Every parent knows that children need space for unstructured play that helps them develop their creativity and problem-solving skills. Free-form experimentation leads to the rapid acquisition of information about the world. When children play together, they expand their social skills and strengthen the ability to regulate their emotions. Young animals, such as elephants, dogs, ravens, and crocodiles, also develop survival skills through play.

The benefits of play don’t disappear as soon as you become an adult. Even if we engage our curiosity in different ways as we grow up, a lot of learning and exploration still comes from analogous activities: things we do for the sheer fun of it.

When the pressure mounts to be productive every minute of the day, we have much to gain from doing all we can to carve out time to play. Take away prescriptions and obligations, and we gravitate towards whatever interests us the most. Just like children and baby elephants, we can learn important lessons through play. It can also give us a new perspective on topics we take for granted—such as the way we represent numbers.

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Playing with symbols

The book Arithmetic, in addition to being a clear and engaging history of the subject, is a demonstration of how insights and understanding can be combined with enjoyment and fun. The best place to start the book is at the afterword, where author and mathematics professor Paul Lockhart writes, “I especially hope that I have managed to get across the idea of viewing your mind as a playground—a place to create beautiful things for your own pleasure and amusement and to marvel at what you’ve made and at what you have yet to understand.”

Arithmetic, the branch of math dealing with the manipulation and properties of numbers, can be very playful. After all, there are many ways to add and multiply numbers that in themselves can be represented in various ways. When we see six cows in a field, we represent that amount with the symbol 6. The Romans used VI. And there are many other ways that unfortunately can’t be typed on a standard English keyboard. If two more cows wander into the field, the usual method of counting them is to add 2 to 6 and conclude there are now 8 cows. But we could just as easily add 2 + 3 + 3. Or turn everything into fractions with a base of 2 and go from there.

One of the most intriguing parts of the book is when Lockhart encourages us to step away from how we commonly label numbers so we can have fun experimenting with them. He says, “The problem with familiarity is not so much that it breeds contempt, but that it breeds loss of perspective.” So we don’t get too hung up on our symbols such as 4 and 5, Lockhart shows us how any symbols can be used to complete some of the main arithmetic tasks such as comparing and grouping. He shows how completely random symbols can represent amounts and gives insight into how they can be manipulated.

When we start to play with the representations, we connect to the underlying reasoning behind what we are doing. We could be counting for the purposes of comparison, and we could also be interested in learning the patterns produced by our actions. Lockhart explains that “every number can be represented in a variety of ways, and we want to choose a form that is as useful and convenient as possible.” We can thus choose our representations of numbers based on curiosity versus what is conventional. It’s easy to extrapolate this thinking to broader life situations. How often do we assume certain parameters are fixed just because that is what has always been done? What else could we accomplish if we let go of convention and focused instead on function?

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Stepping away from requirements

We all use the Hindu-Arabic number system, which utilizes groups of tens. Ten singles are ten, ten tens are a hundred, and so on. It has a consistent logic to it, and it is a pervasive way of grouping numbers as they increase. But Lockhart explains that grouping numbers by ten is as arbitrary as the symbols we use to represent numbers. He explains how a society might group by fours or sevens. One of the most interesting ideas though, comes when he’s explaining the groupings:

“You might think there is no question about it; we chose four as our grouping size, so that’s that. Of course we will group our groups into fours—as opposed to what? Grouping things into fours and then grouping our groups into sixes? That would be insane! But it happens all the time. Inches are grouped into twelves to make feet, and then three feet make a yard. And the old British monetary system had twelve pence to the shilling and twenty shillings to the pound.”

By reminding us of the options available in such a simple, everyday activity as counting, Lockhart opens a mental door. What other ways might we go about our tasks and solve our problems? It’s a reminder that most of our so-called requirements are ones that we impose on ourselves.

If we think back to being children, we often played with things in ways that were different from what they were intended for. Pots became drums and tape strung around the house became lasers. A byproduct of this type of play is usually learning—we learn what things are normally used for by playing with them. But that’s not the intention behind a child’s play. The fun comes first, and thus they don’t restrain themselves to convention.

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Have fun with the unfamiliar

There are advantages and disadvantages to all counting systems. For Lockhart, the only way to discover what those are is to play around with them. And it is in the playing that we may learn more than arithmetic. For example, he says: “In fact, getting stuck (say on 7 +8 for instance) is one of the best things that can happen to you because it gives you an opportunity to reinvent and to appreciate exactly what it is that you are doing.” In the case of adding two numbers, we “are rearranging numerical information for comparison purposes.”

The larger point is that getting stuck on anything can be incredibly useful. If forces you to stop and consider what it is you are really trying to achieve. Getting stuck can help you identify the first principles in your situation. In getting unstuck, we learn lessons that resonate and help us to grow.

Lockhart says of arithmetic that we need to “not let our familiarity with a particular system blind us to its arbitrariness.” We don’t have to use the symbol 2 to represent how many cows there are in a field, just as we don’t have to group sixty minutes into one hour. We may find those representations useful, but we also may not. There are some people in the world with so much money that the numbers that represent their wealth are almost nonsensical, and most people find the clock manipulation that is the annual flip to daylight savings time to be annoying and stressful.

Playing around with arithmetic can teach the broader lesson that we don’t have to keep using systems that no longer serve us well. Yet how many of us have a hard time letting go of the ineffective simply because it’s familiar?

Which brings us back to play. Play is often the exploration of the unfamiliar. After all, if you knew what the result would be, it likely wouldn’t be considered play. When we play we take chances, we experiment, and we try new combinations just to see what happens. We do all of this in the pursuit of fun because it is the novelty that brings us pleasure and makes play rewarding.

Lockhart makes a similar point about arithmetic:

“The point of studying arithmetic and its philosophy is not merely to get good at it but also to gain a larger perspective and to expand our worldview . . . Plus, it’s fun. Anyway, as connoisseurs of arithmetic, we should always be questioning and critiquing, examining and playing.”

***

We suggest that playing need not be confined to arithmetic. If you happen to enjoy playing with numbers, then go for it. Lockhart’s book gives great inspiration on how to have fun with numbers. Playing is inherently valuable and doesn’t need to be productive. Children and animals have no purpose for play; they merely do what’s fun. It just so happens that unstructured, undirected play often has incredibly powerful byproducts.

Play can lead to new ideas and innovations. It can also lead to personal growth and development, not to mention a better understanding of the world. And, by its definition, play leads to fun. Which is the best part. Arithmetic is just one example of an unexpected area we can approach with the spirit of play.

The post Learning Through Play appeared first on Farnam Street.

Umberto Eco wrote Confessions of a Young Novelist in his late seventies. But having published his first novel, The Name of the Rose, only twenty-eight years earlier, he considered himself a newcomer to fiction writing. Looking back on his career so far, Eco reveals some valuable insights into his writing process. In this post, we’ve extracted four of the key lessons for fiction writers from Confessions of a Young Novelist.

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Defining creative writing

“A text is a lazy machine that wants its readers to do part of its job.”

It seems a given that fiction writing is inherently creative, but what exactly makes a piece of writing creative?

“I have never understood why Homer is viewed as a creative writer and Plato isn’t. Why is a bad poet a creative writer, while a good scientific essayist is not?”

Some languages draw a distinction between the kind of writer who creates texts out of their imagination and the kind who simply records information, such as a poet versus a court stenographer. Eco disagrees with the notion that we can make this distinction based on the function a writer’s work serves in society. Nor can we define as creative solely writing that does not pretend to state the truth:

“Can we say without a doubt that Melville, in telling the story of a nonexistent whale, had no intention of saying anything true about life and death, or about human pride and obstinacy?…It is problematic to define as creative a writer who simply tells us things that are contrary to fact. Ptoelmy said something untrue about the movement of the Earth. Should we then claim that he was more creative than Kepler?”

For Eco, the distinction lies in how a writer responds to interpretations of their work. It is possible to misunderstand an uncreative piece of writing. It is not possible to misunderstand a creative piece of writing—creative writers leave it to the reader to decide what their work means.

