Sprezzatura | Hacker News Reader

Sprezzatura

sivers.org

145 pointsnreece26 comments

That's a great word. It's really fascinating how certain words need a sentence-long definition when translated from other languages to English. So much is captured in one word!

And that's an incredible TED talk. I recommend to anyone who hasn't seen it that they watch it when they have a chance.

The best part in my opinion: "That's not what my creative process is - I'm not the pipeline! I'm a mule, and the way that I have to work is that I have to get up at the same time every day, and sweat and labor and barrel through it really awkwardly. But even I, in my mulishness, even I have brushed up against that thing, at times. And I would imagine that a lot of you have too."

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Sprezzatura

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." - http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/James_Nicoll

It's ours now! Mu-hu-ha-ha-ha!

A great word. In English. It is somewhat interesting that it is a word from XVI century italian, not in use anymore. I can barely understand the meaning because we have some cousin words remaining in the language. For example "Sprezzante", that means "contemptuous" or "scornful" and have very negative connotations. This negative connotation extends to the ancient word, so it is difficult for me (and I suppose for other Italian speaking) to give it a positive meaning. Loaned words are funny sometimes...

That is one of the best TED talks I've ever watched, and I've seen it many times. I read her book, "Eat Pray Love" and googled her, when I came across the TED video. If anyone reading this hasn't watched the video yet, please do.

can you explain more of the appeal?

(apologies, but i am going to explain my opinion here before waiting for you to answer. eit.)

i stopped watching 75-85% of the way through. i couldn't take all the "you know"s, "like"s and "um"s.

i'm not sure if the content wasn't appealing to me, or if her explanation was unexciting.

when i see great art or learn something awesome i feel something lift inside me. i have an emotional connection. this drew a blank.

i was a little surprised, since the blog post made sense to me. i agree with other commenters who mention have this fuzzy concept but not seeing it discussed in public much less defined.

for a "best" TED talk i'd recommend http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke...

she's a good speaker. there are other excellent speakers, too.

maybe the "worked on 8hrs a day for 6 weeks" build up raised my expectations, but she sounded nervous, laughed at her own unfunny and irrelevant jokes, and didn't create anything wondrous or lifting inside either my heart or my head.

Jill Taylor's talk is awesome, I agree.

I'm not sure how to explain. Genius is a topic that can't be black and white, and can be debated/discussed all day. The part about being a mule etc, struck a chord.

I read her book, it was good, though I wouldn't say its the best travel/autobiographical book I've read. "Travels" by Michael Crichton is very very good, he was a great guy and had traveled to many places. He was trained to be a doctor, but his heart was into writing, he talks about that a lot. You could take a look at 'eat pray love' (though I'd recommend Crichton's book if you have to choose), to get a background on her, as a person.

In short, I don't know how to explain, I just happen to agree with her thoughts on the subject, and really enjoyed the talk.

I pretty much agree. This talk did nothing to me. It didn't really break any new ground. Yes, you must be persistent and "show up for work" to be an artist. Who hasn't heard this before?

I hadn't heard of this author or her book, so I checked it out on Amazon. The most useful review is titled "Glib, narcissistic and lightweight". That's kind of how I felt listening to this talk. How many times did she mention the "freakish success" of her book?

Perhaps it would be difficult to understand what she is talking about if you had never experienced similar personal dilemmas...

Indeed, the struggle with the process of creation, the fear of rejection, misunderstanding, failure, is at the core of many artists. I look at entrepreneurialism and hacking as forms of art too, so the topic is very on point here in my view.

But back to that vulnerability. As an artist, you can connect to that immediately. It's moving to hear another artist talk that openly and honestly about something so central to their existence. One of my favourite things she said was about being a mule. We're all mules. And we can be proud of the effort, of continuing to show up, regardless of the result.

I'm a fairly hard-line atheist (I am open to actual proof ;), but there is something mystical about the eureka moment during the creative process. Sometimes it is a wave that comes at you when you hope to be ready, and you just try to catch it while you can. And several times I remember feeling the way she described the dancer becoming something more. I've seen that dancer before. Anyone who's created art for long enough has touched that, but as a logical person I'm almost ashamed to get that out-there describing my personal experiences. Hat's off to her for having the guts to do so and do so that openly.

er... i think i understand what she is talking about and have had similar personal experiences...interesting choice there of questioning that.

no, i was speaking to the disjoint between the content of the blog article (effortless requires extreme diligence) and the example (eat, pray, love author's ted talk as "best ted talk ever").

"It's really fascinating how certain words need a sentence-long definition when translated from other languages to English. So much is captured in one word!"

That's also true for many English words translated to other languages, and for English words simply being explained in plain English.

What's particularly interesting is when one culture decides that some concept deserves a single-word moniker, while other cultures have no corresponding word, as if the concept never (or rarely) comes up. (The German word Schadenfreude comes to mind as an example.)

Somehow, it's fabulous to have words for concepts you've fuzzily known about for a long time.

The TED talk mentioned reminds me of "You and Your Research" by Richard Hamming: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

Hamming asserts that people who have done great work fail to "plant acorns." They chase another great revelation instead of stepping back to the fundamental level where they started, and spend the rest of their life only working on great problems, not useful subproblems. I see no reason an artist's success would be different.

As someone who as explored both "creative" pursuits such as art and the technical pursuit of coding, i explain to my techie but creatively challenged friends that pursuing art is like hacking your brain's kernel while it is running. A bad line of code can bring down the entire OS. It might be why traditional creatives have the reputation of being unstable. You can't really take your brain offline and debug if something goes wrong with refactoring your aesthetic assumptions. If a creative is hacking their visual identity, they can get to look pretty weird through the major releases and might require several dot releases to look "right."

