TLDV: Innovation is not driven by narrowly focused heroic effort. We'd be wiser and the outcomes would be better if instead we whole-heartedly embraced serendipitous discovery and playful creativity. We can potentially achieve more by following a non-objective yet still principled path, after throwing off the shackles of objectives, metrics, and mandated outcomes.
This also matches my experience 100%. All my best discoveries are accidental.
So what is your writing process like? I'm personally really interested in how well designed things are created. It seems like there is a paradox, you can't force great things to happen with objectives and planning. But you can objectively tell that something is great. So are you personally concerned about whether a specific piece of writing is objectively great, or are you more interested in your ability to write well in general?
Thanks for asking! I have several different but interconnected processes:
1. I have a regular writing practice where I just open up something (Evernote, Byword, notepad, whatever) and start writing about whatever comes to mind. This is primarily just to develop the habit of writing. I mainly do this with my 1,000,000 word writing project [1].
2. I do content marketing for work, which is much more systematic and planned out– I work backwards from common queries and search terms. The most successful post I've ever written, though, was something that I had written out of curiosity [2].
3. Sometimes 'inspiration' hits: somebody asks the right question, or something happens and I feel a need to respond– and everything just comes right out of my subconscious, almost as if it were already written. But when I examine this, it's clear that I was already ruminating about it for a long time before.
> It seems like there is a paradox, you can't force great things to happen with objectives and planning.
Not exactly a paradox. The objectives and planning aren't about making great things happen; they're about creating a stable context in which great things happen. It's about putting in the hours of practice so that you can improvise freely when the moment calls for it.
> So are you personally concerned about whether a specific piece of writing is objectively great, or are you more interested in your ability to write well in general?
I think I cycle between the two, back and forth, depending on what I'm doing. If I'm working on something with a sense of purpose, I want it to be great. Otherwise I'm happy just working on my craft on a day to day basis.
Thanks! And to riff off of the cat feet analogy, you have to be comfortable enough to let the cat come to you. You can't scare it away by getting anxious. That sort of calm comes with lots of practice.
I'm a composer as well as a software developer. There is no way in hell I could plan an interesting piece of music. You really just have to wait for it to come, however importantly it does mean you have to be ready to listen: i.e. put yourself in environments and states of mind that are most receptive and be extremely well-honed on your craft on a technical level so you can execute well.
I think this is a sentiment most people share, because most creative people only output—at most—a few masterworks in their lifetimes.
I bet the people who are constantly pumping out works that, on their own, would be considered achievements—the Picassos and Frank Zappas and Stephen Kings of the world—have a pretty different view on how much of creating something good is inspiration vs. a schlepp.
> 12 months from now you won't be able to tell what you wrote while inspired and what while schlepping.
I've been writing almost every day for probably about a decade now. The reality of it is a little more nuanced that that.
It's more like... 20% of the time you were inspired, you'll realize that what you produced was still crap.
Similarly, about 20% of the time you were schlepping, you'll realize it was actually pretty good.
And about maybe 20-30% of the time, you'll find yourself getting 'inspired' midway through a schlep. And as you do it more and more often, you start subconsciously preparing things in anticipation of the work.
Yes, this is so important to communicate. I think "waiting for inspiration" is a bad approach and bad advice for anyone who want to do something professionally. Unless you are inspired 20-40 hours per week, only hobbyists have the luxury of waiting for inspiration.
Also, how will you ever improve in something if you only do it while inspired? And how will your inspired work be any good if you have no practice and experience to build upon?
> The main thing is that getting 4 masterpieces is extremely likely if you produce 10,000 works
Yes and no. Once you succeeded in creating a masterpiece it can become incredibly hard to ever create something worthwhile again because success (especially when rewarded by the markets) can screw up your mind for good. You loose your sense of wonder, you feel the pressure to have success again and so on. It could very well be that you just create more of the same or get worse due to this. I think bands that are considered one hit wonders might provide a good example.
It's a bit like an optimization algorithm that found a local optimum but can't escape its current neighborhood.
You're just playing around with stuff, create a lot of drafts and play with them if you feel that they're fun. And then, suddenly, one of the drafts doesn't get dull; surprisingly, it gets more and more interesting the more things you add to it.
And then you realize that this one is actually done.
Maybe, although in my experience a piece of work is never really done, you just eventually realize you have to declare a stopping point and move on to the next project.
A software's features could always be improved, a book can always be revised further, a song could always be tweaked or rearranged, you can always knock the sand castle down and try to make the parapets straighter this time.
Most of my projects have a wishlist of features, 80-90% of them eventually get cut when I decided I was finally, finally going to release the damn thing.
It's a profound talk, but incomplete in my view. It's mostly that we're culturally far too used to linear and predictable (culturally only because we know very well about randomness, laughter and surprise is wired in our brains). Also, we cannot predict the path, nor the number of possible paths that will approach a given structure.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXQPL9GooyI
TLDV: Innovation is not driven by narrowly focused heroic effort. We'd be wiser and the outcomes would be better if instead we whole-heartedly embraced serendipitous discovery and playful creativity. We can potentially achieve more by following a non-objective yet still principled path, after throwing off the shackles of objectives, metrics, and mandated outcomes.
This also matches my experience 100%. All my best discoveries are accidental.