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by Roberto Zoia

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Work That Lasts

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From Ryan Holiday’s Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts:

People claim to want to do something that matters, yet they measure themselves against things that don’t, and track their progress not in years but in microseconds. They want to make something timeless, but they focus instead on immediate payoffs and instant gratification. (…)

We focus on all the wrong metrics for measuring our success and, in the process, actually diminish our chances for longevity. Making a beloved classic that lasts for a hundred years may seem like a tall order. Fine, put that aside. What if we start by just trying to make something that lasts longer than average? (…)

We’re all selling ideas. Whatever the form, the process is the same. And if we get really good at it and we think about it the right way, our idea can sell forever, an infinite number of times. That’s the dream. To matter, to reach, to last. So let’s go get it.

Create or Hate. Successful People Make Things, by Dan Norris

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Even if some factors that lead people to be successful could be attributed to sheer luck, a common trait is that successful people create things.

In Norris’ vision, creating something –that is, being creative– has little to do with wild talent and is more about productivity. The first requisite for being creative is to start to do something.

In his book The War of Art, Steven Pressfield writes about The Resistance, the voice that delays us from doing our work, the self-sabotaging habits of procrastination, self-doubt, susceptibility to distraction, perfectionism, and shallowness. Dan Norris’ nemesis to creativity is Hate.

“Haters don’t create anything, and instead get caught up in a never-ending cycle of Hate feeding Hate and criticism triumphing over creation.” The hate ecosystem nurtures from negative people that may surround us or work with us. However, what most hinders our capacity to do things is own self-hate.

It turns out that people can be very good at making up reasons [for not making things]. Not all reasons are invalid, but we have to beware of Hate breeding excuses.

Some common excuses are:

  • It’s expensive
  • I don’t want to divide my attention
  • I don’t want to be one of those guys/gals that teaches people something before they know it themselves.
  • There is too much effort needed to start
  • The learning curve. I will definitely suck at the first try
  • I see no purpose to get it going
  • I don’t have what it takes

The second half of the book is about how to fight hate. For conquering hate, we need to accept failure as part of the creative process, an essential part of creating anything. Self awareness and gratefulness are our allies in our fight for being creative.

The final chapter gives practical advice that can give you some ideas on how to improve your creative process.

I specially liked to chapter on how empathy breeds creativity. Empathy is hard, and not commonly understood.

Your goal in being empathic is to imagine what it’s like to be that person and feel what they are feeling. If you can improve your empathy, you improve your imagination. And imagination is the source of all creativity.

The author is not shy about his own failures and learned lessons. For me, this showing himself vulnerable by reflecting about his own experiences is one of the things that makes the book valuable.

Ira Glass on Creativity

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I found (again) this quote by Ira Glass of This American Life thanks to Tom Chandler of The Writer Underground. Ira talks about taking creative work from good enough to great. (You can watch the video of the segment after the quote, taken from a series on Storytelling.)

What nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish someone had told this to me . . . is that all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple [of] years you make stuff, and it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not.

But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase. They quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story.

It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take a while. It’s normal to take a while. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

Abandoning perfection

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Seth Godin on perfection as a defense mechanism:

It’s possible you work in an industry built on perfect. That you’re a scrub nurse in the OR, or an air traffic controller or even in charge of compliance at a nuclear power plant.

The rest of us, though, are rewarded for breaking things. Our job, the reason we have time to read blogs at work or go to conferences or write memos is that our organization believes that just maybe, we’ll find and share a new idea, or maybe (continuing a run on sentence) we’ll invent something important, find a resource or connect with a key customer in a way that matters.

So, if that’s your job, why are you so focused on perfect?

Perfect is the ideal defense mechanism, the work of Pressfield’s Resistance, the lizard brain giving you an out. Perfect lets you stall, ask more questions, do more reviews, dumb it down, safe it up and generally avoid doing anything that might fail (or anything important).

You’re not in the perfect business. Stop pretending that’s what the world wants from you.

Truly perfect is becoming friendly with your imperfections on the way to doing something remarkable.

You have to read to be able to write

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Matt Gemmell on the classic question How do you get your ideas, or the relation between reading, writing, and the idea-flow:

The corresponding answer is usually something like “they just come to me”, but it’s a half-truth. We all know that, deep down. The reality is more prosaic: your outlook alters, such that everything is an idea. In the same way that a former spy can never fully switch off their vigilance, a writer’s imagination just becomes perpetually active.

Reading is what makes it possible – you have to read in order to be able to write – but you have to write to actually activate this shift in perspective. It happens fast: within days. The problem isn’t ever finding ideas; it’s filtering them.

Reading is important, even if you are not a writer yourself. Finding time for reading long form –books, long articles, etc.– is crucial, even if it seems to be increasingly difficult.

Creativity and Negative Capability

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Short PBS video on creativity. The creative process is relevant not only to artists but to anyone who must solve complex problems.

Julie Burstein explains her view on the creative process and negative capability at the beginning of the video:

[Creativity implies] the ability to stay in a space where you don’t exactly know what’s going to happen next. Willing to chase down ideas, and also willing to understand that not all of them will lead somewhere. But knowing that the experience of pursuing an idea will influence the next step.

Each creative person develops his or her own set of tools. The creative impulse is one piece of the process. But at a certain point you have to sit down and do the work. Understanding how to work is a key part to bringing your creativity to a point where you can share it to other people.

“Inspiration is for Amateurs. I just get to work.” (Chuck Close)

(via FarnamStreet)