Notes on The Creative Habit: Skill

I’ve been reading Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit again. Today I read through the chapter on skill.

Tharp lists the categories of skills she uses in her work as a dancer/choreographer:

musical skill
dramatic skill
painterly skill
sculptural skill
psychological skill
design skill
theatrical skill
temporal skill
motivational skill
entrepreneurial skill
promotional skill
athletic skill
literary skill

I won’t get into her descriptions of each, for that you should read the book. What she’s explaining is this: we all have a bunch of skills that relate to our work. For example, “literary skill” doesn’t mean her ability to read and write, it relates to her work as a choreographer in that she’s developed “a sense of beginning, middle, and end.”

Take Inventory of Your Skills

Getting clear about where you actually are with certain skills is difficult work, but it has to be done if you want to get better. There’s always a gap between where you want to be in some area and where you actually are. This is always my starting place when I want to learn a new skill, or improve an existing one. I have to see that gap, first.

“Skill is how you close the gap between what you can see in your mind’s eye and what you can produce; the more skill you have, the more sophisticated and accomplished your ideas can be.”

Twyla Tharp

“What you can see in your mind’s eye” is an important piece of that quote. You really do have to see what you want and how much of a gap there really is between that and what you’re actually, at this point, capable of doing (“what you can produce”).

Notes on The Creative Habit: Hard Work and The Blank Page

Notes on The Creative Habit: Morning Rituals