During my sophomore season of high school basketball (where I was the only player whose GPA matched his points per game average), our team experienced a lot of change. We went through two coaches. All but one player from last year’s starting lineup had left. We even got new uniforms.
However, even amidst all of this uncertainty, there was one undeniable constant. In every gym we went to, we were bound to hear “Lose Yourself” during pregame warm-ups. No matter what team we were playing, we all knew that we would inevitably be asked if we had one shot, one opportunity, to get anything we ever wanted, whether we would capture said opportunity or just let it slip.
This is all just one long-winded way of saying that “Lose Yourself” was everywhere, and rightfully so. I don’t particularly like Eminem, but this track has to be in the conversation for most influential rap song of the decade. “Lose Yourself” is Eminem’s most commercially successful song, and judging by this, I doubt Eminem will ever recapture his 2002 glory.
“Lose Yourself" shows Eminem (or I guess “B-Rabbit”) as he prepares for a freestyle battle. Despite being incredibly nervous (“his arms are sweaty/knees weak/arms are heavy/there’s vomit on his sweater already”), Eminem strives to overcome his anxiety and simply get lost in his performance. The Detroit rapper knows that his best rhyming occurs when he isn’t really even thinking about his lyrics, when the words just kind of flow out of him without any real conscious awareness. There’s no real point in writing down the chorus, because any who reads this column already knows it, but just for the sake of consistency, I’ll reproduce Eminem’s immortal lines:
You better lose yourself in the music, the moment
You own it, you better never let it go.
You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow
This opportunity comes once in a lifetime
Eminem’s idea of his best work coming when he doesn’t really think about it is actually a well-researched psychological concept. We often hear about performers achieving a new form of consciousness in their best work, like when athletes say they were simply “in the zone.” In psychological jargon, this state is known as “flow”. The lead expert in flow research is Claremont Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced “chicks sent me highly”). In his book, Csikszentmihalyi gives an intricate analysis of how people find flow, what it feels like and even how best to achieve it. According to Csikszentmihalyi, “flow” isn’t just when we produce our best work; it’s also what we are really striving for in life. I’m sure Eminem would agree.
What’s more interesting is what happens when people are in the opposite of flow, and end up thinking about their performance too much. Usually, the results are disastrous. Research has shown that overthinking one’s work can be detrimental, often leading to “choking” under pressure. For instance, in one study led by the University of Chicago’s Sian Beilock, participants were asked to do some putting on a golf green while being instructed to consciously think about their strokes. Beginning golfers actually benefited from thinking about their performance, as the more time a novice spent contemplating a putt, the more likely it was to go in.
However, the opposite was true for more experienced golfers. Beilock and her colleagues found that when these seasoned golfers were forced to think about their shots, their shot accuracy significantly decreased. Beilock explains the findings by positing that since much of a golf swing has come routine for these golfers, making them think about their form creates a situation where conscious thought begins to override a largely automatic process. The end result is choking. As science writer Jonah Lehrer explains, “choking is merely a vivid example of the havoc that can be caused by too much thought. It’s an illustration of rationality gone awry.”
Eminem is dead on when he motivates himself to get lost in the moment. If he thought about his lyrics too much, they probably wouldn’t come out.
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