ENGINE OF THE CREATIVE LIFE

August 25th, 2020

What is at the heart of the creative life?  What keeps creative people moving forward as though they are drawn by some sort of invisible force?  How is it that consumption can be so unsatisfying, so unfulfilling when placed next to a life of creating?  Creating is work, consumption is pleasure.  Is there not a paradoxical contradiction here?

Starting out in the creative life is fraught with hard goings.  Ira Glass put it quite well in an infamous quote where he describes the ‘killer instinct’ that creatives have.  They get into the business because they have good taste, and then they try to create something and realize there’s this huge gap between their good taste and their skill.  And this, as Ira states, this where most people give up.

The straightforward analysis of this discrepancy is that the feedback loop between skill and taste is too large and unwieldy.  A good taste in writing, or painting, or whatever the creative endeavour be is just too far ahead of the skills we possess at the beginning.  The instinct for what is good doesn’t really inform the burgeoning creative about how to improve their work, it just crushes it, seeing everything wrong with the work.  

As with all instances of learning, the real trick here, is an emotional one.  If the young creative can respect their instinct for what is good without being offended by it, by managing those emotions effectively, and just keep at it with the work, the quality of the work does eventually close the gap between what we think is good and what we produce.  

But the key to why the creative life is so fulfilling is that the gap between our good taste and our ability to satisfy that good taste is never fully closed.  Now with the feedback loop much tighter, the creative work produced starts informing that killer instinct.  Our sense of what is good is not a static rubric.  It too is a changing, shifting, pivoting entity that is improving, and our own creative output eventually becomes a fuel for its process. 

The skill required to satisfy that instinct with your own creative work is always lagging behind.  The creative skill sharpens, and further informs the instinct for ‘what’s good’ and in turn that instinct sees the creative work in a sharper light, a more honest and brutal frame.  It’s this asymmetry that is at the heart of why the creative life can be so fulfilling.  It’s like you’re always chasing the perfection of your own shadow as the sun sets behind you, running into darkness, trying to find this particular thing, this method and process, the experience of execution that lurks in the unknown - that fearful realm that holds everything you don’t yet know.  And we race into the unknown, trying always to grasp at that mythic ideal envisioned by instinct, before the light finally goes out.

SIMPLE OPERABLE ITERATION

August 24th, 2020

Startups and entrepreneurs of all kinds seek to get off the ground with a minimum viable product.  This is generally the first version of a business product that can actually be released to the public, ideally for money.  Many great things have come to market because of the thinking that tends to compliment and enable a minimum viable product.  But all too soon, that thinking goes awry, as the product becomes bloated with features and clunky iterations, as companies grow themselves upon the success of that first minimum viable product.  How is it that the pressure of necessity and the simplicity that boot-strapping forces is lost once we move beyond that first iteration, and more importantly, how can we maintain the efficiency of the boot-strapper and the survivor?

Similarly, many companies fail to get off the ground in the first place due to the same problem: by concocting elaborate demos that don’t actually do anything.  The thinking here is somewhat inside out: instead of making something that is powerful because it simply works in its most simple form, individuals plump up the pomp of their product with flashy theatrics that hint at what might be possible.  The insecurity here is searing: why go through all the showy flash and bang if at core there really is something useful?  Is it a genuine fear that normal people won’t clue into the potential use of something that actually is useful?

These questions answer themselves.  A flashy demo is likely to be hiding something.  But a working demo?

A working demo can become that minimum viable product.  This is certainly a better allocation of resources.  Instead of spending time, energy and money making a flashy demo to simply evoke a fantasy in the minds of others, wouldn’t it be more efficient to actually build the darn thing and see if it works?  The success of a demo in the eyes of others inevitably calls for a working version, which simply becomes another step.  Why not cut to the chase and build some thing that works?

For those in the business of building, these distinctions might be trivial and uninteresting.  What is perhaps lost on a great number of builders is the continued utility of simplicity and how to stick to it.  Many builders don’t realize just how simple a thing can be in order to get the feedback we need to move forward.  Not only this, we often build in a bloated way that inhibits clear feedback.  We can mistake the target of the signal.  Only be making simple, clear moves can we  be sure that the signal within feedback actually accords with the change we’ve made.  This hints not just at a minimum viable product, which harks of only one iteration of a given idea, but all iterations, and a philosophy of building that cuts the fat and makes our path of pivots towards something truly excellent faster, and more efficient.

The concept of a simple operable iteration applies to the 10th version, and the 1000th, along with all iterations in-between and beyond.  

Entertain, for a moment, a detour into an analogy comparing a student and a master: at first the student flounders, having no competence of the skill, then, once the student gains proficiency, the expression of this skill explodes.  Using the skill becomes an expression more of personal agency than it is an expression of the skill well-used.  Think of a junior woodworker, or even a kid with legos who figures out how to put things together and soon enough is pouring loads of effort into huge, sprawling, elaborate projects.  Then eventually the student, with time and practice slowly becomes a master of the skill.  And what is more evocative of mastery than simplicity?  The master of any given skill has distilled very simple fundamentals from enormous amounts of experience.  All the fat and bloat has been cut, and what is most often left over is elegance.

