Zest for Life
How Curiosity Beats the 10-Year Rule
‘I’ve just got an insatiable curiosity. I want to learn. I want to see. I want to do things I don’t know if I can do.’
PJ Harvey – in an interview with ABC news
Losing her religion
By 2016, PJ Harvey had been nominated for every songwriting award going. She’d won a fair few, too. The only artist to have won the Mercury Music Prize twice, she’d also been given an MBE for services to music.
For twenty years, she’d written, recorded and performed music. It was what she did. But now, after a year on the road, something changed.
‘As an artist, I was feeling lost,’ she later said.
She knew she should be thinking about the next album, but she’d hit a roadblock:
‘I’ve always just been so curious as a person. I love learning. That’s also why I don’t want to do the same things over and over again.’
Music had lost its hold on her.
The problem with having superior tastes
Take two people you know. One of them loves everything. Whoever they meet, wherever they go, they’re enthusiastic about it all. They want to chat to everyone and find out everything they can about the world.
The other? They play it cool. They tell you it’s not their sport, not their type of art, not the right food. The person they just met? Boring. Too full of themselves. Doesn’t have the right outlook.
Other than their attitude, in what way is the second type of person superior to the first? They present a persona of aloofness and refined taste, but something fundamental is missing. Where’s their enjoyment of life?
For the philosopher Bertrand Russell, the first character had something the second was lacking: zest.
Zest is a spark, an energy, an enthusiasm for discovery. And there are many reasons someone might not have it. Maybe, like our second character, they want to seem cool and sophisticated. They might be afraid or lack confidence. It could be down to illness, or it might simply be a habit.
For Russell, zest gives life meaning. Zest is about keeping that childlike joy, that need to engage with everything we come across.
We lose this at school or work, Russell argues, when we forget how to direct our own attention and rely on others instead. Even when we can choose how to spend our time, we simply feel bored or tired.
Having zest requires more than just freedom. It requires, for Russell, ‘the smooth working of the psychological machine’. If we are afraid to try new things, to explore novel experiences, to make mistakes, our zest will take a hit.
Zest also helps draw us out of ourselves. Interest in the world around us prevents us obsessing about ourselves – our worries, what others think of us. Russell gives the example of Sherlock Holmes finding a hat on the street. Within an instant, he can describe the life of the owner through the tiny clues he discovers.
How can life fail to be fascinating, Russell asks, for someone who takes such an interest in mundane objects?
This one simple trick will make you a musical genius
PJ Harvey had zest in spadefuls. ‘I always think it’s so sad that when we get older, we tend to stop playing with our imagination like we do when we’re young,’ she said.
So what changed in 2016 to make her lose her love of music?
Before we find out what she did next, it’s important to understand a bit more about how she works.
Don’t tell her to sell out stadiums, her manager warns: ‘She’s not driven in any way by commercial imperatives. Really, she’s working to satisfy herself.’
And what drives her is relentless curiosity.
She started out as a sculptor. After she’d created something at art school, she immediately wanted to create its opposite. Even when she became famous through her music, she was inspired by filmmakers and painters rather than other musicians.
Her secret? Constantly challenge yourself. As she puts it: ‘it’s good to put oneself in unfamiliar situations. And that might be as simple as an instrument you don’t know how to play.’
Simple. Right.
She isn’t the only person to take this approach. REM’s Peter Buck wrote the riff to ‘Losing My Religion’ just after he’d bought a mandolin and was trying it out.
Some artists switch between media to challenge themselves. Picasso created prints, sculptures, ceramics and collages, each time finding a new way to express his ideas.
In Think Again, Adam Grant discusses the Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick. Except for a class on the good life, he never taught the same course twice. ‘I do my thinking through the courses I give,’ Nozick said.
There is a term in Zen Buddhism – Shoshin – meaning ‘beginner’s mind’. It encompasses openness, eagerness to learn and a lack of preconceptions. Most closely associated with the martial arts, it’s a way to counter the narrowing of thought that can creep in when people consider themselves experts.
It is this attitude – Shoshin – that PJ Harvey describes when she talks about the importance of putting yourself in unfamiliar situations.
With zest, it is easy to put yourself into the beginner’s mind. When you’re focused on what takes your interest and sparks your curiosity, you find yourself taking a path without knowing where it might lead.
But surely there are limits to this.
Maybe in music you can keep taking up a new instrument to inspire yourself, but what about a field like science, where there is so much to learn? Don’t you have to move past the beginner’s mind and become an expert before you make an impact?
Short-circuiting the ten-year rule
To become an expert at anything takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice – or around 10 years. This is the way Malcolm Gladwell explained K. Anders Ericsson’s finding that top professional violinists put in thousands of hours more practice than those destined to become only amateurs.
Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein have spent their careers studying what separates Nobel winners from near-misses. And they think there’s another way to succeed.
Take Darwin, who mastered ten disciplines, by their count, ranging from botany to paleontology. This should have taken a century, but he managed to integrate ideas from all of them to form the theory of evolution in thirty years.
Top scientists (and Nobel winners in other fields) have that beginners’ mindset – Shoshin. They are constantly retraining themselves, unafraid of seeing themselves as ‘serious amateurs’. They can apply ideas they learn in one area to a different field.