But then we encounter the creative coder. Those people are freakiest of all and for that we are all better off.

I'm not sure I like the idea of inventing external imaginary beings that grant us extraordinary powers for no other reason than it makes it easier to accept those powers.

It seems dishonest.

Are you advocating total awareness of the world? Total immersion in both refulgent horror and terrible wonder? Constant consideration of ounce of harm you inflict on the world around you? An unclosing eye toward this miracle of entropy we call home? Unending empathy toward every single person you pass and even those you never meet. Total awareness that your own personal self has quite possibly culminated and now has only got forty years of slowly turning to dust.

At some point you've got to shield your eyes; or, put it differently, find an interpretation you're comfortable with and settle down. Who can claim to not lie to themselves every day just to put their next foot forward? Even if you can see the honor, the honesty, in living that way I highly doubt you can survive.

If you can, write a book about it. I think David Foster Wallace tried.

Life isn't science. If you can go to a museum and enjoy the paintings, you can embellish the way you interpret your own sight. And if you're going to do it, why not pick a beautiful story?

I'm not advocating total awareness, though that would be cool and it is achievable according to some philosophies. I'm advocating the pursuit of an honest interpretation of the world. We know there aren't little trolls living in our walls that grant us creative powers. We know that isn't true.

I believe it is possible to be aware of our impact on the world, even negative and continue to live. On 60 Minutes tonight there was a story about a recycling center in Colorado that was illegally shipping used computer monitors and televisions to Hong Kong. People there disassemble them and in doing so pollute their environment and damage their health.

But I'm using a computer. There are two monitors in this very room. My behavior indirectly harms the world. I am aware of that. Perhaps I am adding a bit of negativity to the world, but that doesn't mean I should choose ignorance of that. It doesn't mean I should invent a little troll in the wall that is actually creating that monitor.

I think it is okay to acknowledge the accomplishments of the creative. I think it is okay to accept responsibility for the good that we create and the harm that we inflict.

I'm advocating honesty and pursuit of truth. Sometimes that requires that we forgive ourselves for that which we do that harms others. Those apologies can be truthful as well.

Can you say there aren't trolls in the walls that grant us creativity? Can you assume that genius still happens in a vacuum? Can you hope to describe these things fully, attribute it to humanism? Perhaps the human achievement is in becoming an antenna for the inspiration of our chaotic world?

I mean, no. I don't advocate intentional blindness to problems in our world. I would even go so far as to actually advocate a greater awareness of the weight of our impact in the world. We can learn something from knowing more what the impact of a dollar is.

But humans are nothing if not machines for selective attention. If every time I bought my lunch I thought about the fertilizers dripping into the ocean causing immense algal blooms full of asphyxiated fish and oh the smell! I'd probably starve.

If your life, the thing that puts you closest to your own understanding of divinity, is being creative; if you honestly have to face the idea of never being able to communicate like you did that one time not so long ago; if you have to keep going in face of that, well, I know what I'm not going to expend my attention toward.

But even so, the speech wasn't about finding ways to ignore some nasty personal tragedy. It's about finding an interpretation on the charity and capriciousness of the creative process. What really is the best way to contextualize the immense amount of discipline and work and training that goes into creation that can all amount to precisely nothing without something widely considered to be external to us?

Genius is 99% perspiration, 1% inspiration. Even when we can assume the sweat, we're still might end up short one spark. What gives?

(I apologize for the waxing here, but god this is such a fascinating philosophical question.)

In The Salmon of Doubt (I think), there's a transcript of a talk that the staunchly atheist Douglas Adams gave, and one of the things he mentions is the concept of Feng Shui, which he explains as the notion that the contents of your house should be arranged such that a Chinese dragon would be able to walk through it without scraping itself on corners or getting stuck in dead-ends. Clearly, to a rational scientific mind, the idea that your belongings should be organised for the benefit of magic invisible dragons is ridiculous.

And yet... there's no doubt that some particular furniture layouts are more convenient or more aesthetically pleasing than others, and without a rigorous, mathematical function for deciding the optimum layout, perhaps the metaphor of a dragon walking around the house is a useful one - that is, it's not true in a scientific sense, but it's a concept that turns a relatively abstract and complicated problem-space into something concrete enough for the human mind to grapple with.

I take this notion of "daemons" or "geniuses" to be something similar - it certainly doesn't pass Occam's Razor, but in this case we're not looking to discern Ultimate Truth. We just want to find a way of looking at the world that defuses the complex and oppressively powerful psychological feedback-loops that seem to be associated with creative vocations.

Might I recommend going back to the source on "sprezzatura"? http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_0_11?url=search-alias%3Dst...

pronunciation (the red loudspeaker icon) http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sprezzatura

It's quite hard to pronounce, but the speaker makes it sound easy.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=470695

This is brilliant.

Kobe Bryant is the best example of sprezzatura in sports, especially when you see him drive to the rim with four defenders on him. Kobe also speaks italian.

Agreed. This account of his 4am workouts and non-stop icing routine on gameday is truly inspiring:

http://sports.espn.go.com/espnmag/story?id=4068270

I like Kobe more than Lebron more for this very reason. He compensates for his relatively inferior size with superior work ethic.

His work ethic is legendary (and rubbed off on Lebron at the Olympics last summer). FYI, Kobe is 6'5" which is exactly average for NBA shooting guards.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com