The most creative works are those that can be endlessly reinterpreted and reinvented by readers. Every reader can understand their own version of them depending on their particular worldview. Some of the most popular works of fiction ever written are ones that reflect common dreams and fantasies or idealized versions of life. They afford enough ambiguity to allow readers to project themselves into the text, thereby formulating their own interpretation of it. They also present worlds that readers want to be a part of and characters that readers want to spend time with (whether from affection or morbid curiosity or a hundred other reasons). And just like we all get something different out of various relationships, so too do we connect with books differently than other readers do.

“…in a theoretical essay, one usually wants to demonstrate a particular thesis or to give an answer to a specific problem. Whereas in a poem or a novel, one wants to represent life with all its inconsistency.”

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Defining fiction

“Fictional characters live in an incomplete—or, to be ruder and politically incorrect—handicapped world. But when we truly understand their fate, we begin to suspect that we too, as citizens of the here and now, frequently encounter our destiny simply because we think of our world in the same way that fictional characters think of theirs. Fiction suggests that perhaps our view of the actual world is as imperfect as the view that fictional characters have of their world.”

Now let’s take a look at Eco’s four rules for writing creative fiction.

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Rule 1: Start with a seminal image

Each of Eco’s novels began with a striking image around which he constructed an elaborate narrative.

For The Name of the Rose, he began with the image of a monk being poisoned while reading a book, which first came into his mind forty years earlier. For Baudolino, Eco began with the image of the city of Constantinople set alight by the Crusaders at the start of the thirteenth century. For Foucault’s Pendulum, he began by imagining the juxtaposition of two things: the device made by physicist Léon Foucault in 1851 to demonstrate the earth’s rotation and a trumpeter playing in a cemetery on a sunny morning.

“But how to get from the pendulum to the trumpeter? To answer this question took me eight years, and the answer was the novel.”

Once he had the seminal image, Eco would construct an entire world around it. Everything else in the book was about making that image make sense. Once you pick your image, you close the door on hundreds of other choices. To make that image work, you need to build your world so that image fits seamlessly, and so there are many element which you can no longer incorporate.

The place in which your image is set, the time, the people in it—all of these will help you determine what characteristics your world must have.

If your seminal image is a woman in a torn coat holding a drooping bouquet of daffodils in the rain at the end of a long driveway, here are some of the questions you might immediately ask yourself: Is she coming or going? Do daffodils grow everywhere? How old is she? What color is her coat? What style? Is the driveway paved?

Once you start to answer these questions, more will appear. You will start to get a feeling for the style and genre of your story. If you make your audience care about the woman, you will have to get her out of the rain. Where can she go? Does she have a car? Is she walking? How long to the closest refuge? You will make decisions. You will choose elements for your setting that are incompatible with others. You will choose plot points that necessitate certain elements in the backstory of your characters, which will then influence what they do during the course of your story.

Your choices will narrow. You will begin to build your world.

Eco cautioned that having a multitude of images in mind is a bad sign: “If there are too many seminal images, this is a sign that they are not seminal.”

Sometimes two or three seminal images can be signposts as you build your story. But one image will always be the starting point, and as you keep creating, you may find those other images need to be discarded.

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Rule 2: Don’t expect inspiration to come out of nowhere

It’s a common misconception that the inspiration for a great work of fiction comes to a writer in a sudden flash. While particular ideas or images can seem to appear out of nowhere, they are often still the product of the long, slow digestion of relevant material. Creating a whole world requires a great deal of contextual information.

For Eco’s first novel, the material for it was collected in his subconscious mind for many years, during which he never intended to turn it into a work of fiction. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the Middle Ages which inspired years of interest in the subject, and so he accumulated “twenty-five years’ worth of old filing cards” on the topic. As he began writing his novel, he had a rich collection of knowledge about the area from which to draw information.

After a chance suggestion, Eco discovered the inspiration he’d accumulated for The Name of the Rose:

“As soon as I returned home, I hunted through my desk drawers and retrieved a scribbling from the previous year—a piece of paper on which I had written down some names of monks. It meant that in the most secret part of my soul the idea for a novel had already been growing, but I was unaware of it.…When I decided to write the novel, it was as if I had opened a big closet where I had been piling up my medieval files for decades. All that material was there at my feet and I had only to select what I needed.“

To illustrate the reality of creative writing, Eco gives the example of Alphonse Lamartine. The French poet claimed to have written one of his most famous works in a sudden flash of inspiration. After his death, a plethora of versions of that poem were found in his study, revealing he’d actually worked on it for years.

For later novels, Eco spent years studying relevant subject matter to fit with his main idea. Although he always picked topics he had some knowledge of to begin with, later novels required far more research than his first. Once he had his seminal image and knowledge of relevant subjects, he used these to create an entire world for his story to live in.

Curiosity is a much more useful starting place for a writer than inspiration. Even with a topic you know well, there is so much you don’t know. Being curious about what you would need to know to set your story in a field hospital during the Battle of Vimy Ridge, a penthouse in contemporary Hong Kong, or a saloon on a planet in the Andromeda Galaxy is how you find the inspiration to write and the elements of the story you want to tell.

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Rule 3: Create an entire world for your story to live inside

Whether you aim to set your story in the so-called “real world” or to create an entirely fabricated one, you need to know as much as possible about that world. It needs to have a consistent logic and rules that make sense to the reader. You then need to write with that world in mind, ensuring every part of your story truly inhabits your world.

Writing of the time he spent researching for novels in order to gain inspiration, Eco explained:

“What do I do during the years of literary pregnancy? I collect documents; I visit places and draw maps; I note the layouts of buildings, or perhaps a ship…and I sketch the faces of characters…I give the impression of doing a lot of different things, but I am always focused on capturing ideas, images, words for my story.”

For example, for The Name of the Rose, Eco sketched hundreds of maps and plans of its locations so he would know how long it would take characters to get between different places. When writing dialogue for scenes in which characters conversed while walking, he knew precisely how long to make each conversation, so “the layout of my fictional world dictated the length of the dialogues.”

Eco believed that the physical world a writer creates should dictate a great deal of the way they write. In particular, he believed in knowing what locations looked like “down to the last millimeter.” He went on to write:

“To narrate something, you start as a sort of demiurge who creates a world—a world that must be as precise as possible, so that you can move around in it with total confidence.…If you design every detail of a world, you know how to describe it in terms of space, since you have it before your eyes.“

Having created an entire world, you will then have a clear sense of the kind of language to use within it. You will be influenced not only by the time and place but also by the history of your characters. You will know more about your world than will ever make it into the pages of your story. You will know what one character received for Christmas when she was ten, and all the years before and after. You will know exactly how long a certain pub has been in business and the color of the fabric on its barstools. You will know the bus routes and the frequency of buses at each stop and what the driver looks like on each one. You will know intimately the details of every part of the world that your characters inhabit.

The makeup of your world will also influence other factors, such as the overall structure of the writing. Certain worlds demand a certain pacing. You will find a cadence that suits your world. A world in which everyone is moving quickly can suggest sentences in which the words tumble over each other. Intense actions demand short, clear descriptions so a reader can easily imagine they are going through it all with the character.

The rhythm of the words you use to tell a story has a huge impact on the story you tell.

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Rule 4: Enforce constraints on your writing

Once you have your seminal image, you’ve crafted a world for your story to live in, and you’ve gathered the material necessary for inspiration, Eco proposes one more step for writing creative fiction. You need to place some constraints on your work. Counterintuitively, constraints lead to greater creativity and make it easier to come up with ideas.

Eco writes:

“In order to enable the story to proceed, the writer must impose some constraints. Constraints are fundamental to every artistic endeavor. A painter who decides to use oils rather than tempera, a canvas rather than a wall; a composer who opts for a given key; a poet who chooses to use rhyming couplets, or hendecasyllables rather than alexandrines—all establish a system of constraints. So too do avant-garde artists, who seem to avoid constraints; they simply construct others, which go unnoticed.”

