How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery by Kevin Ashton

Author:Kevin Ashton [Ashton, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780385538602
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-01-19T14:00:00+00:00

1 | WOODY

In March 2002, Woody Allen did something he had never done. He flew from New York to Los Angeles, put on a bow tie, and attended the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences annual awards ceremony, the Oscars. Allen had won three Academy Awards and received seventeen other nominations, including more screenwriting nominations than any other writer, yet he had never attended a ceremony. In 2002, his movie The Curse of the Jade Scorpion was nominated for nothing. He went anyway. The audience stood and applauded in welcome. He introduced a montage of movie scenes made in New York and encouraged directors to continue working there even though terrorists had attacked the city months earlier. He said, “For New York City, I’ll do anything.”

Why does Allen avoid the ceremony? He gives several tongue-in-cheek excuses—the two most common being that there is nearly always a good basketball game on that night and that he has to play clarinet every Monday with the Eddy Davis New Orleans Jazz Band. Neither reason is real. The real reason, which he explains occasionally, is that he believes the Oscars will diminish the quality of his work.

“The whole concept of awards is silly,” he says. “I cannot abide by the judgment of other people, because if you accept it when they say you deserve an award, then you have to accept it when they say you don’t.”

On another occasion: “I think what you get in awards is favoritism. People can say, ‘Oh, my favorite movie was Annie Hall,’ but the implication is that it’s the best movie, and I don’t think you can make that judgment except for track and field, where one guy runs and you see that he wins; then it’s okay. I won those when I was younger, and those were nice because I knew I deserved them.”

Whatever motivates Woody Allen, it is not awards. His example is extreme—almost all other Academy Award–nominated writers, directors, and actors attend the Oscars—but it points to something important. Prizes are not always carrots of creation. Sometimes, they can inhibit and impair.

Motives are never simple. We are motivated by a soup of things, some we are aware of and some we are not. Psychologist R. A. Ochse lists eight motivations for creating: the desire for mastery, immortality, money, recognition, self-esteem; the desire to create beauty, to prove oneself, and to discover underlying order. Some of these rewards are internal, some external.

Harvard psychologist Teresa Amabile studies the connection between motivation and creation. Early in her research, she had a suspicion that internal motivation improves creation but external motivation makes it worse.

The external motivator Woody Allen avoids is the evaluation of others. Poet Sylvia Plath admitted to craving what she called “the world’s praise,” even though she found it made creating harder: “I want to feel my work good and well taken, which ironically freezes me at my work, corrupts my nunnish labor of work-for-itself-as-its-own-reward.”

In one of her studies, Amabile asked ninety-five people to make collages.

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