several months ago I looked up videos of Meryl Streep, trying to get a better model for "charismatic older woman"
looking for quirks to mimic/steal
this interview from 1998 was particularly interesting:
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I was going to paraphrase here but I'm actually going to transcribe this part (mostly) verbatim
the interviewer asks "how do you do it?"
Streep: "oh you know, well, that's acting *laughs* I mean, it is, that's what I like to do, it's total immersion into possibility. (1/4)
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...a life I could imagine I lived. and that's, uh, infinitely interesting to me. and you can't, there's no bottom to it...I'm so inscrutable to myself, I don't really know, I've never been in analysis, I don't understand very much about why I do what I do. (2/4)
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this is why I've been, uh, very shy to give an acting class because *whispering* I don't know how to do it! *laughs* I don't know how to construct it in a logical method that I could impart to someone. (3/4)
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I think a class given by me would be something like "well you know you just kinda like feel it??? and, um, just, 'trust yourself,' and all the stupid platitudes that don't help." (4/4)
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what's striking is that this is an extremely hardworking, talented actress, with a fantastic reputation in her industry and decades of experience
and she does *not know how to communicate her process*
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this is incredibly dissatisfying to the interviewer -- he scoffs a few times at that
and it's dissatisfying to people who look at high-performing people and ache to mimic what they do
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I've never been in this position myself but I imagine there's a ton of pressure from followers/fans/aspiring practitioners of any given craft, pressure to distill the process into a simple set of steps that another person could pick up and execute on
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and if you can't, and you're honest about that, I could see a lot of skepticism or even resentment from those aspiring practitioners
like you're holding back, keeping the secret sauce all to yourself
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but I think Meryl Streep is being honest here -- she has *no idea* how to transmit her process, she doesn't even want to try because she knows it would disappoint her hypothetical students
and I suspect this is the norm for any craft
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are there good instructors in every craft who get unusually good results? of course
but thinking IME with such instructors, after a certain proficiency level, they can hardly *tell* you how to do anything
they nudge
they observe your output
they tweak
try packaging *that*
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try packaging that in a way that scales at all
I think it's unlikely that most skilled practitioners can 1) identify the actual components of their process, 2) package the process, and 3) transmit it to somebody successfully
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but supposing you do *all that*
odds are that the combination of your idiosyncracies in the way you learn/practice, and your idiosyncracies in how you explain your process, will only "click" with a few people who are just similar enough to you to grok it
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this is one reason I'm kind of laughing to myself listening to that book about Martin Erickson
guy had (and still has) a reputation for being a fantastic hypnotist
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I've been listening to an audiobook compilation of Milton Erickson's therapy sessions (link below)
coming around to some opinions I may compile when I emerge from the rabbit hole
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_H.
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I've seen video of him -- he was charismatic as hell and definitely pulled off some fascinating stuff
he knew his shit
but the commentary in the book is written by a disciple -- excuse me, student -- who pulls the most inane explanations out of his ass
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I just don't trust those explanations much
I've been on my bullshit before about the whole "explanatory narrative" aspect of therapy being deeply suspicious to me
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example from my personal life: I think I did a pretty good job pulling myself (with help from friends!) out of the crab bucket and narrowly avoiding NEETdom
I think about compiling a "how I did it" writeup
but I don't know how I did it! hell, it could've all been hormonal!
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the best I could do would be to list everything I *tried,* the things I *think* had the most to do with it, and a bunch of advice on not dying or burning too many bridges while you bootstrap yourself into functionality
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this would be useful but also boring
and I'd keep coming back to boring shit like sleep, water, nutrition, fitness, and having good friends
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two things I take away from this line of thought:
first: if you try to follow expert guidance on improving your skills (or just improving your life as a whole), and you fail, it's worth trying lots of different advice from people who communicate differently, til it resonates
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and second:
for any craft humans haven't yet achieved proficiency in, via engineering, robots, or math
assume any advanced practitioner of said craft can only articulate, idk, 30% of "how they do it"
if they're lucky
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(and, as reminded me this morning, we can barely describe the "how" of many things we *have* figured out with robots and math)
(yet!)
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