For example, in Foucault’s Pendulum, Eco imposed a constraint on the book’s structure. He decided it needed to have one hundred and twenty chapters and be divided into ten parts. Naturally, this decision shaped the way he wrote the book. In his novels, Eco also often employed temporal constraints. He might decide a particular character needed to be in a particular city on a particular date in order to witness a real historical event, or that a plot required the existence of a particular piece of technology, meaning events needed to happen after its invention.

Some constraints will naturally occur as you build your world. But if you find yourself creatively blocked, adding more constraints (instead of removing them) can help the writing flow. Constraints are powerful because they cut down the number of options open to you, making it easier to know how to proceed.

To give an example: if you’re writing a story and need to decide on several locations for different events to happen, you could decide they all need to happen in real cities with names beginning with the letter “C.” This reduces the number of possible locations, meaning less deliberation over where to situate your story. Once you choose the cities, you’re then further constrained by the nature of the places themselves. If you decide that the first chapter will take place in Chicago and the second in Copenhagen, the differences between those two cities will naturally influence what can happen in those parts of the story.

You may decide to kill a character, or make a commitment to another one that they are going to live. You may create obstacles to limit the movement of your characters. You may set yourself a cap on your word count. There are many ways to introduce constraints once you have started to write.

Ultimately, constraints are necessary to tell a story. Stories themselves have built-in constraints called the beginning and the end. No work of fiction can be everything to everyone. All choices in storytelling introduce constraints, and employing them deliberately is a powerful tool for a writer.

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Eco’s advice in Confessions of a Young Novelist offers some excellent signposts for aspiring fiction writers. But remember: “In order to write a successful novel, one needs to keep certain recipes secret.”

The post How to Write Creative Fiction: Umberto Eco’s Four Rules appeared first on Farnam Street.

Imagine if you, as a budding productivity enthusiast, one day gained access to a time machine and decided to take a trip back several decades to the office of one of your old-timey business heroes. Let’s call him Tony.

You disguise yourself as a janitor and figure a few days of observation should be enough to reveal the secret of that CEO’s incredible productivity and shrewd decision-making. You want to learn the habits and methods that enabled him to transform an entire industry for good.

Arriving at the (no doubt smoke-filled) office, you’re a little surprised to find it’s far from a hive of activity. In fact, the people you can see around seem to be doing next to nothing. Outside your hero’s office, his secretary lounges at her desk (and let’s face it, the genders wouldn’t have been the other way around.) Let’s call her Gloria. She doesn’t appear busy at all. You observe for half an hour as she reads, tidies her desk, and chats with other secretaries who pass by. They don’t seem busy either. Confused as to why Tony would squander money on idle staff, you stick around for a few more hours.

With a bit more observation, you realize your initial impression was entirely wrong. Gloria does indeed do nothing much of the time. But every so often, a request, instruction, or alert comes from Tony and she leaps into action. Within minutes, she answers the call, sends the letter, reschedules the appointment, or finds the right document. Any time he has a problem, she solves it right away. There’s no to-do list, no submitting a ticket, no waiting for a reply to an email for either Tony or Gloria.

As a result, Tony’s day goes smoothly and efficiently. Every minute of his time goes on the most important part of his work—making decisions—and not on dealing with trivial inconveniences like waiting in line at the post office.

All that time Gloria spends doing nothing isn’t wasted time. It’s slack: excess capacity allowing for responsiveness and flexibility. The slack time is important because it means she never has a backlog of tasks to complete. She can always deal with anything new straight away. Gloria’s job is to ensure Tony is as busy as he needs to be. It’s not to be as busy as possible.

If you ever find yourself stressed, overwhelmed, sinking into stasis despite wanting to change, or frustrated when you can’t respond to new opportunities, you need more slack in your life.

In Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency, Tom DeMarco explains that most people and organizations fail to recognize the value of slack. Although the book is now around twenty years old, its primary message is timeless and worth revisiting.

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The enemy of efficiency

“You’re efficient when you do something with minimum waste. And you’re effective when you’re doing the right something.”

Many organizations are obsessed with efficiency. They want to be sure every resource is utilized to its fullest capacity and everyone is sprinting around every minute of the day doing something. They hire expert consultants to sniff out the faintest whiff of waste.

As individuals, many of us are also obsessed with the mirage of total efficiency. We schedule every minute of our day, pride ourselves on forgoing breaks, and berate ourselves for the slightest moment of distraction. We view sleep, sickness, and burnout as unwelcome weaknesses and idolize those who never seem to succumb to them. This view, however, fails to recognize that efficiency and effectiveness are not the same thing.

Total efficiency is a myth. Let’s return to Gloria and Tony. Imagine if Tony decided to assign her more work to ensure she spends a full eight hours a day busy. Would that be more efficient? Not really. Slack time enables her to respond to his requests right away, thus being effective at her job. If Gloria is already occupied, Tony will have to wait and whatever he’s doing will get held up. Both of them would be less effective as a result.

Any time we eliminate slack, we create a build-up of work. DeMarco writes, “As a practical matter, it is impossible to keep everyone in the organization 100 percent busy unless we allow for some buffering at each employee’s desk. That means there is an inbox where work stacks up.”

Many of us have come to expect work to involve no slack time because of the negative way we perceive it. In a world of manic efficiency, slack often comes across as laziness or a lack of initiative. Without slack time, however, we know we won’t be able to get through new tasks straight away, and if someone insists we should, we have to drop whatever we were previously doing. One way or another, something gets delayed. The increase in busyness may well be futile:

“It’s possible to make an organization more efficient without making it better. That’s what happens when you drive out slack. It’s also possible to make an organization a little less efficient and improve it enormously. In order to do that, you need to reintroduce enough slack to allow the organization to breathe, reinvent itself, and make necessary change.”

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Defining slack

DeMarco defines slack as “the degree of freedom required to effect change. Slack is the natural enemy of efficiency and efficiency is the natural enemy of slack.” Elsewhere, he writes: “Slack represents operational capacity sacrificed in the interests of long-term health.”

To illustrate the concept, DeMarco asks the reader to imagine one of those puzzle games consisting of eight numbered tiles in a box, with one empty space so you can slide them around one at a time. The objective is to shuffle the tiles into numerical order. That empty space is the equivalent of slack. If you remove it, the game is technically more efficient, but “something else is lost. Without the open space, there is no further possibility of moving tiles at all. The layout is optimal as it is, but if time proves otherwise, there is no way to change it.”

Having a little bit of wiggle room allows us to respond to changing circumstances, to experiment, and to do things that might not work.

Slack consists of excess resources. It might be time, money, people on a job, or even expectations. Slack is vital because it prevents us from getting locked into our current state, unable to respond or adapt because we just don’t have the capacity.

Not having slack is taxing. Scarcity weighs on our minds and uses up energy that could go toward doing the task at hand better. It amplifies the impact of failures and unintended consequences.

Too much slack is bad because resources get wasted and people get bored. But, on the whole, an absence of slack is a problem far more often than an excess of it. If you give yourself too much slack time when scheduling a project that goes smoother than expected, you probably won’t spend the spare time sitting like a lemon. Maybe you’ll recuperate from an earlier project that took more effort than anticipated. Maybe you’ll tinker with some on-hold projects. Maybe you’ll be able to review why this one went well and derive lessons for the future. And maybe slack time is just your reward for doing a good job already! You deserve breathing room.

Slack also allows us to handle the inevitable shocks and surprises of life. If every hour in our schedules is accounted for, we can’t slow down to recover from a minor cold, shift a bit of focus to learning a new skill for a while, or absorb a couple of hours of technical difficulties.

In general, you need more slack than you expect. Unless you have a lot of practice, your estimations of how long things will take or how difficult they are will almost always be on the low end. Most of us treat best-case scenarios as if they are the most likely scenarios and will inevitably come to pass, but they rarely do.

You also need to keep a vigilant eye on how fast you use up your slack so you can replenish it in time. For example, you might want to review your calendar once per week to check it still has white space each day and you haven’t allowed meetings to fill up your slack time. Think of the forms of slack that are more important to you, then check up on them regularly. If you find you’re running out of slack, take action.

