Are Discipline and Play Compatible? With High-Wire Artist Philippe Petit | Big Think

I think of myself as a man of contradictions. I mean, first I am very brutal in my way of thinking. I love or I hate, it’s black or it’s white, which is not very true because then a part of me loves the gray festivals.

But anyway, I realize that I am a man of contradiction and extreme, and very often I state something and within the same sentence I contradict myself. Or I give a rule, and of course, I add the exceptions to that rule.

The discipline that I demand in many of my arts – the discipline of spending hours in front of a mirror perfecting a magic trick by manipulation – also comes with its antidote or its extreme, which is the opposite of discipline. Forget about what you’re doing. Don’t work, play.

And very often in my arts, taking the magic again as an example, if I stop working on a move but if I just fool around as you would say with a deck of cards, you know, watching a film or talking to a friend – suddenly out of the playfulness will come a great invention.

It could be a very small detail but a way to turn a card or something that I can use in a magic trick, and it didn’t come from the discipline of work, it came from its opposite. It came with playing, you know.

So I advocate that, and I think I am a man who works very hard and also plays very hard, enjoys life...