How I Test Ideas (Or: Discerning Good From Great) — Shawn Blanc
Shawn Blanc on how he goes through the process of testing an idea.
I suspect many of you can relate to the dilemma of having more ideas than time. Which means that, in addition to endurance, we also need discernment to know what ideas are worth pursuing and what ideas we should let go of.
Creativity is about constraints. Weirdly, many people seem to see creativity as the opposite, as being about expansion. We must think outside the box. We must generate ideas. The problem of how to be creative is the problem of thinking up things. But this is wrong. Or in any case, the opposite is just as correct. Creativity is all about thinking inside the right box. There is an infinite amount of possible ideas. The problem is not how to come up with ideas, but how to remove the ideas that are no good. The problem is not how to think outside the box, but where on the infinite plain of thought to put it. Creative work is about finding ever narrower constraints, until you are left with only one idea that fits the bill. That’s the right one.
That’s one hell of a paragraph.
Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson on Where Ideas Come From | Wired Magazine
Two of my favorite thinkers on creativity.
I’ve always been intrigued to read this book since Merlin Mann championed it over a year ago on 43folders. I’m glad I finally got to it because this book is truly a gem. Unless you skim it passively, there’s no way you won’t get something out of this book. Tharp insightfully demystifies the creative process, showing that it’s mostly a matter of discipline and hard work. She writes about the importance of rituals and routines, or how to prepare to create. To me, this is the key thing in the book and creativity for that matter. You have to find a way to trick yourself to make it habitual. It’s difficult to form habits because we can’t help thinking about the end result, but the focus should always be to start. After that, you can worry all you want about how to end something.
There’s a lot of dance talk throughout the book, but not as much as to overwhelm. Plus Tharp is so well versed in other creative fields that it never reads as creativity through the eyes of a choreographer, but as someone with a deep knowledge of the creative process who could be in any creative field she wanted. Her enthusiastic appreciation of Beethoven for example was contagious. I’m lowbrow, but she made me “last.fm’d” Bach and Wolfgang.
The book is practical and insightful with elegant typography. With exception of the last chapter, all chapters have an exercise section that’s enough to be worth the price of admission. It’s superbly well written by a smart and classy lady.
“I don’t do this for the money or the recognition. I do this because I was born to do it. Because I’m passionate about it. Because I feel it in my bones”.
There’s no way to prove whether or not people are born to do something. The only thing you can do is whether to believe it or not. You either believe that you are free to make choices or that your life was previously determined.
In my experience, most people that say something like the above quote, are musicians, writers, bloggers, puppeteers, and other creative types. I can’t prove whether they believe it, but it seems that some use it as crutch. Something that they’re trying to convince themselves to believe. I’m sure that artists that have been successful (recognition as well as financially) don’t need those kind of external motivations to keep doing what they do. But the successful ones don’t say it as much as the unsuccessful ones.
I have yet to find someone that says that they were born to be an accountant. I’ve never heard a real estate agent saying that he will keep selling houses even if he doesn’t get paid. “Oh, but those are just jobs”, you might say. That’s one of the problems right there with the idea that “creative jobs” are callings from God and the “non-creative” ones are a choice to pay the rent.
If you have to justify what you do with trascendental feelings of passion and destiny, your raising the bar to impossible heights. Without getting into a philosophical debate, I’m sure most people are rational and believe in free will. So if you try to convince yourself everyday that you don’t have a choice, then you don’t have a choice, and that’s not a good thing.
When you truly like doing something, you just do it. I’m sorry. It’s really that simple. It’s like breathing and bowel movements. You don’t need to think about it or justify it. But unlike bowel movements if you choose to be a writer that’s one choice out of the many choices you could have made. Sure, you have to commit to it in order to get good at it, but being committed is one thing and feeling that it’s something that you were born to do is another.
If you’re not being successful at something, no matter how much you believe that it’s something that you’ll keep on doing no matter what, that doesn’t change the fact that you’re not successful at it. You just have to work. Like an accountant or a real state agent.
HiLoBrow on the magical-ness of doodling and its etymological history.
“In its modern sense, doodling is surrealism and abstract expressionism’s dour bachelor uncle — a workaday, intuitive expression and proof of the conviction that the artist is coextensive with nature. And the power of all art, furthermore, is bound up in our empathetic experience as doodlers; great art returns our doodles to us with a kind of alienated majesty. It was Emerson who said this, referring to the works of great thinkers — in whose complex, polished, and ramified ideas we may discern the traces of our own abandoned musings.”