Once in a while, you might need to forgo slack to reap the benefits of constraints. Lacking slack in the short term or in a particular area can force you to be more inventive. If you find yourself struggling to come up with a creative solution, try consciously reducing your slack. For example, give yourself five-minutes to brainstorm ideas or ask yourself what you might do if your budget were slashed by 90%.

Most of the time, though, it’s critical to guard your slack with care. It’s best to assume you’ll always tend toward using it up—or other people will try to steal it from you. Set clear boundaries in your work and keep an eye on tasks that might inflate.

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Slack and change

In the past, people and organizations could sometimes get by without much slack—at least for a while. Now, even as slack keeps becoming more and more vital for survival, we’re keener than ever to eliminate it in the name of efficiency. Survival requires constant change and reinvention, which “require a commodity that is absent in our time as it has never been before. That commodity—the catalytic ingredient of change—is slack.” DeMarco goes on to write:

“Slack is the time when reinvention happens. It is time when you are not 100 percent busy doing the operational business of your firm. Slack is the time when you are 0 percent busy. Slack at all levels is necessary to make the organization work effectively and to grow. It is the lubricant of change. Good companies excel in creative use of slack. And bad ones only obsess about removing it.”

Only when we are 0 percent busy can we step back and look at the bigger picture of what we’re doing. Slack allows us to think ahead. To consider whether we’re on the right trajectory. To contemplate unseen problems. To mull over information. To decide if we’re making the right trade-offs. To do things that aren’t scalable or that might not have a chance to prove profitable for a while. To walk away from bad deals.

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Slack and productivity

The irony is that we achieve far more in the long run when we have slack. We are more productive when we don’t try to be productive all the time.

DeMarco explains that the amount of work each person in an organization has is never static: “Things change on a day-to-day basis. This results in new unevenness of the tasks, with some people incurring additional work (their buffers build up), while others become less loaded, since someone ahead of them in the work chain is slower to generate their particular kind of work to pass along.” An absence of slack is unsustainable. Inevitably, we end up needing additional resources, which have to come from somewhere.

Being comfortable with sometimes being 0 percent busy means we think about whether we’re doing the right thing. This is in contrast to grabbing the first task we see so no one thinks we’re lazy. The expectation of “constant busyness means efficiency” creates pressure to always look occupied and keep a buffer of work on hand. If we see our buffer shrinking and we want to keep busy, the only possible solution is to work slower.

Trying to eliminate slack causes work to expand. There’s never any free time because we always fill it.

Amos Tversky said the secret to doing good research is to always be a little underemployed; you waste years by not being able to waste hours. Those wasted hours are necessary to figure out if you’re headed in the right direction.

The post Efficiency is the Enemy appeared first on Farnam Street.

Deliberate practice is the best technique for achieving expert performance in every field—including writing, teaching, sports, programming, music, medicine, therapy, chess, and business. But there’s much more to deliberate practice than 10,000 hours. Read this to learn how to accelerate your learning, overcome the “OK” plateau, turn experience into expertise, and enhance your focus.

What is deliberate practice?

“Engaged in the creative process we feel more alive than ever, because we are making something and not merely consuming, masters of the small reality we create. In doing this work, we are in fact creating ourselves.” —Robert Greene, Mastery

Deliberate practice is what turns amateurs into professionals. Across every field, deliberate practice is what creates top performers and what they use to stay at the top of their game. It’s absolutely essential for expert performance.

As a general concept, “practice” means preparing. It’s the act of repeatedly performing certain activities with the intention of improving a specific associated skill. We rehearse what to do in low-pressure situations so we’ll be better when we use a skill in situations where something is actually at stake, such as in a competition or in the workplace. Although this definition may seem obvious, it’s crucial to distinguish between doing something and practicing it, because they’re not always synonymous.

The key distinction between doing and practicing is that we’re only practicing something when we do it in a way that makes us better at it—or at least with that intention.

Deliberate practice means practicing with a clear awareness of the specific components of a skill we’re aiming to improve and exactly how to improve them. Unlike regular practice, in which we work on a skill by repeating it again and again until it becomes almost mindless, deliberate practice is a laser-focused activity. It requires us to pay unwavering attention to what we’re doing at any given moment and whether it’s an improvement or not.

Geoff Colvin summarizes deliberate practice as such in Talent Is Overrated:

Deliberate practice is characterized by several elements, each worth examining. It is activity designed specifically to improve performance, often with a teacher’s help; it can be repeated a lot; feedback on results is continuously available; it’s highly demanding mentally, whether the activity is purely intellectual, such as chess or business-related activities, or heavily physical, such as sports; and it isn’t much fun.

The extraordinary power of deliberate practice is that it aims at constant progress. Practitioners are not content with repeating a skill at the same level. They have metrics for measuring their performance. And they aspire to see those metrics get continuously better.

While engaging in deliberate practice, we are always looking for errors or areas of weakness. Once we identify one, we establish a plan for improving it. If one approach doesn’t work, we keep trying new ones until something does.

Using deliberate practice, we can overcome many limitations that we might view as fixed. We can go further than we might even think possible when we begin. Deliberate practice creates new physical and mental capabilities—it doesn’t just leverage existing ones.

The more we engage in deliberate practice, the greater our capabilities become. Our minds and bodies are far more malleable than we usually realize.

Deliberate practice is a universal technique, and you can employ it for whatever you’re trying to be the best (or just get a little bit better) at. It’s easiest to apply to competitive fields with clear measurements and standards, including music, dance, football/soccer, cricket, hockey, basketball, golf, horse riding, swimming, and chess.

But deliberate practice is also invaluable for improving performance in fields such as teaching, nursing, surgery, therapy, programming, trading, and investing. It can even accelerate your progress in widely applicable skills such as writing, decision-making, leadership, studying, and spoken communication.

The key in any area is to identify objective standards for performance, study top performers, and then design practice activities reflecting what they do. Recent decades have seen dramatic leaps in what people are capable of doing in many fields. The explanation for this is that we’re getting better at understanding and applying the principles of deliberate practice. As a field advances, people can learn from the best of what those who came before them figured out. The result is that now average high-schoolers achieve athletic feats and children advance to levels of musical prowess that would have seemed unthinkable a century earlier. And there’s little evidence to suggest we’ve reached the limits of our physical or mental abilities in any area whatsoever.

Many of us spend a lot of time each week practicing different skills in our lives and work. But we don’t automatically get better just because we repeat the same actions and behaviors, even if we spend hours per day doing it. Research suggests that in areas such as medicine, people with many years of experience are often no better than novices—and may even be worse.

If we want to improve a skill, we need to know what exactly has to change and what might get us there. Otherwise, we plateau.

Some people will tell you it’s only possible for anyone to improve at anything through deliberate practice, and any other sort of practice is a waste of time. This is an exaggeration. In reality, regular practice works for reinforcing and maintaining skills. It can also help us improve skills, particularly in the early stages of learning something. However, deliberate practice is the only way to:

1. Reach expert-level performance and enjoy competitive success
2. Overcome plateaus in our skill level
3. Improve at a skill much faster than through regular practice

If you’re just doing something for fun and don’t care about constantly improving at it, you don’t need deliberate practice. For example, maybe you like to go for a walk around a local park in the afternoons to clear your head. Although you’re practicing that walk each time you go, you probably don’t care about increasing your walking speed day by day. It’s enough that the repetitions further ingrain the habit and help maintain a certain level of physical fitness. Not everything in life is a competition! But if you want to keep getting better at something as fast as possible or reach an expert level, deliberate practice is vital.

Another important point to note is that deliberate practice isn’t just a catchy name we came up with out of thin air. The term is largely attributed to Karl Anders Ericsson, one of the most influential figures of all time in the field of performance psychology. It’s something many scientists have studied for decades. Everything we say here is supported by substantial academic research, particularly Ericsson’s work.

We’ll also debunk the numerous myths swirling around deliberate practice as a concept and reveal some of its significant limitations. So if you’re looking for quick hacks for overnight success, you might want to look elsewhere. If you want a realistic roadmap for improving your performance, read on.

