April 1, 2024
Confidence and Creativity: What the Drumeo Sessions Reveal
I recently had an interesting, eye-opening experience regarding the connection between confidence and creativity. I was watching a video of a drummer trying to play along to a song she hadn’t heard before. It was clear she was way outside her comfort zone. There was neither confidence not creativity in her playing.
Eventually she managed to get into the song and (judging by her expressions) have fun with it. After all, she is a professional drummer who, as I read, has played with some known artists in Quebec, Canada, and has appeared in several big shows.
Yet there is a difference between having played for “known artists in Quebec” (I can’t name anyone, but that’s just me) and, say, having played drums professionally for decades, touring with bands like Red Hot Chili Peppers and Megadeth. Respect to her and Quebec, but it’s simply not the same thing.
The drummer outside her comfort zone was Domino Santantonio who faced the challenge of the unknown on Drumeo, that has offered the same challenge to (among others) Chad Smith and Dirk Verbeuren, drummers for Red Hot Chili Peppers and Megadeth respectively. I will share the videos below, but as you might guess, their confidence was supremely evident. When you’ve played in huge stadiums next to musicians like Flea or Mustaine (with all their quirks), a little studio session for a YouTube channel can’t scare you.
The difference was so pronounced that it inspired me to write this post about the inseparable connection between confidence and creativity. Only someone truly comfortable with themselves can be creative.
The topic is more complex than what it might appear – not the least so because both confidence and creativity are peculiar concepts – so let’s try to unpack it.
Confidence and Creativity: Santantonio’s, Smith’s, and Verbeuren’s Drumeo Sessions
Before we talk about confidence and creativity in art in general, let’s take a look at the videos. Santantonio had to play “Before I Forget”, by Slipknot; Smith “The Kill”, by Thirty Seconds to Mars; and Verbeuren “Mr. Brightside”, by The Killers. None of them had heard the song before.
The difference in their methodology is also interesting. All drummers were offered the opportunity to listen to a drumless track of the song. Santantonio did so but took no notes. Smith didn’t even listen to the whole song, and after a few seconds of listening to the drumless track he started playing along. Verbeuren listened to the track once, taking detailed notes.
Click to display the embedded YouTube video
Click to display the embedded YouTube video
Click to display the embedded YouTube video
It’s worth noting that Chad Smith also broke a drumstick while playing and still didn’t bat an eyelid. Personally, I liked Verbeuren’s playing the best, because it showed creativity. Smith’s playing was fun, daring, certainly confident, but Verbeuren actually offered a different artistic interpretation of the song.
In a way, it felt as if Smith played for himself, whereas Verbereun played for the art and the audience. But that’s a different discussion.
How Do We Define Confidence and Creativity in an Artistic Context
In an artistic context, creativity has a fairly transparent meaning. Basically, it’s your ability to find connections to experiences and display them – ideally in unique, authentically new ways. Keep it separate from imagination, though.
Creativity, for our purposes, doesn’t quite mean to simply daydream or let your mind wander. That’s part of the process, too, but it can’t be described solely as some sort of mindless meandering journey – even though these experiential connections I mentioned often are subconscious! Yeah, it’s transparent; but also complicated.
What about confidence, though?
First of all, confidence is often mistaken for arrogance. Confident people can come across as arrogant, but most arrogant people are actually insecure. Truly confident people don’t need to flaunt their abilities, though truly confident people also don’t try to hold back, either. Confidence, like creativity, is complicated.
Confidence in Art
A confident artist is secure in their abilities. Most importantly, a confident artist is fully able to make mistakes and share them.
Confident musicians often hit the wrong notes. Confident writers publish something that is too experimental. Similarly, confident painters go against the grain and have complete disregard for “schools of thought” – sometimes it doesn’t work, but they’re confident in their ability to learn from it.
Indeed, perhaps the best gauge of confidence (and, just maybe, creativity) for an artist is to look at their behavior when things don’t go as planned.
If you watch the videos above, notice the body language of Santantonio when things don’t work out (e.g. when she doesn’t know how to play a part): She has this hesitant smile, her eyes looking around as if waiting for something to rescue the situation. Her drumsticks very tentatively explore some timid patterns, but she’s too cautious to commit to anything.
Conversely, notice Smith. Not only does he feel confident in his own abilities – enough to start playing to a song he’s listened to for 30 seconds [to Mars 😛] – but when he breaks the drumstick, he just cracks (no pun intended) an amused smile and reaches for another stick while continuing to play with one hand.
Why Confidence and Creativity are Connected
Confidence and creativity are more than just connected: They are a necessary pair. This might come across as too absolute – there is, indeed, a continuum – but when we think in ideal terms, there is a clear association between confidence and creativity: The greater the confidence, the more genuine the creativity. Why?
