We’ve spent so much of our lives trying to eliminate friction that we’ve forgotten some kinds of friction are productive. The discomfort of not quite understanding something forces us to stay with it. It asks us to turn an idea over, look at it from different angles, wrestle with it until it finally becomes our own.
Ted Kazanoff was a great man, a brilliant acting teacher, and one of the most frustrating teachers I ever had the sheer pleasure of working with. That was the general consensus about Ted while I was in grad school at Brandeis University. One of the greatest things about Ted wasn’t something I discovered until years later, after I left school and embarked on my professional career as an actor. Ted never gave you answers; he asked you questions and pointed you in the right direction. That was his gift.
I mean, that wasn’t all. He had insights and theories about acting that I’ve carried with me ever since and passed on to anyone who happens to land in one of my classes. I’ve held onto those ideas because they work. For me, they work, and they seem to work for those I’ve shared them with. But when I was sitting in a classroom with Ted, trying to understand what he was saying while he dismantled a scene I’d just performed, I had no idea what he was talking about. And that, dear reader, was the point.
For an actor, answers are not like those for a math student. A mathematical constant is a fixed, unchanging number that arises naturally from the fundamental rules of geometry, calculus, or number theory. Because these values represent universal truths, they remain exactly the same across every equation and operation. They are constants. There are no constants in the art of acting.
One theory or approach may work brilliantly in one situation and fail completely in another. If you’re a method actor, you’re going to find it difficult to apply that same approach to classical work. It’s hard to method act Shakespeare. Different writers demand different ways in. I like animal imagery when I’m building a Shakespeare character. When I play Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night, I often begin with the image of a bear. The physical informs the verbal, and the verbal melds with the physical, giving me an entrance into the character. Working from the outside in suits Shakespeare, at least for me. So if we agree there are very few constants in acting, we can also agree there are very few answers.
When I was studying with Ted, all I wanted were answers. How do I get better? What does better feel like? How do I get the part? How do I become famous? How do I get it?
Of course, Ted never answered those questions because his answers and my eventual discoveries were never going to be the same. The need for answers was outweighed by the value of process. As an actor, sometimes how we arrive at truth in imaginary circumstances is just as important as the destination itself.
Between my first and second years of grad school, I was doing a show when something Ted had said months earlier suddenly made sense. The fog I’d been dragging around like a piece of carry-on luggage was no longer a burden. It had become part of my process. It stopped being something I carried and became something I understood. Best of all, I arrived there on my own. Ted didn’t explain it, mostly because he wouldn’t. I simply found myself in the right place, in the right frame of mind, and everything clicked. It happened months after class, while I was standing on a professional stage.
As that realization became clearer with each rehearsal, I understood something that has stayed with me ever since. Had Ted simply given me the answer, I never would have been able to fully apply it to my own work. It wouldn’t have settled into me. It wouldn’t have lasted. The nuances behind his teaching had to be discovered individually, or they wouldn’t become yours.
Time, self-interpretation, and nuance all came together to help me understand what Ted had been trying to teach me. He planted the idea, pointed me toward it, then pushed me out the door and said, in effect, “Figure it out for yourself.” Only then did what I learned truly become mine.
Learning to Participate
Looking back now, I realize Ted wasn’t withholding answers because he enjoyed watching us struggle. Well…he did, a little. He’d laugh when one of us exploded in frustration, grin, and say, “Okay…start from there.”
But beneath the mischief was something much more important. Ted understood that struggle isn’t the obstacle to learning. It’s part of learning. Confusion isn’t necessarily a sign you’re failing. More often than not, it’s a sign you’re thinking.
We’ve spent so much of our lives trying to eliminate friction that we’ve forgotten some kinds of friction are productive. The discomfort of not quite understanding something forces us to stay with it. It asks us to turn an idea over, look at it from different angles, wrestle with it until it finally becomes our own. The moment someone simply hands us the answer, that process ends.
Increasingly, though, we seem less willing to tolerate that kind of uncertainty. We expect information to arrive fully formed, immediately understandable, and instantly useful. We want the key takeaways before we’ve considered the argument. We reach for the summary before we’ve read the story. We demand clarity before we’ve earned understanding.
Somewhere along the way, we’ve begun treating every unanswered question as a problem to solve instead of an invitation to think.
I found myself thinking about Ted again this morning after reading an article in The Atlantic about how we’re collectively reading less than we used to. Not because we’ve suddenly decided we don’t like books, but because we’ve slowly retrained ourselves to consume information differently. It struck me that reading isn’t all that different from what Ted was trying to teach us.
