[Outcome] Driven Right into a Ravine
This is what you get for talking to me at a party
Note: No newsletter next week. I’m off to Vegas to gamble “all” “the money” “I have” away. (Millennial lol) Wish me “luck.”
I have a hard time with “outcome driven.”
Not necessarily with the concept. I’ve heard it many times. It has guided any number of jobs I've been employed at. I have probably used the phrase in any number of personal evaluations. Which is all to say that I’ve been driven by outcome more than once in my life, whether by choice or by instruction.
It’s the phrase I have a hard time with, I guess. Another phrase that I bristle at every time I hear it—a lot. And it’s everywhere. If you have a job or a business or listen to the news, you’ll hear it. These two seemingly innocuous words strung together sends a shiver down my spine and an electrical current to my brain that jumpstarts the “you aren’t good enough” refrains.
Hmm. Bristling at a business phrase? Sounds familiar.
“Outcome driven” is a goal, a metric. It can be used to evaluate progress and ultimately success. And it is often used to measure those things, whether you want it to or not. Fairly or unfairly. From where I’m sitting, unfairly happens a lot more than fairly.
That’s why I have a hard time with “outcome driven.”
This is where you might hear the echo of some authority figure saying: life isn’t fair…fair…fair…fair. I hear it too. And to that I’ll say, “Yeah, okay. Well, there are a whole lot of people working tirelessly and very hard to make things equitable across the board so if that’s what you want to go with, say no more. I know what I need to know.”
That’s probably the root of my discomfort. Outcome is just another one of those things in life that we’re to believe is completely in our hands and are expected to strive for when, actually, there are many situations where we don’t have a whole lot of control over what the outcome is.
Life is pretty much all prediction. Educated guesses will help you make choices that will hopefully move you in the direction of your desired outcome. But no matter how much you research, how many charts and graphs you make, how many experts you talk to, it’s still a guessing game. Ultimately, you can’t be certain what the weather will be tomorrow, you don’t know if your train will actually be on time, you can’t be sure that the well-informed guidance you received on your stocks will turn out to be accurate, you don’t know if a new manager will come in and change the entire notion of what an outcome looks like. So many systems are set up to be confusing so just to get to any sort of outcome you need to find your way out of a maze, solve a rubix cube, and answer my riddles three. And if you manage to do that, you’ll be met by a person who tells you didn’t fill out the correct form. Prediction, by definition, means a certain level of uncertainty which, to me, indicates less control in regards to the outcome. We don’t all have the right kind of sharpie, after all.
All of this leads to big questions about what ‘success’ means. Or, rather, what ‘failure’ means. Having an outcome (or outcomes) means that there is a defined metric for success, a specific wanted result. So what do you do with an unmet outcome? In an ideal situation, you’d probably learn from it and reevaluate, picking new outcomes to work towards. In a less ideal but probably more realistic situation, someone gets the blame and the consequences for an unmet objective. In a pragmatic situation, maybe it’s just called a failure and everyone moves on. But, again, all this is based on the accuracy of prediction and the level of real or imagined control over any given situation.
Fish sticks will run out right before you reach the head of the line in the cafeteria. Rain will happen on your wedding day. There will be an understudy performing in place of the celebrity in the play you paid too much money to see. Funding will get cancelled. Phones will ring and ring. Emails will go unanswered. The job you accepted won’t match the one you showed up for. Many things are out of our hands.
I’m a big fan of failure actually. As a concept. And as a practical learning tool. You don’t get anywhere cool without trying stuff and you don’t learn anything good without getting it wrong first. But failure is a hard concept to sell1 existentially. Failure is seen as bad—we’re taught it is—and must be avoided at all costs. Sometimes, failure can have very real physical, financial, familial, mental, emotional (and so on) consequences. Since there is so little in place to support the large majority of people who try and fail, who take chances for themselves or others, and, well, just in general, the fear of failure makes so much sense. It’s hard to believe that something will turn out to be beneficial when first, it could tank your project or job or art or livelihood. Survival is first. Once you get to that, then the failure might become valuable. It’s a big ask to keep an eye towards the personal existential good when everything is burning.
Writing all this out is kind of bleak. I’m sure it reads that way too. Honestly, this probably tracks for me. I’m indeed that person at a party who, if you end up talking to me, you’ll probably end up hearing all my thoughts on death and grief and whatever. This newsletter, in general, and this post, in particular, is probably a good example of that. But here’s the thing, I’ll probably also have a fun metaphor to share, a lighter piece of insight to round out a tidbit or a chat, a gentle or not so gentle reminder of your own humanity. And I’ll definitely make a joke somewhere along the way. (Don’t hold me to that last one today.) So, stay with me.
I’m not against goals at all. I think they’re important. I, of course, have many of my own. I probably wouldn’t have a newsletter if I didn’t. Or keep writing plays. Or be trying to build a business. To have a motivating factor of some kind is helpful—family, friends, community connection, protection, stability, art, whatever it is—and can make so much of the cost of everyday existence feel worth it. I just don’t think we benefit from the jargon-ification of our lives. ‘Outcome driven’ reeks of the rigidity of capitalism. It feels like it doesn’t leave room for the messy middle. There is success and there is failure and there is nothing else. Personally, I don’t live in a world where only binaries exist. I mean, the world doesn’t exist in a world where only binaries exist but that’s not the narrative in many places.