Because confidence is what allows the artist to depart from the safety of the known and experiment with the unknown. Without confidence, creativity would be limited to repeating the same patterns, recreating the safe and the known, regurgitating the same pointless things everyone else is doing.
Confidence allows a musician to try something difficult or experimental even though it might lead them to a dead end.
It is confidence that allows a writer to utterly ignore everyone (audience, publishers, or “the market”), refusing to abide by genres.
Confidence: When You Know and You Know that You Know
There is some old quotation about this, which I won’t repeat. But, essentially, confidence in art is when you are aware of your own abilities – including your ability to make mistakes and learn from them.
Is there a correlation between confidence and some sort of measurable skill level? That’s a tricky question, because measuring skills in art can be misleading.
Generally, some sort of Dunning-Kruger curve applies here as well: The utterly inexperienced are very insecure. Those with a little experience can be arrogant. Then there is a rapid drop into insecurity (“I don’t know anything!”) which gradually evolves – though not for everyone – into genuine confidence: “I don’t know everything, but I know quite a few things and I know them well”.
Confidence and Creativity Can Be Narrowed Down
I am an inexperienced musician, without great technical skills and with very rudimentary theoretical knowledge. I’m also a very inexperienced cartoonist, again without great technical skills and with near-zero theoretical knowledge.
Yet I’m also confident in my ability to make my kind of music, as I’m confident in my ability to draw Punning Walrus. Still, if you give me a guitar and ask me to play along to something else or give me pen and paper, and ask me to make a portrait, I will not even attempt it. I know I can’t.
Here’s the difference with writing – with decades’ worth of experience and a doctoral degree in literature – where I am supremely confident in my creativity. Put me in front of a keyboard, and ask me to write anything at all – from a metered and rhymed poem to a short story and from a personal essay to a comedy script – and I have complete confidence in my ability to produce something that will be at least good and, if it resonates with my personal preferences, very good.
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I have worries about a lot of real-world things, including our health, the stock market, the kids – the usual concerns of parents.
And up until a number of years ago, I also had Impostor Syndrome in varying degrees about my writing. And then I figured out that I either had all the craft skills I need, or could figure them out if a new need popped out, dumped the Impostor Syndrome, and haven’t looked back.
I’m an autodidact in writing, not particularly arrogant about it or my skills, but quite confident that if I need to know something, I’ll figure it out.
That confidence makes it easier to write the new stuff – if I want to write it, and can maneuver my body into supporting my mind for a few hours, it will happen.
It is bolstered by an odd extra: when I’m tired, I reread the first two novels in the Pride’s Children trilogy, enjoying every page – and never looking at what I have written to fix, improve, or adjust it (except for the typo list which I’ll tackle when I do another update – meanwhile, those sections must be interesting, because only one person since 2015 has mentioned that I had a typo).
I understand some painters have gotten into trouble in museums because they kept trying to improve their paintings there!
Am I perfect? Of course not – no one is. But reading my own work makes me happy, not critical, and is not accompanied by the angst of revision.
I have learned how to write: big ‘honken’ novels, short stories, very short stories, and some kinds and bits of poetry – to my own satisfaction.
Not the same as your highly academic creativity, but as much as I’ve ever wanted or can foresee needing. Confidence, I hope, and not arrogance.
I’m confident in the abilities I’ve developed and my capacity to detect the requirement of more – enough to tell stories I like and I hope others will, too. I don’t need anything else. Maybe that’s something that happens when you’re old enough. Mature enough?
I developed that same level in my now-not-used sewing skills – whatever I wanted to make, I could and would and did. I know what it feels like.
When you say you are “quite confident that if [you] need to know something, [you’ll] figure it out”, you essentially say that you have learned how to learn, which is one of the most important skills a person can develop.
Learning how to learn lets us discover new things as well as polish the skills we already have.
Learning how to learn is the reason why my mother (who spent most of her adult life behind a computer terminal) nowadays can barely use a laptop, whereas my mother-in-law (who spent most of her adult life not behind a computer terminal) is in her 70s able to troubleshoot her own printer or WiFi connection.
Learning how to learn is hands down behind every worthy endeavor!
Yup.
EVEN while battling brain and body, if I need something. Sometimes that involves finding an expert, but I know how to learn from them, too.
And from internet ‘advice’ which is sometimes current, sometimes not.
And from guides and manuals.
I think learning (of which research is part) is one of the good parts of writing. The next part is learning how little of it to dump into the story – and how – to not interrupt your planned pacing.