Top scientists also have a wide range of hobbies, from the arts and drama to creative writing and crafts like woodwork. In fact, they are fifteen to twenty-five times more likely than the average scientist or US citizen to have hobbies.
Hobbies are correlated with every measure of success you can think of – from scientific papers published, grants received, companies founded to membership of academic bodies and receiving a Nobel Prize.
The least successful scientists see their hobbies as ‘regrettable wastes of time’ that don’t help further their careers. Successful scientists can see the link between everything they do. Their activities outside science help them to generate novel ideas.
What do Einstein and Sherlock Holmes have in common? Both did their best thinking while they were playing the violin.
Rediscovering her religion
PJ Harvey never stopped learning. She was always ready to put herself back into that beginner’s mindset.
In 2014, she took poetry classes with renowned poet Don Paterson, who has won as many poetry awards as PJ Harvey has for songwriting.
He asked her to share her poetry. She thought he was just being polite, but he insisted. They collaborated, and PJ Harvey eventually published a book of verse.
When PJ Harvey was feeling burnt out after a year of touring, she went to another creative friend for help – the director, writer and artist Steve McQueen.
Focus on what you enjoy, McQueen told her. Don’t worry about producing something, just follow your love of words, images and music.
‘It helped me re-find the joy,’ PJ Harvey said. ‘That joy that I could remember having initially, when I first started writing songs when I was 17’.
She spent eight years on an epic, book-length poem written in the ancient Dorset dialect she remembered hearing in her youth. She explored the landscape of her childhood in her mind and on the page.
After she finished, the album that had eluded her – and her fans – for almost a decade came in a three-week rush as the music to accompany the poem spilled out of her. It was released to widespread critical acclaim and earned PJ Harvey her eighth Grammy nomination.
McQueen’s advice helped PJ Harvey to remove the boundaries that had appeared in her mind.
She rediscovered her zest.
Finding your zest
‘One of the sources of unhappiness, fatigue and nervous strain is an inability to be interested in anything that is not of practical importance in one’s own life,’ Bertrand Russell wrote.
We often try to force our thoughts down a particular path. If ideas don’t seem to fit into a particular project, we dismiss them. Like PJ Harvey, the direction we think we should be going in obscures the path we need to take to grow.
We can all heed Steve McQueen’s suggestion to go back to the fundamental things we love, like PJ Harvey’s focus on words, music and images. Whether it’s through learning a new instrument, a new artistic medium or teaching a new course, we always have the option of embracing the beginner’s mindset.
Sources:
Books:
Malcolm Gladwell (2008) Outliers: The story of success
Adam Grant (2021) Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know
Academic Sources:
Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100(3), 363–406.
Root-Bernstein, R., Allen, L., Beach, L., Bhadula, R., Fast, J., Hosey, C., Kremkow, B., Lapp, J., Lonc, K., Pawelec, K., Podufaly, A., Russ, C., Tennant, L., Vrtis, E., & Weinlander, S. (2008). Arts foster scientific success: Avocations of Nobel, National Academy, Royal Society, and Sigma Xi members. Journal of Psychology of Science and Technology, 1(2), 51–63
Root-Bernstein, M., & Root-Bernstein, R. (2022). Polymathy among Nobel Laureates as a creative strategy—The qualitative and phenomenological evidence. Creativity Research Journal, 35(1), 116–142.
Root-Bernstein, R., & Root-Bernstein, M. (2020) A Statistical Study of Intra-Domain and Trans-Domain Polymathy among Nobel Laureates, Creativity Research Journal, 32:2, 93-112,
Root-Bernstein, R., & Root-Bernstein, M. (2020). Polymathy. In M. Runco & S. Pritzker (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Creativity (3rd ed., Vol. 2, pp. 375-381). Elsevier, Academic Press.
Interviews:
Louise Brailey (1 June 2023) Into the woods with PJ Harvey. Crack Magazine. https://crackmagazine.net/article/profiles/pj-harvey-cover-story/
Liam Fay (9 October 2024). Happy Birthday PJ Harvey: Revisiting a classic interview. Hot Press. https://www.hotpress.com/music/happy-birthday-pj-harvey-revisiting-a-classic-hot-press-interview-23053712
Stephen Gallacher (17 May 2022) Don Paterson on poetry, PJ Harvey and why we need to use or risk losing our local dialects. The Sunday Post. https://www.sundaypost.com/fp/don-paterson
Stephen Gallacher (21 August 2022) ‘People think I live in a cave and eat children. I don’t mind. I accept it’: Enigmatic rock siren PJ Harvey is happy to let book of poems speak for her. The Sunday Post. https://www.sundaypost.com/fp/pj-harvey-interview/
Dorian Lynskey (24 April 2011). PJ Harvey: England Shake interview. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/apr/24/pj-harvey-england-shake-interview
Ann Powers (6 July 2023). ‘Life and death is such a fine line’: PJ Harvey on creating in a place between worlds. NPR Music. https://www.npr.org/2023/07/06/1185749989/pj-harvey-i-inside-the-old-year-dying-orlam-interview
Jared Richards and Karen Leng (18 March 2025). PJ Harvey, one of rock’s most influential figures, reflects on 35 years of making noise and never standing still. ABC News. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-18/pj-harvey-2025-interview-australia/105059736
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