A rejection means I tried. That’s something I wrote in pretty lettering and doodled around for myself a couple of weeks ago. You can’t get anywhere if you don’t try. I truly believe that. I believe this sentiment about rejection. I also think it’s a load of shit. I’ll tell you why. I got three playwriting rejections in two days (two within two hours of each other) and it hurt. Truly madly deeply.2 I know rejections aren’t personal. I know I’m one of thousands of people who are submitting work to opportunities. Rejection is part of the job. It’s part of what I sign up for every single day when I wake up and keep on writing. I have grown a decently thick skin over the years. So, it feels vulnerable to admit that, actually, some of my skin is still very thin. That even as a person generally confident about their writing skills, even as a person who has been working in this career for quite a bit over half their life, even as a pragmatic person, somedays a rejection feels like a broadsword through my heart. Somedays the bcc’d emails want to make me throw my computer across the room. Somedays, opening up my submission spreadsheet and seeing all the ‘no’s’ makes me want to curl up in a ball and sob directly into a cheesecake.
While it doesn’t necessarily make it feel better, I do understand that some of this feeling comes from the binary thinking I try—and sometimes fail—to avoid. My eyes see rejection as a failure. My ears hear rejection as a whisper from something deep within saying, “take the hint.” My heart feels rejection as an indictment of any optimism I have for myself. Depending on which one, the binary of success and failure breeds only positive or negative feelings. There is no room for anything in between. I hate that. And I don’t believe in it. Because I do think creativity is one place where you can have both success and failure and be outcome driven at the same time.
At my writers group meeting this past week, I was talking to a couple of people about trying to build my business and the focus of it. My goal with this work is to help everyone see the value of creative activities in their lives, whether they want to build a practice for the first time or expand an already existing one. But I also have a particular interest in helping people who have lost their connection to their creative selves for some reason—lack of time or resources, artistic trauma, living in the binary of good and bad—find their way back. As I was talking about what I was hoping to do, I realized the crux of my work is that for an act of creativity, the person creating is in control of all of it.
In undergrad, I had a costuming professor who used to say that theatre artists don’t finish things, they just stop. That is true simply because there is a date when a show opens and you can’t do anything else to it. But, this little bit of wisdom popped into my head this week because, I believe, creative activities are a place where you can ‘just stop’ and still accomplish something. This is a place where achieving an outcome doesn’t rely on whether something is finished or not, or a success or not.
If you finish a painting and it doesn’t match what was in your head, that doesn’t mean you didn’t reach your goal. You finished the painting. Because it doesn’t match what it was in your head, you might see the painting as a ‘failure.’ I’d disagree but you are in charge of that decision. Even if you decide the painting is a failure, you still did it. You reached the outcome. That is an achievement. Or maybe you find a pattern for a sweater and you start knitting it. Then, about halfway through, you realize you don’t yet have the skills for this particular pattern or you don’t like how it’s turning out, so you put the project down and never return to it. In this case, maybe the hoped for outcome is that you spend some time doing something with your hands that isn’t scrolling your phone. You did it! And even though you didn’t finish the sweater, you learned some new knitting techniques and you consider that a success. Someone else might do the exact same thing with a project and consider it a failure. Ultimately, success or failure doesn’t matter because you do, actually, get to control which one you think it is. And, in this context, the outcome is always creativity. If you try at all3, you'll always achieve that outcome.
Talking to my colleagues at writing group gave me a little bit of a spark and, I guess, a little bit of clarity. It gave me a little bit of hope for all of us.
For the last few months, unpredictability keeps coming up in the newsletter. And, in life. For all of us. Unpredictability is unmooring. There is so much we don’t have control over. I strongly dislike it. You probably do too. There is so much we don’t have a say in. There are so many places that could use our attention, it’s constant whiplash. It’s likely that the one place that could use our attention the most—the care of ourselves—is where we are giving the least amount of attention. I bet you need your attention. I can feel it.
I’m going to end this newsletter by saying the same thing I’ve said a lot over the last few months (and more): go do something creative. But this time I’m saying it because in this time and place where control is hard to come by, doing something creative will give you the slightest bit of it. Creativity is broad and you get to decide what it is. Your first bit of control. It can be something simple or complicated. It can take two minutes or days. It’s all for you. That’s it. It’s yours.
And also, I want you to know you’re successful. Simply by doing the creative thing, you have achieved the outcome of creativity.
This next thing is extra mushy but I’m so happy to give it to you if it’s helpful.
I’m proud of you.
Or driven right into the sewer.
THANK YOU for reading. Very seriously, thank you. If you’d like to learn more about the newsletter, here’s my About page. It’s about…me…and this…newsletter.
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Sharing is also nice. Sharing is a great kind of support. Sharing is, in fact, caring.
Ah yes, even as I’m dissecting the capitalism, here it is in the metaphor.
A joke!
I’ve always said, “You can’t fail trying.” And that is, in fact, another thing I do believe.
Shout out to prof G.P.!