The image here evoked of the student and the master, and the bloated progress that links the two isn’t one so much to be applied to the builder, but to the thing being built.  All minimum viable products start in the same way that the student gains a simple proficiency.  But then the product (and the company) often bloats and bloats and bloats until it breaks.  How stereotypical is it for a young company with a fresh influx of money to spend huge sums on fancy office space and cute extras -or rather- extravagances?  How can this sort of bloat fail to indicate that something fundamental has shifted within the perspective of the company?  Would it be wise to worry about whether or not this shift might effect the way people build?

But we have to attract the best talent? Might be the rallying cry.  Perhaps, but does this not say more about the product and how interesting it is… or isn’t?  Is not such extravaganza not like the theatrical demo that doesn’t actually work?

Passionate people who are genuinely interested in their work don’t need views of the river or foozeball tables to keep them happy.  The work does that.

The simple operable iteration is a perspective about building at every step of the process.  It asks:  what does the this version look like with everything stripped from it before it ceases to fundamentally work?

The boostrapper asks this question out of necessity.

The master craftsman asks this question out of a hunt for beauty.

Strangely, the beginner and the expert are inextricably linked.  Both reach for success from a point of leanness as both are devoid of an interest or access to opulent resource.  It’s this pared down focus which creates the simple operable iteration.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: ZEN SIMPLICITY

August 23rd, 2020

DEMO VS. WORKING ITERATION

August 22nd, 2020

A term that flies around in business lingo and particularly the tech world is minimum viable product.  This is generally the first crude iteration that can be tested in the market to see if it has any capital potential.

So what is the difference between this minimum viable product, or a first working iteration, and a demo?  Is not a demo supposed to perform in the same way?

A demo is often a form of theatre.  It is the semblance of an idea that others can see, feel, hear and touch - not just a description of the idea.  In some cases there is no possibility for a demo.  A fictional novel, for example, goes straight from idea into full execution.  It’s not possible to ‘demo’ a novel, because even just an excerpt is an actual instance of the working iteration, even if an excerpt cannot be shipped.

If we were forced to fit the fictional novel as a product into the concept of a demo, we might imagine a book with a fantastic cover, expertly designed, with the title and author listed.  Perhaps a small stack of these books make for an excellent photo.  But if someone were to actually open the book, it would be blank, or perhaps what they’ve seen is just a beautiful and convincing dust jacket wrapped around a completely different book.  That would be a demo.

A working iteration for a novel would be a first draft.  This satisfies the basic function of the end goal.  There is now something that can be read which honours the original idea and allows the imagination a fully informed experience for envisioning what the end product after editing and rewrites might look like.

What’s the point of sharpening the knife and cleaving difference between the concept of a ‘demo’ and a working iteration?

There’s more risk when creating a demo.  Not only can the demo fool other people, but an individual can fool themselves into believing they have a good idea through the crafty theatrics of the demo . . . when in reality, the idea could still be a dud.  Now, with this potentially deceptive demo, we’ve perhaps wasted time making a fantasy look real, when the time could have been devoted to an actual working product.

The first draft of chapter one might not look as flashy and impressive as product photos for a beautifully crafted book with the correct title on the cover, but one has far more substance, and it’s exactly that substance that can tell us whether this project is something we would be wise to devote more time.

ROLLING FRUIT

August 21st, 2020

The day starts, you have a ton to do, particularly one massive project that feels like intimidating even though you’re excited to bring it to life.  How do we get the ball rolling?  How do we take on the daily Goliaths?

More than anything, it’s a matter of starting, not doing.  

Doing something refers to the whole task - which is never within the purview of possible action.  We can’t just ‘build a website’.  We certainly say that when it comes to language, but that’s the key deception.  When it comes to the actual ‘doing’, the language fails to describe the what actually happens.  First we open a text editor, then we create the basic html skeleton, then we add styling, then we add more details, functionality, etc..  The task, whether it be building a website from scratch, starting a business, or even something as mundane as doing taxes is actually a huge chain of tiny incremental actions.

Describing our task in more minute detail can have a tremendous effect on the way we get rolling.  Instead of writing “do taxes” on the to-do list, its actually a lot more effective to write something like “gather W-4’s”.  This is a far easier task, and more importantly, it describes an actual single action.  

This specificity can work like magic, particularly because the first actual task is easy, and if we identify it correctly, it can feel like low-hanging fruit.

It’s this actionable low-hanging fruit that helps us get the ball rolling.

Once we’ve actually started, it’s much much easier to jump to the next link in the chain of actions required to get the whole task done.  

Strangely enough, human psychology mirrors physics.  We all know that it’s much easier to keep the couch moving across the floor than it is to get the couch moving in the first place.  This is because the nature of friction for a stationary object is much higher than the friction of a moving object.  The same is true of the mind.  The friction an idle mind experiences is much higher than the friction opposing a mind in motion.