The elements of deliberate practice

“Life is not always a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.” —Jack London

In this section, we’ll break down the fundamental elements of deliberate practice and exactly how to incorporate them into your practice sessions. As Ericsson wrote in Peak, “No matter what the field, the most effective approach to improving performance is to follow a single set of principles.” We’ll explain why each component is crucial and how they apply to different fields, and we’ll cover multiple ways to implement them depending on your goals.

Deliberate practice is structured and methodical

“Everyone has talent. What’s rare is the courage to follow it to the dark places where it leads.” —Erica Jong

As humans, we’re wired to want to do the easiest thing at all times in order to conserve energy. Put more simply, it’s in our nature to be lazy. When we practice something a lot, we develop habits that become almost effortless to enact. While that’s beneficial in many areas of our lives (and helps us survive), it’s something we have to overcome in order to engage in deliberate practice. We can’t expect constant improvement if we keep repeating the elements of a skill we already know how to do with ease. That’s only enough if we’re just having fun or want to reinforce our habits.

Deliberate practice is structured to improve specific elements of a skill through defined techniques. Practitioners focus above all on what they can’t do. They seek out areas of weaknesses impacting their overall performance, then target those. At every stage, they set tailored, measurable goals in order to gauge whether their practice is effective at moving them forwards. Numbers are a deliberate practitioner’s best friend.

If you want to reach an expert level of performance, you need to begin practice sessions with a plan in mind. You need to know what you’re working on, why, and how you intend to improve it. You also need a way to tell if your improvement efforts aren’t working and if you need to try a new tactic. Once you reach your goal for that particular component of the skill, it’s time to identify a new area of weakness to work on next.

Having lots of little, realistic goals with a game plan for achieving them makes deliberate practice motivating. There’s a sense of ongoing movement, yet the next step is always a realistic stretch. Day by day, the gains from deliberate practice may feel modest. But when we look back over a longer period of time, small bits of progress compound into gigantic leaps.

How to implement this: Take the skill you’re aiming to improve and break it down into the smallest possible component parts. Make a plan for working through them in a logical order, beginning with the fundamentals, then building upon them. Decide which parts you’d like to master over the next month. Put your practice sessions in your calendar, then plan precisely which parts of the skill you’re going to work on during each session.

Don’t expect your plan to be perfect. You’ll likely need to keep modifying it as you discover new elements or unexpected weaknesses. The most important thing is to always go into practice with a plan for what you’re working on and how. Knowing what you’re doing next is the best way to stay on track and avoid aimless time-wasting. That means seeking to keep figuring out what separates you from the next level of performance so you can concentrate on that.

Deliberate practice is challenging and uncomfortable

“One must develop an instinct for what one can just barely achieve through one’s greatest efforts.” —Albert Einstein (attributed)

Imagine the world from the perspective of a baby learning to walk for the first time. It’s not usually an easy process. They need to develop a lot of new skills and capabilities. They need to build enough muscular strength to stand upright without support. And they need to learn how to coordinate their limbs well enough to move around. Along the way, a baby needs to develop numerous sub-skills, such as how to grip supports to pull themselves up. It likely takes thousands of attempts to master walking—as well as numerous, falls, collisions, and other mishaps. We might not remember the process as adults, but a baby learning to walk needs to spend many hours challenging themselves and moving incrementally out of their comfort zone.

If we want to use deliberate practice, we could do with learning a thing or two from babies. Deliberate practice isn’t necessarily fun while we’re doing it. In fact, most of the time it’s a process of repeated frustration and failure. We have to fall down a dozen times for every step we take. That’s the whole point.

Seeing as deliberate practice requires us to keep targeting our weakest areas, it means spending time doing stuff we’re not good at. In the moment, that can feel pretty miserable. But the quickest route to improvement involves stepping outside of our comfort zones.

The reason why people who have spent decades doing something are not necessarily better than newbies is that they’re liable to get complacent and stop pushing themselves. We need to keep attempting to do things that feel out of reach at the moment.

In his studies of elite violinists, Ericsson asked them to rate different practice activities by how enjoyable they were and how much they contributed to improving performance. Invariably, there was an inverse correlation between the usefulness of an activity and its enjoyability. As Ericsson puts it in Peak:

The reason that most people don’t possess these extraordinary physical capabilities isn’t because they don’t have the capacity for them, but rather because they’re satisfied to live in the comfortable rut of homeostasis and never do the work that is required to get out of it. They live in the world of “good enough.” The same thing is true for all the mental activities we engage in.

Elsewhere in the book, he writes “This is a fundamental truth about any sort of practice: If you never push yourself beyond your comfort zone, you will never improve.” The interesting part is the more time you spend deliberately practicing, the more comfortable you’ll become with being uncomfortable.

Daniel Coyle writes in The Little Book of Talent:

There is a place, right on the edge of your ability, where you learn best and fastest. It’s called the sweet spot.…The underlying pattern is the same: Seek out ways to stretch yourself. Play on the edges of your competence. As Albert Einstein said, “One must develop an instinct for what one can just barely achieve through one’s greatest efforts.”

The key word is ‘barely.’

A quick way to assess if you’re doing deliberate practice or just regular rote practice is to ask yourself if you ever feel bored or zone out during practice sessions. If the answer is yes, you’re probably not practicing deliberately.

Deliberate practice isn’t boring. Frustrating, yes. Maddening, yes. Annoying, even. But never boring. As soon as practicing a skill gets comfortable, it’s time to up the stakes. Challenging yourself is about more than trying to work harder—it means doing new things.

Pushing ourselves just beyond the limits of our abilities is uncomfortable, yet it’s how we do our best—and indeed, it can be the source of some of our greatest moments of satisfaction. According to psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, we often experience happiness as a result of entering a “flow” state, which occurs when we intensely focus on an activity that is challenging yet achievable. During moments of flow, we become so immersed in the activity that we lose any sense of time or of ourselves.

Noel Tichy, professor at the University of Michigan business school and the former chief of General Electric’s famous management development center at Crotonville, puts the concept of practice into three zones: the comfort zone, the learning zone, and the panic zone.

Most of the time when we’re practicing, we’re really doing activities in our comfort zone. This doesn’t help us improve because we can already do these activities easily. On the other hand, operating in the panic zone leaves us paralyzed, as the activities are too difficult and we don’t know where to start. The only way to make progress is to operate in the learning zone, which are those activities that are just out of our reach.

Repetition inside the comfort zone does not equal deliberate practice. Deliberate practice requires that you operate in the learning zone and you repeat the activity a lot with feedback.

How to implement this: Each time you practice a component of a skill, aim to make it 10% harder than the level you find comfortable.

Once per month, have a practice session where you set yourself an incredibly ambitious stretch goal—not impossible, just well above your current level. Challenge yourself to see how close you can get to it. You might surprise yourself and find you perform far better than expected.

A common deliberate practice mistake is to plan a long practice session, then adjust the intensity of your practice to allow you to engage in a skill for the whole time. It’s far more effective to engage in “sprints.” Practice with the most intense focus you can manage for short periods of time, then take breaks. Seeing as you learn most when you stretch yourself beyond your current capabilities, shorter, more challenging practice periods are the way to go.

Deliberate practice requires rest and recovery time

“There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep.” —Homer, The Odyssey

Seeing as deliberate practice is so challenging, it’s impossible to do it all day long. Across fields, top practitioners rarely spend more than around three to five hours per day on deliberate practice, at the high end. They may work for more hours than that per day, but few can sustain the mental energy to engage in deliberate practice for eight hours a day. Additional hours often result in diminishing negative returns, meaning more practice makes performance worse because it results in burnout. Geoff Colvin writes:

The work is so great that it seems no one can sustain it for very long. A finding that is remarkably consistent across disciplines is that four or five hours a day seems to be the upper limit of deliberate practice, and this is frequently accomplished in sessions lasting no more than an hour to ninety minutes.

Ericsson’s studies of elite violinists found they often took afternoon naps and slept an average of eight hours per night, considerably more than the average person. They were highly aware of the importance of sleep.

Even fitting in a single hour per day of deliberate practice is ample time to make substantial improvements, especially when we’re consistent with committing to it over the long haul. Continuous investments in success compound. In the long run, commitment pays off.