When you read, just like when you see a play or a film, you’re part of the experience. You can sit back and let it happen to you, or you can lean forward, ask questions, imagine, interpret, and participate in what’s unfolding. Artists don’t create so their work can remain hidden away. The completion of an artist’s endeavor is the audience.
I can rehearse a play, especially a comedy, for only so long before I need an audience to tell me whether it works. The audience isn’t just there to witness the performance; it’s the final element that completes it.
So I read the article about our declining reading habits, and it offered familiar explanations. TikTok and social media reward information delivered in small, visual bites that ask almost nothing of us beyond a like, a share, or the next swipe. They reward speed over contemplation. Reading asks something entirely different.
It asks us to hold characters, ideas, and unresolved questions in our minds. It encourages us to remember what happened fifty pages ago because it may matter fifty pages from now. It gives us leave to tolerate uncertainty, to wait for understanding, and occasionally to finish a chapter with more questions than answers. Most importantly, it asks us to participate.
The Reader’s Role
Increasingly, though, we’ve become accustomed to information that arrives already interpreted for us. We want the summary before we’ve read the article, the highlights before we’ve watched the interview, and the answer before we’ve had time to wrestle with the question.
Convenience isn’t the enemy here. But every time we remove a little more effort from the process, we also remove a little of the thinking that effort was quietly doing on our behalf.
One of the arguments the article put forward was that AI is making the problem worse. By summarizing, simplifying, and condensing information so effortlessly, it risks stripping away the nuance that makes ideas worth exploring in the first place. I don’t think that’s quite right.
AI is capable of remarkable nuance when we ask it to be. It can compare competing ideas, examine multiple perspectives, challenge assumptions, and spend thousands of words exploring an argument from every conceivable angle. But that’s rarely what we ask of it.
We ask for summaries. Bullet points. Executive briefs. Key takeaways. We ask it to tell us what matters before we’ve taken the time to decide that for ourselves.
In many ways, we’re approaching AI exactly as we’ve trained ourselves to approach everything else: as a shortcut to certainty.
Certainty on Demand
The irony, of course, is that AI doesn’t force us to stop thinking any more than a calculator forces us to stop understanding mathematics. We decide how we use the tools we create. We can ask AI to challenge us, question us, expose us to ideas we hadn’t considered, or argue the opposite side of a position we’re convinced is right. Or we can ask it to save us time. Increasingly, we’ve chosen the latter. That’s not a failure of artificial intelligence. It’s a reflection of our own priorities.
AI hasn’t removed nuance from our thinking. It has simply become extraordinarily good at reflecting the way we’ve chosen to consume information. It didn’t teach us to want shorter answers or quicker conclusions. We taught ourselves that over years of headlines, notifications, executive summaries, social media feeds, and endless scrolling. AI simply arrived at a moment when we’d already decided faster was better and certainty was preferable to curiosity.
I think about Ted often these days, usually when someone asks me for an answer I know I shouldn’t give. It’s tempting. Answers are satisfying. They make us feel helpful. They bring conversations to a neat conclusion. But Ted understood that the answers we remember most are rarely the ones we’re handed. They’re the ones we discover after wrestling with an idea long enough for it to become our own.
The Takeaway
Perhaps that’s what concerns me most about the way we consume information today. It’s not that we have access to AI, social media, or instant answers. Those are extraordinary tools, and used thoughtfully, they can help us learn, create, and explore ideas in ways that were unimaginable only a few years ago.
My concern is that we’re becoming less willing to participate in the process of understanding. We want the conclusion without the journey. The insight without the struggle. The certainty without the curiosity.
Ted never let us have that luxury. He trusted that confusion had value. He believed questions could teach more than answers, that nuance wasn’t something to be explained but something to be discovered. Looking back, I realize he wasn’t just teaching us how to act. He was teaching us how to think.
Maybe that’s the question we should be asking ourselves as AI becomes more capable. Not whether it can think like we do, but whether we’ll continue to value the kind of thinking that asks us to slow down, sit with uncertainty, wrestle with ideas, and participate in the search for meaning instead of simply accepting the first answer we receive.
Maybe the real danger isn’t that AI becomes better at answering questions. Maybe it’s that we’re becoming less willing to live with them.
Ted pointed me in the right direction, opened the door, and sent me on my way. It took me months to understand what he was trying to teach me, but because I found it myself, I’ve carried that lesson with me for the rest of my life.
I sometimes wonder how many of the most important ideas in our lives are like that, ideas that can’t be summarized, accelerated, or handed to us because they only become meaningful through the act of discovering them ourselves. Maybe that’s why books still matter. Maybe that’s why great teachers ask questions instead of giving answers. And maybe that’s why, every now and then, it’s worth closing the summary, opening the book, and allowing ourselves the time to search.
Some answers are worth waiting for.
