CATCHING IDEAS

July 27th, 2019

Quantity in creativity leads to quality.

The creator who makes quantity a priority will inevitably stumble upon quality and therefore have both.  The creator who only concentrates on quality may never achieve either.

The most illuminating example of this would be the great composers like Beethoven and Mozart.  The quantity of musical output that these composers had was not simply double that of mediocre composers, nor even ten times the amount.

On average, the great composers produced one hundred times as much work as mediocre composers.

To put this in perspective, let’s make up some numbers. 

Let’s say a mediocre composer produced 10 large pieces of music, symphonies perhaps.

This means that a great composer would produce . . . . 1,000 symphonies!

But total size is not the most interesting part of these made up numbers.  Let’s say that only 10% of any given composer’s work is really good.  The cream of the crop, you might say.

For the mediocre composer, that’s about…. 1. One piece of music that is considered that composer’s best. 

But for a great composer, their best 10% is 100 symphonies!

These numbers are hypotheticals, but the magnitude of quantity becomes particularly poignant.  A great composer’s top 10% is the size of other mediocre composers’ entire output. 

But here’s the thing.  No one really knows how good their work is going to be when they start out on it.  We all have hopes that we’ll produce something great, but that can’t really be planned nor guaranteed.  We can certainly get better with practice, but this again supports the quantity as a higher priority than quality. 

Qualityemergeswith quantity.  It akin to saying that there’s a 1 in 10 chance of producing something awesome. if you only try once, then odds are slim that it’ll happen.  But the more often you try, the more likely it is to happen.

Simply: those who make creative output a habit are bound to create something worth while…. eventually.

NETWORK WEB

July 26th, 2019

We are our networks.  In total isolation we can function, say in a cabin in the woods, but all the things necessary to actually live and function in that isolation still depends on our prior experience as social creatures that can learn how to build a cabin and forage, tend a garden, hunt and all that good survival stuff. 

We are raised, we do not simply grow up. 

Infant humans in total isolation apparently turn out to be feral.

One huge aspect of this social web that we create and which creates us is that it catches ideas and  allows for the implementation of ideas that would otherwise be impossible to explore if our species lived as isolated individuals in the same way that cheetahs or albatross do.

The business world is constantly harping on about the importance of creating and maintaining a network.  And the reason is obvious.  Who you know in large part determines who can help you, and how. People are viewed in a depressingly pragmatic way in this sense.  It’s a game of who you can call in order to help you get what you want.

But we can flip this scrip into a far more generous one when we take the frame that networks enable us to explore ideas. 

The best example of this is a group of young kids who go on an adventure together.  The idea is just to have fun, and it’s only really possible with the group of friends working together for symbiotic joy.

As is often said, when shit hits the fan, that’s when you find out who your real friends are.  This is just to say that networks have degrees of concentration. Just as we are all a few degrees away from Kevin Bacon, stripping away those degrees highlights the most powerful core of our network.  Inevitably, that core network is key to any idea you might come up with. 

Instead of networking, perhaps we should just look to make a friend. 

PESSIMISTIC TIME KEEPER

July 25th, 2019

Hofstadter’s Law states:  It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

This law is comically and infuriatingly recursive. We project how long a project will take, one we’ve never undertaken, and invariably we grossly underestimate how long it will take.    Construction projects present a fabulous example of this.  With so much work contracted out, and the whole process becoming decentralized, getting a handle on how long each part will take becomes more and more difficult.

Add to this the strange way that time dilates from a subjective point of view.  Some minutes can drag on forever, while a fun day seems to evaporate before we can really sink our teeth into it.

In addition to this, work also seems to expand to fill the time allotted for it. 

All three of these phenomena combined, it seems impossible that we can ever get a clear idea of what we can and will get done.

We have two options.  When it comes to deadline agreements with other people, we can inflate the time with the hope that we will deliver before, or we can give a tighter deadline and risk missing it.

Giving a later deadline might seem wise, but as mentioned, work has a strange inflational quality and will probably fill this buffer time.

It stands sensible to reason that the opposite is also true.  If work can expand, then perhaps it can be compressed.  The risk is that lower quality work will result from being rushed..

So which to go for?

Is there anyway to have our cake and eat it too? Can we compress work so that we have time left over?

The question remains open and probably depends on the project and the situation.  For those things that we have enough experience doing, we might be more accurate with our realistic timeline.   But for the unknown, chances are we’ll ned to work fast and with a generous deadline.

BORING WORKS BUT ANXIETY IS EXCITING

July 24th, 2019

The words Excitingand Nervousform a Rivalnymic pair.  In short they are essentially the same thing with polar opposite emotional identities. 

Anxiety as word describes much the same that nervous does.  The emotional identity of anxiety is just more concentrated, distilled into an affliction, one for which medications can be created and sold for.

Now, to be clear, just about no one who feels anxiety is going to claim that is it excitingor that it’s something they are creating and somehow enjoying in some kind of perverse way.

But the curative tools that most effectively battle this state of excitement are simply the opposite of anything exciting:

a well managed to-do list

meditation,

routine exercise

consistent sleep

Excitement, whether positive or negative, simply tries to breed more of itself.  We try to cure anxiety by going out and having a good time, when really, this merely replaces one excitement for another, and inevitably, the slip back from some positive sort of excitement to a negative one is just as quick to arise.

Doing the boring things is counter-intuitive, even if it seems like a logical no-brainer.  But that’s the thing: what is intuitive is already not using that executive thoughtful part of the brain.  Intuition is more about emotion.  Emotions like excitement, and the intuitive solution to a negative excitement is a positive excitement.  Hence the counter-intuitive realization of slowing down and concentrating on the boring things.

We can rephrase these ideas in simpler, grander and primordial terms:  chaos & order.

Chaos breeds more chaos, not matter how good or bad it feels.

The answer to chaos is sorting it out. Creating order.

The answer is, well, kind of boring.

This episode references Episode 293: Rivalnym

EXHAUSTED BATTERY

July 23rd, 2019

Allowing a battery to go to 0% damages the battery significantly.  It’ll be possible to get the battery fully charged again, but it will run out much quicker.  At the same time, charging a battery to 100% isn’t that great either and also injures the life of the battery.

People are in some sense, quite similar.  We do best with daily sprints of work and nightly rest in order to recharge. 

It doesn’t take much putzing around in this world to experience just how haggard and hindered it feels to burn the candle at both ends for too long.

But likewise, most all of us know that strange phenomenon of feeling tired after getting an extraordinary amount of sleep.

Like the battery, one is certainly worse than the other.  Best to oversleep than overwork.

But even better is to keep the equation balanced. There’s always tomorrow for more work, and if we overdo it today, our ability to stay consistent tomorrow drops.