Not only do most deliberate practitioners not spend all day at it, they also devote a lot of time to recuperation and recovery. They sleep as much as their bodies need. They nap if necessary. They take frequent, refreshing breaks. Most of us understand that rest is necessary after physical activity. But we can underestimate its importance after mental activity, too. Deliberate practice needs to be sustainable for the long term. How long a person keeps at a skill is often far more important than how many hours a day they spend on it.

When you’re practicing deliberately, truly practice. When you’re recuperating, truly relax. No one can spend every waking hour on deliberate practice.

Sleep is a vital part of deliberate practice. Being asleep doesn’t mean you’re not still improving your skill. We consolidate memories at night, moving them from short-term to long-term memory. And we can’t exactly benefit from deliberate practice sessions if we don’t remember what we learn each time. Not only that, but sleep deprivation also results in a plethora of negative cognitive effects that impact performance. If we skimp on sleep, we’re likely to forget far more of what we learn during deliberate practice sessions, rendering them less useful.

When you’re not engaging in deliberate practice, your brain is still at work. During deliberate practice, we’re in focused mode. When we let our minds wander freely while at rest, we’re in diffuse mode. Although that time feels less productive, it’s when we form connections and mull over problems. Both modes of thinking are equally valuable, but it’s the harmony between them that matters. We can’t maintain the effort of the focused mode for long. At some point, we need to relax and slip into the diffuse mode. Learning a complex skill—a language, a musical instrument, chess, a mental model—requires both modes to work together. We master the details in focused mode, then comprehend how everything fits together in diffuse mode. It’s about combining creativity with execution.

How to implement this: Make a list of activities you can engage in without too much conscious thought, letting yourself daydream while you do them. Common examples include going for a walk, washing the dishes, taking a shower, free-writing in a journal, playing with a toy like Lego, driving a familiar route, gardening, cooking, listening to music, or just gazing out the window. When you feel yourself getting tired or hitting a roadblock during deliberate practice, don’t keep pushing for too long. You want to be stretching yourself, not exhausting yourself. Instead, switch to one of those more relaxing activities for at least five minutes. You’ll likely come back to practice with new connections or at last feeling refreshed.

Deliberate practice involves constant feedback and measurement

“Deliberate practice is hard. It hurts. But it works. More of it equals better performance and tons of it equals great performance.” —Geoff Colvin, Talent Is Overrated

Practicing something without knowing whether you are getting better is pointless. Yet that is what most of us do every day without thinking.

As we saw before, deliberate practice involves continuously stretching yourself to improve on weak areas of a skill. For that to work, practitioners require constant feedback about their current level of performance so they can identify what works for making it better.

What gets measured gets managed. To engage in deliberate practice, you need a way of measuring the most instructive metrics related to your performance. Seeing how those metrics change is the sole way to know if practice is working or not. Top performers across fields tend to spend time examining their past performance with care to identify areas for improvement. For example, a tennis player might film themselves playing a match so they can go through the footage frame by frame afterward. This provides valuable feedback, because they can figure out what might have held them back during weaker moments.

In fields such as sports and chess, measuring performance tends to be straightforward. In other areas such as business, measurements are harder to take, and there may be no established markers of success. The influence of random factors may also be stronger, making it less clear whether technique changes are actually having an influence or not. When you engage in deliberate practice, it’s always important to be aware of how strongly correlated your practice and your performance are likely to be.

When measuring your performance, beware of vanity metrics. These are numbers that are easy to calculate and feel good to boost. But they don’t actually move the needle towards the real improvements in performance that help you reach your goals. For example, let’s say you’re using deliberate practice to improve the skill of email marketing, as part of the wider goal of getting more customers for your business. The number of email subscribers is a vanity metric; the number of paying customers is a useful metric. It’s completely possible to increase the former without a corresponding increase in the latter.

How to implement this: Identify the most significant metrics related to performance in your chosen skill and keep a record of them each time you practice. It’s easy to fool yourself without a clear record of how you’re doing. You might want to break the skill down into a few different parts to measure it, but make sure you’re not fixating on vanity metrics.

Deliberate practice is most effective with the help of a coach or some kind of teacher

“The best teacher is not the one who knows most but the one who is most capable of reducing knowledge to that simple compound of the obvious and wonderful.” —H.L. Mencken (attributed)

Deliberate practice is most effective when conducted with some kind of coach who can give feedback, point out errors, suggest techniques for improvement, and provide vital motivation. Although mastering any skill requires a lot of time engaging in solitary practice, working with a coach at least some of the time is incredibly valuable. In some fields such as sports and music, it’s common for a coach to be present all of the time. But most top performers benefit from a combination of coaching and solitary practice.

When we look at the lives of people who achieved great things, we often find that those who did so at a young age or in a shorter time than expected benefited from having fantastic teachers. For example, physicist Werner Heisenberg had the epiphany that led to the formulation of matrix mechanics a mere five years after commencing serious study of physics. But he no doubt benefited from the mentorship of Niels Bohr and Max Born, two of the foremost physicists at the time.

Even people at the most elite levels of performance across fields can benefit from specialist coaching. Engaging in something and teaching that thing are separate skills in themselves. The best practitioners are not always the best teachers because teaching is a skill in itself.

Ericsson explained that “the best way to get past any barrier is to come at it from a different direction, which is one reason it is useful to work with a teacher or coach.” We often make the same mistakes again and again because we simply don’t realize what we’re doing. Our performance falls into ruts and we can’t figure out why we’re running into the same problem yet again.

A coach can see your performance from the outside, without the influence of overconfidence and other biases. They can identify your blind spots. They can help you interpret key metrics and feedback.

Ericsson went on to say that “even the most motivated and intelligent student will advance more quickly under the tutelage of someone who knows the best order in which to learn things, who understands and can demonstrate the proper way to perform various skills, who can provide useful feedback, and who can devise practice activities designed to overcome particular weaknesses.” An experienced coach will have worked with many people on the same skill so they’ll be able to advise on the best ways to structure practice. They’ll know when you’re just repeating what you find easy, and they’ll be able to push you to the next level.

Teachers or coaches see what you miss and make you aware of where you’re falling short. Geoff Colvin writes:

In some fields, especially intellectual ones such as the arts, sciences, and business, people may eventually become skilled enough to design their own practice. But anyone who thinks they’ve outgrown the benefits of a teacher’s help should at least question that view. There’s a reason why the world’s best golfers still go to teachers.

But what if you don’t have access to a coach? What if you don’t have the means to hire one or one isn’t available for your particular skill? In that case, it’s still possible to apply the same principles that make a coach useful by yourself. Top performers across fields build the skill of metacognition, essentially making it possible for them to coach themselves. Colvin explains:

The best performers observe themselves closely. They are in effect able to step outside themselves, monitor what is happening in their own minds, and ask how it’s going. Researchers call this metacognition—knowledge about your own knowledge, thinking about your own thinking. Top performers do this much more systematically than others do; it’s an established part of their routine.

…A critical part of self-evaluation is deciding what caused those errors. Average performers believe their errors were caused by factors outside their control: my opponent got lucky; the task was too hard; I just don’t have the natural ability for this. Top performers, by contrast, believe they are responsible for their errors. Note that this is not just a difference of personality or attitude. Recall that the best performers have set highly specific, technique-based goals and strategies for themselves; they have thought through exactly how they intend to achieve what they want. So when something doesn’t work, they can relate the failure to specific elements of their performance that may have misfired.

How to implement this: Don’t expect the same teacher to suit you forever. We usually need different teachers as our skill level progresses because we outgrow them. One attribute of a good teacher is that they know when to tell a student to move on. As we reach expert levels of performance, we need teachers who are themselves experts. If they’re always a step ahead, we can learn from their mistakes instead of making our own.

You get the best results from working with a coach if you show yourself to be receptive to constructive criticism, even if it’s uncomfortable to hear. If you respond badly, you disincentivize them from telling you what’s most useful to know. Top performers know the goal is to get better, not just to hear you’re already great.

