it refocuses us and motivates us to create with the things right in front of us. Lately, I’ve been wanting to explore gouache painting but haven’t been able to afford the supplies and brushes, but I remembered I have a half-filled sketchbook and plenty of graphite to get outside and draw.

There’s also a blessing in limitation because it’s less likely that we will suffer from analysis paralysis - too many options to choose from that we procrastinate and often end up stalled out. When you only have one guitar, you don’t have think about what pedals and amp to use or whether you need the tele-tone or that fat humbucker sound, you just grab the gear you have and start writing your next song.

One of my positive self-talk reminders is,

“You have everything you need right now to make something beautiful today.”

To bring us back to the sports arena briefly, creatives can learn from some of the best teams who typically know that to be at their best they need to be themselves and continue to improve on the things that they do best.

The Fear of Failure

The other obstacle that dampens our creative underdog spirit is the fear of failure. This fear is valid because we’ve experienced it before and will likely experience it again and it’s never fun.

But this is where numbers do matter because the best solution is typically to apply the model that many start-ups and entrepreneurs have embraced and popularized and that is the: fail-fast concept, meaning the more times we fail, the more opportunities we have to refine our craft and create to best end result.

We don’t want to go about our work haphazardly, but most of us probably need to allow a little more messiness and imperfections into our work, not that we want to celebrate them, but as we allow them to happen we can learn from them, and make improvement to our work faster. It’s often the fear of making a mistake or being rejected that leaves our work on the shelf or in the drawer to gather dust, but the faster we fail and make a crappy first draft, or allow the colors to get a little too muddy on the canvas, the faster we can learn from our mistakes and move forward to creating the very things we imagined we could create. The faster we share that new vulnerable song at an open mic where maybe only two people clap (including your Mom) the faster we can make tweaks to our song structure or take it to a co-write to help the song say what you really meant for it to say.

Stop Taking Yourself So Seriously

The last idea to help combat the fear of failure is to stop taking yourself too seriously. This point is typically more for the top dogs who must stay on guard against arrogance and complacency, but many underdogs also need to remember that the stakes of losing aren’t as serious as we make them out to be. And when there’s no target, expectations, or label on you, it’s easier to re-write the rules without all the pressure.

If you don’t have an editor emailing you for your next draft, a curator who needs your latest pieces for their gallery in Paris, or a label pressing you to release a hit in your next record, then you may have an advantage after all because you have the freedom to create with less pressure and can remain close to the essence of being an artist who creates for the love of creating because it is who you are.

To bring us back to the world of sports one last time, this concept of performing under less pressure is why we see so many upsets in athletics year after year. There is something about the teams that go out and play because of the love of the sport and they don’t have to worry about what the public thinks or what the press might say if they don’t live up to expectations. It’s often in these moments that we see these teams rise to the occasion and display talent and effort that no one believed was in them and they defy the odds that were stacked against them.

This is the kind of madness we can take from March and a college basketball tournament and embed into our creative practices. So if you find yourself around a television with basketball games on this weekend, before you change the channel or ignore the screens in the restaurant, take a moment to soak in some of the excitement as your own, as an underdog with the world cheering you on to continue making the impossible possible in the world around us.

-Andre Vander Velde
Artist Community Leader