The Forbe article sort of praises Michael Moore’s new film, Capitalism: A Love Story. I write “sort of” because I haven’t seen the film yet and it’s not clear what the author agrees with. I suppose this discussion is healthy, but we have to be careful and separate what’s purely ideology (capitalism is fair and egalitarian) from what the economic system actually is.
I think Moore’s a little too flip about how important it is for people to be free to chase their fortunes. Some take Moore’s own financial success as irony. I see it as hopeful. We need more Michael Moores. But we don’t get them in a system where, say, the telecom, television and radio industries are difficult to disrupt because only the largest companies can afford access to a spectrum that’s supposed to be held in the public trust.
via This is Probably an Interesting Blog
Understanding the Anxious Mind
NYT Magazine profiles Jerome Kagan’s research on anxiousness.
The tenuousness of modern life can make anyone feel overwrought. And in societal moments like the one we are in — thousands losing jobs and homes, our futures threatened by everything from diminishing retirement funds to global warming — it often feels as if ours is the Age of Anxiety. But some people, no matter how robust their stock portfolios or how healthy their children, are always mentally preparing for doom. They are just born worriers, their brains forever anticipating the dropping of some dreaded other shoe. For the past 20 years, Kagan and his colleagues have been following hundreds of such people, beginning in infancy, to see what happens to those who start out primed to fret. Now that these infants are young adults, the studies are yielding new information about the anxious brain.
Ron Rosenbaum over at Slate writes about genius-dom. He discusses Me and Orson Welles, an upcoming Richard Linklater film about Welles rise. He also writes about other artists that we have dubbed genius.
Has the term been applied somewhat—or wildly (Tarantino?)—indiscriminately of late? And have the prerogatives of genius too often been used to excuse transgressions or mediocrity? (“Not his best work, but he’s a genius!”)
Those are precisely the questions—the nature of genius, the profligacy of genius, the questionable allowances made for genius—that are at the heart of Me and Orson Welles, which is perhaps Linklater’s most ambitious film and is scheduled to be released this Thanksgiving. I think it will cause a stir. Oh, let’s not be restrained: When I saw it, I found it amazing and moving.
Chiefly because of Welles, his genius and his tragedy. The film celebrates the triumph of Welles’ genius, but it also gives us a Welles who abuses the prerogatives of genius in ways we know will eventually cost him. The future casts a melancholy shadow over the proceedings.
He concludes at the end of the essay that instead of tagging artist’s as geniuses, we should only tag their work as genius. I agree, but I still don’t like the idea of genius. First, genius-dom is controlled by the high brow society. If you’re low educated you’ll never understand what’s so great about Picasso. Second, most of the time it’s in hindsight. It took some years, about a decade or so, for Citizen Kane to become one of the greatest films of all time. Third and lastly, it implies that people have unique and inherent talent that comes out of nowhere… or mythical muses in a soul. And this inherent talent myth is something that the neuroscience field keeps debunking everyday. It’s not that I’m against holding people’s work and art in high esteem, but the genius idea should be left back with the guys with wigs of the Renaissance.
Merlin Mann, the 43Folders weblog author, Twitter jester king, and all around awesome dude is writing a book and he wants to like, make sure you know about it. He made a web page about it called Inbox Zero, which is the title of the book.
Merlin Mann’s latest talk on Maximumfun.org were he talks about the problem creative people have of focusing too much on the process of making things, than actually making things. For him, and I agree on this, the fixation on the pre-planning process is mostly a way to avoid dealing with the fact that you will suck a lot when you make something at first. The cure he offers for this is to cut out the ‘thinking about thinking”, start doing whatever is that you want to do, and get comfortable with the idea that you will suck sometimes.
via The BB
Are You Thinking or Are you Farting?
The post is geared toward the topic of software design, but it can be applied to anything in life that requires creative problem solving.
The problem is that first thoughts are like babies farting. A baby farts, and it grins. Babies love to fart. For them, it’s one of life’s greatest pleasures.
First thoughts are exactly the same. They feel good, so we like them… and because we like them, we assume that they are good. More importantly, we assume that they are accurate.
This is a logical fallacy called post hoc ergo propter hoc. “After this, therefore resulting from this.” But I prefer to call it farting.
via Hacker News