Deliberate practice requires intrinsic motivation

Persisting with deliberate practice despite its innate difficulty and discomfort requires a lot of motivation. But that motivation needs to be intrinsic, meaning that it comes from inside us because we find an activity enjoyable for its own sake. This is in contrast to extrinsic motivation, where we participate in an activity to gain an external reward or avoid a negative consequence. Yet another reason why rest is important for deliberate practice is because it helps sustain motivation.

Although deliberate practice can lead to external rewards for using a skill (such as winning a competition or getting a promotion), this should not be the sole reason for practicing it. Extrinsic motivation is unlikely to be enough to get us through the long period of struggle necessary to master a skill. Becoming proficient at anything means spending time failing repeatedly at it, during which there are few external rewards. But if we enjoy getting better for its own sake, we have more of a chance of persevering until our practice starts paying off. We can navigate obstacles because we want to see where the road might take us—the obstacles aren’t roadblocks.

If you want to use deliberate practice to master a skill, you need to be willing to keep practicing it no matter what. Although brute force and rewarding yourself can be effective in the short run, it won’t work forever. If you’re planning to engage in deliberate practice to reach expert-level performance, make sure it’s a prospect you feel excited about even if it won’t always be fun.

Extrinsic motivation isn’t always ineffective, however. People who engage in consistent, sustainable deliberate practice tend to be adept at knowing when and how they need to employ external incentives. It’s important to reward yourself when you make progress in your practice and reflect on how far you’ve come, not just how far is left to go.

The need for intrinsic motivation is one reason why children who are pushed to develop a skill from a young age by their parents don’t always end up reaching a high level of performance and often quit as soon as they can.

How to implement this: Make a list of the reasons you want to work on a skill and the benefits getting better at it might bring. Before you begin a deep practice session, reread the list to remind you of why you’re bringing your full focus to something difficult. You could also list some of the benefits you’ve experienced from it in the past or include quotes from top performers in your field you find inspiring. It might feel cheesy, but it can provide a powerful boost during particularly difficult practice moments. Try to focus on intrinsic reasons and benefits, such as feeling fulfilled.

Keep a “motivation diary” for one week (or longer if possible.) Try setting an alarm to go off every fifteen minutes during each practice session. When the alarm sounds, score your motivation level out of ten (or whichever scale you prefer.) At the end of the week, review your notes to look for any patterns. For example, you might find that you begin to feel demotivated once you’ve been practicing for more than an hour, or that you feel more motivated in the morning, or some other pattern. This information could be enlightening for planning future deliberate practice sessions, even if it may disrupt your focus at the time. Another method is to simply take notes each day, documenting your current level of motivation to work on your chosen skill. Pay attention to any recurring influences. For example, you might feel more motivated to improve your skill after speaking with a more proficient friend, but less motivated after a bad night’s sleep.

One potent option for sustaining motivation is to find someone who can be a reliable cheerleader for you. In an Ask Me Anything session for Farnam Street members, Tesla co-founder Marc Tarpenning explained that having a cofounder is vital for entrepreneurs because partnering with someone else helps sustain motivation. It’s rare that both founders feel demotivated on the same day. So if one is struggling, the other can provide the encouragement needed to stay resilient. Having someone to provide extrinsic motivation when you need it can help you persevere at deliberate practice. Your cheerleader doesn’t necessarily need to be working on the same skill themselves. They just need to understand your reasons and be willing to remind you of them when you start to doubt whether the hard work is worthwhile.

Deliberate practice takes time and can be a lifelong process

Although deliberate practice tends to result in much faster progress than normal practice, truly mastering a skill is a lifelong process. Reaching the top of a field can take years or even decades, depending on its competitiveness. As the bar for success in many areas keeps rising, more deliberate practice is required to stand out.

When we applaud the top people in any field, we often fail to appreciate that their success almost always came after many years of deliberate practice, which Robert Greene refers to in Mastery as “a largely self-directed apprenticeship that lasts some five to ten years [and] receives little attention because it does not contain stories of great achievement or discovery.” They may have ultimately benefited from a lucky break, but their extensive preparation meant they were ready for it. Great achievements tend to come later in life or even near the ends of careers. Those who succeeded young started very young.

Throughout Ericsson’s decades of research, he searched high and low for an example of a true prodigy: someone born with an innate, remarkable talent. He never found a single proven example. Instead, he discovered that people labeled as prodigies invariably put in enormous amounts of deliberate practice—they just often obscured it on purpose or started at a young age.

Although innate differences count when beginning to learn something (and people who begin with advantages may be more likely to persist), in the long run, deliberate practice always wins out.

David Shenk writes in The Genius in All of Us: “Short-term intensity cannot replace long-term commitment. Many crucial changes take place over long periods of time. Physiologically, it’s impossible to become great overnight.”

According to psychologist John Hayes, creative genius tends to come after ten years of studying relevant knowledge and developing skills. Hayes referred to this as the “ten years of silence.” In a study of seventy-six composers with sufficient biographical data available listed in The Lives of the Great Composers, Hayes found they almost always created their first notable works (defined as being those for which at least five different recordings were available at the time) at least ten years after commencing a serious study of music. Just three of the five hundred works Hayes included in his sample were composed after less than a decade of preparation—and those were produced in years eight or nine. In additional studies, Hayes found similar patterns for painters and poets.

Later research reinforces Hayes’ findings, and any casual survey of the lives of people widely considered to be geniuses tends to show a similar pattern. Making a breakthrough takes time. When it seems like someone was an overnight success, there’s almost always a long period of silent deliberate practice preceding it. Innate talents are just a starting point. If we want to master a skill, we need to commit to working on it for a lengthy period of time, likely with few rewards. While there are no assurances that with struggle comes reward, without it the odds are lower.

Not only do world-class performers spend a long time getting good at their core skill, those in creative fields tend to produce an enormous quantity of work before gaining recognition. For every piece of work we’re familiar with, there are likely dozens or even hundreds of others few people remember or ever saw.

For example, British prime minister Winston Churchill was known for his masterful public speaking. One of his best-known speeches “We Shall Fight on the Beaches,” given in June 1940, displayed the extent of his command of oration and helped build morale at the time. But it’s hard to overstate how prolific Churchill was as a speaker, giving an estimated 3,000 speeches during his political career. For every speech—an average of one per week between 1900 and 1955—he used deliberate practice to prepare. He engaged in focused rehearsals in front of a mirror, taking notes as he went to inform modifications. Churchill also left nothing to chance, planning his pauses and movements in advance. As well as devising his own techniques for added impact, he memorized the works of some of history’s most inspiring orators.

Although he doubtless began with a degree of innate talent (his father, Randolph Churchill, was also an admired orator), Churchill clearly used extensive deliberate practice to build upon it. While this impressive resume and history solidified his place on the throne of oratorical excellence, it’s important to note that he wasn’t a “born speaker”—in fact, he made many mistakes. And he learned from them. If you want to produce a masterpiece, you need to accept that you’ll make a lot of less remarkable work first.

Deliberate practice requires intense focus

“You seldom improve much without giving the task your full attention.” —Karl Anders Ericsson

The deeper we focus during deliberate practice sessions, the more we get out of them. Intense focus allows us to increase skills and break through plateaus. Developing your attention span can have a huge impact on your life. When asked about his success, Charlie Munger once said, “I succeeded because I have a long attention span.”

The authors of The Game Before the Game write, “If you can pay attention for only five minutes in practice, then take a break every five minutes. If you can pay attention for only twenty balls, don’t hit fifty. To be able to practice longer and maintain the quality of the practice, train yourself to pay attention for longer periods of time….Productive practice is about how present you can stay with your intention and is measured in the quality of the experience as opposed to the quantity of time used.”

A benefit of getting constant feedback is that it shows you what moves the needle towards improved performance and what is just running in place. Certain practice activities can feel good without having any impact. Top performers prioritize knowing what to prioritize. They always start with the most important thing because anything else is a distraction.

Intense focus is a multiplier of everything else. Keeping an eye on key metrics enables top performers to identify and systematically remove distractions from their lives. To be the best, you need to focus on both the micro and macro level. You need to pay full attention to what you’re doing in the current practice sessions, and you need to know how it fits into the bigger picture of your desired trajectory. Deliberate practice is part of the exploit phase of selecting opportunities.

