Art for Competitive People

Growing up, my brother and I were very competitive. We both played multiple sports which took up most of our time. I played basketball nearly year round, but in the summer we had baseball nearly everyday. When baseball season was over, we’d go right into football season which overlapped with the start of winter basketball season. 

The competition didn’t just stop at sports. My brother and I (but mostly my brother) would compete over everything. We would give each other words to spell and the first one who misspelled a word was the loser. We would even get into heated fights over who had more cookie dough pieces in their ice cream. This wasn’t just once, but any time we happened to get the same flavor. Alex would always ask, “Jacob, how many chunks do you have?” I would count and give him a number and almost always, without fail, Alex would just add one to my total and claim that’s how many he had. Sixteen years later and I’m still mad about it. I would watch him not even count! He would sit there with a straight face and insist I was just a sore loser. I’m getting heated all over again just writing about it. 

When I discovered theatre, I noticed a lot of overlap with sports. You’re part of a team. You spend months preparing for a big game, or in this case a show, and if it goes well, the crowd roars, and if it goes poorly, crickets. Films like Remember the Titans (2000), Hoosiers (1986), Coach Carter (2005), A League of Their Own (1992), Major League (1989), The Replacements (2000), and so many more portray an “us-against-the-world” brotherhood among the team. Even in films where the team is riddled with internal conflict, like Remember the Titans, they come together to defeat they nay-sayers. The scene where they exit the locker room chanting “Everywhere we go, People want to know, Who we are, So we tell them, We are the Titans, The mighty might Titans.” and performing the loosest choreography during pregame warmups is so impactful because it’s when they stop fighting each other to fight the Goliath that is racism in desegregationist Virginia. This isn’t a film criticism of Remember the Titans, but if you haven’t seen it yet, what are you doing? (It’s probably on TV right now, stop reading this and go watch it… But then come back and finish reading this… Please?) 

I had been on many really good teams, but had never experienced that band of brothers feeling. We were friends, but we wouldn’t pick each other up or even hang out outside of team events. It felt more like a group of people I played with, some of whom were cool, and some were total pricks. It wasn’t until I participated in my first high school show when I really felt that kind of camaraderie. I had finally found a team where everyone had your back and wanted you to succeed. In sports, I was starting to fall behind, but I had found something that I loved just as much. It really bothered me to not play any sport anymore, but it’s better to read the writing on the walls and back out before someone has to tell you.

After transitioning to doing theatre full time, that competitive drive didn’t go away. Auditions were a form of competition for me, with the “winner” getting the role. I was not the best actor, singer, or dancer, but I could compete. Of my friends, I was hands down the least talented. All of them went on to go to some of the best performance schools in the country. I was always playing catch-up with them. While I was taking hitting lessons and going to basketball practice, they were taking singing lessons, dance classes, and acting in any production that needed children.

Playing catch-up with them led me to apply and get accepted to a well respected theatre school where I studied directing. I had such imposter syndrome my first year there. In my degree path, I was one of nine accepted and the only male throughout my four years there. I found out later there were over 2,000 applicants and somehow I had fooled everyone into being one of the ones accepted. I was surrounded by the best of the best, people who had been working towards their Broadway dreams since they were babies and here I was, some guy who essentially stumbled into it. As the years went on, the nine of us became five and of those five, there were two of us who were solely focused on directing. 

Now, I’m embarrassed to say this, but I took my one other directing classmate and started a completely one sided competition. They directed a show; I wanted to direct a more difficult show; if they had an opportunity I didn’t, then I tried to find a better one; if they asked a question in class, I wanted to ask a better one. 

How do you define success in that situation? A bigger audience? Better praise? I was miserable and angry. It was hard for me to really make friends in the department because I was becoming bitter. My self worth was plummeting and I didn’t know what I was even doing anymore. 

I started to hate this classmate. Why? They did nothing. They’re actually a great person. This was all built up in my head because I didn’t know how to measure success besides winning and losing.

There is nothing more foolish than yelling at someone through a brick wall of ignorance and insecurity. 

It wasn’t until I started taking creative writing classes when I realized that different people have different stories to tell. To use another passion of mine, guitar, I can explain it better. I don’t shred on guitar but I like more melodic, blues based playing and that is the kind of player I want to be. Why would I compare myself to someone in a thrash metal band when that’s not who I am? That doesn’t mean there isn’t something I can learn from them, but it’s stupid to beat myself up over not being as fast or as technical. 

I realized that if you gave me and this other classmate the same script to direct, you would get two totally different shows. I have had my own experiences that shape how I view the world and inform the stories I want to tell and those experiences and views are unique to me. 

Now, setting and achieving goals is how I gauge my success as opposed to winning or losing. Where do I want to be and how do I get there? When I direct a show, I set goals. Sometimes that looks like wanting to get a point across to the audience, other times it’s that I want to get better at blocking or building and releasing tension in scenes. After I finish a show, I listen to audience feedback to see if I reached my goals. Then I look back at the process as a whole, what went well and what could I work on? That reflection informs the next project I work on. 

My goals before were about winning, and everything I did, from practice to working out, was to better achieve those goals. Sports, and any competition, have actual metrics that measure success. Pitchers have their ERA, basketball players have their free-throw percentage, and wide receivers have their number of receptions. Art is completely different. If I was an expert on making handcrafted wood tables and one day decided I wanted to build houses instead, but I still used all the same tools and notes for table building, I would look crazy for being angry that my final project looked more like a table than a house. They are completely different and require different planning and execution. I was trying to create theater by using the same tools and knowledge I had gained from sports and that, quite simply, is absurd.  

However, once I stopped measuring my success by wins and losses, the drive to win didn’t go away. Instead, it morphed into a drive to gain the respect of my peers. It’s the drive that gets me out of bed in the morning, makes me set goals, and pushes me to always look for the next thing. Anyone can say they want to write a book but the person who is driven to be respected by other authors will write short stories to practice pacing, character development, building tension, and other important skills needed to create a compelling book. Someone who just wants to write a book could write just one and be happy, but someone who is driven to be respected by their fellow authors will learn from the first book and make the next one better. 

So what does success and creative fulfillment look like for me now? I am driven to be a storyteller who is respected by my peers as someone who consistently produces high quality work. That drive is why I write every day, whether it is a short story, a blog post, a chapter for a book, or a scene for a play. When I edit something I write, I consider what my goal was in writing it. Sometimes it’s as simple as just wanting to create a character that is sympathetic or as challenging as wanting to tell the story of someone’s entire life using as few words as possible. These goals inform the edits I need to make and once I feel I have successfully achieved my goal for that story, I move it to my “Finished” pile. The value I put on myself is no longer dictated by a scoreboard, but by the goal posts I set for myself.