As the authors of the International Handbook of Research in Professional and Practice-Based Learning write, “Practicing the right things is at the core of the theory of deliberate practice.”

How to implement this: Put the big rocks in first. You can do anything, but you can’t do everything. Figure out which practice activities have the biggest influence on your performance and plan to engage in those first before you even consider activities that offer marginal gains.

Deliberate practice leverages the spacing effect

One reason why consistent deliberate practice sessions over the course of years are more effective than longer sessions for a shorter period of time relates to the spacing effect. We can’t approach learning a skill through deliberate practice in the same way we quite likely approached studying for tests in school. If we better understand how our minds work, we can use them in the optimal way for learning. By leveraging the spacing effect, we can encode valuable knowledge related to our particular skill for life during practice sessions.

Memory mastery comes from repeated exposure to the same material. The spacing effect refers to how we are better able to recall information and concepts if we learn them in multiple sessions with increasingly large intervals between them. The most effective way to learn new information is through spaced repetition. It works for learning almost anything, and research has provided robust evidence of its efficacy for people of all ages—and even for animals.

Spaced repetition is also satisfying because it keeps us on the edge of our abilities (which, as we saw earlier, is a core element of deliberate practice.) Spaced sessions allow us to invest less total time to memorize than one single session, whereas we might get bored while going over the same material again and again in a single session. Of course, when we’re bored we pay less and less attention. The authors of Focused Determination put it this way:

There is also minimal variation in the way the material is presented to the brain when it is repeatedly visited over a short time. This tends to decrease our learning. In contrast, when repetition learning takes place over a longer period, it is more likely that the materials are presented differently. We have to retrieve the previously learned information from memory and hence reinforce it. All of this leads us to become more interested in the content and therefore more receptive to learning it.

We simply cannot practice something once and expect it to stick.

By engaging in deliberate practice on a regular basis, even if each practice session is short, we leverage the power of the spacing effect. Once we learn something through spaced repetition, it actually sticks with us. After a certain point, we may only need to revisit it every few years to keep our knowledge fresh. Even if we seem to forget something between repetitions, it later proves easier to relearn.

How to implement this: Forget about cramming. Each time you’re learning a new component of a skill, make a schedule for when you’ll review it. Typical systems involve going over information after an hour, then a day, then every other day, then weekly, then fortnightly, then monthly, then every six months, then yearly. Guess correctly and the information moves to the next level and is reviewed less often. Guess incorrectly and it moves down a level and is reviewed more often.

The history of deliberate practice

Karl Anders Ericsson: The expert on expertise

“Learning isn’t a way of reaching one’s potential but rather a way of developing it.” —Karl Anders Ericsson, Peak

The concept of deliberate practice is attributed to Florida State University psychologist Karl Anders Ericsson, who along with his collaborators performed pioneering research in the field of expert performance. Ericsson spent decades seeking to answer the question of what it takes to become really good at something difficult. His research often focused on medicine, music, and sports.

Ericsson’s interest in expert performance kicked off in the late 1970s, when he began working with psychologist Bill Chase at Carnegie Mellon University to study short-term memory. Together, they began a series of experiments to see how many random digits it’s possible to memorize after hearing them once. Ericsson and Chase used an undergrad named Steve Faloon as their guinea pig. For a few hours each week, they read out numbers and Faloon repeated as many as he could recall.

Although the experiment might sound dull, they uncovered something intriguing. In a 1982 paper entitled “Exceptional Memory,” Ericsson and Chase summarized their findings. Previously, researchers believed the average person could hold just seven random digits in their short-term memory. Yet with careful practice, Faloon began to remember more and more numbers. At his peak and after 200 hours of practice, he could recall 82 digits. To assess if this was a fluke, Ericsson tried the same with a friend, Dario Donatelli. Five years later, Donatelli could recall 113 digits. Both he and Faloon went far beyond what seemed to be an immovable ceiling on human performance and blew past existing world records.

The experience of seeing two people who started off with ordinary memories enhance their capabilities in such a drastic way inspired Ericsson to further study the effects of practice on skills. Could it be that extraordinary abilities came from extraordinary practice, not just innate ability?

Through his studies of expert performers in a range of fields, Ericsson concluded they practiced their skills in a fundamentally different way than amateur practitioners. Ericsson described this kind of practice as “deliberate” due to its methodical, hyper-conscious nature. He argued that experts become experts largely as a result of the way they practice. They may benefit from innate advantages, but their talents themselves are not innate.

Ericsson also believed that the standards in many additional fields could be improved far beyond their current level if practitioners employed the principles of deliberate practice. Indeed, many fields have seen remarkable increases in their standards for high performance over time. Today, high-schoolers manage athletic feats that were once Olympic level and children play music once considered world-class. This is possible because of better training and knowledge of what it takes to be the best. The more we improve how we train, the more we expand our range of possible performance.

In 2016, Ericsson published Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, a popular science book condensing his learnings from thirty years of research. He also co-edited the 2006 Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance.

Malcolm Gladwell: The 10,000 hour rule

The widespread awareness of Ericsson’s work outside the scientific community is in part a result of Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 book, Outliers: The Story of Success. In the book, Gladwell attributed unusual success in different fields to a mixture of lucky factors (such as when or where a person was born) and around 10,000 hours of practice. He based this figure on research, including Ericsson’s, that suggested top performers tended to have put in about that amount of time before reaching peak performance.

Gladwell showed how the success of Bill Gates, the Beatles, and other outstanding performers is not so much to do with what they are like but rather where they come from. “The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves,” Gladwell writes. “But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot.”

The so-called “10,000 hours rule” caught on. It’s a catchy idea, and many people took it to mean that anyone can master anything if they just put the time in. Ericsson himself disputed Gladwell’s representations of his research, which led to the widespread belief that the time someone spends practicing predicts their success, without emphasizing the quality of their practice.

Although the backlash against Gladwell’s calculation has arguably been exaggerated, it’s important to stress that research into deliberate practice emphasizes quality of practice, not quantity. It’s all too possible to spend 10,000 hours engaging in a skill without serious improvements. For example, most of us spend hours per day typing, yet we don’t see continuous improvements in speed and quality because we’re not using deliberate practice.

The useful takeaway from the “10,000 hours rule” is simply that it takes a lot of work to become the best. There’s no magic number of practice sessions, and everyone’s path will look different. Just because successful people in a given field have spent around 10,000 hours practicing their key skill, that doesn’t mean every person who practices that skill for 10,000 hours will become successful.

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The limitations and downsides of deliberate practice

Part of us wants to believe expert performance is something innate and magical so we can recuse ourselves from hard work. The other part of us wants to believe that it’s something earned through blood, sweat, and tears—that we too could achieve amazing performance, if only we could devote ourselves to something.

Deliberate practice, in reality, is far more complex and nuanced than many people would have you believe. It’s not a panacea, and it won’t solve all of your work- and art-related problems. Let’s take a look at some of the limitations of deliberate practice.

First of all, deliberate practice is a necessary but insufficient part of becoming a world-class performer. You can’t rise to the top without it. But it’s not enough on its own to be the absolute best in any field. Once you reach higher echelons for any skill, everyone is engaging in a lot of deliberate practice.

If you’re aiming at expertise or just really good performance, deliberate practice will most likely get you there. But the higher you rise, the more luck and randomness end up mattering. However much you engage in deliberate practice, you can’t control the chance events (good or bad) that dictate a great deal of life.

When we look at the lives of top performers, they often benefited from specific backgrounds or opportunities, in addition to engaging in deliberate practice. For example, if you’re trying to become a champion chess player, it’s a big boost if your mother was a champion chess player. Not only will you have potential genetic advantages, you’ll have also likely grown up hearing about chess, been encouraged to practice it from a young age, and have someone to turn to for advice.

Seeing as it takes years of consistent deliberate practice to master a skill, people who begin early in life have an advantage over those who start later on. That doesn’t mean you can’t become exceptional at something you discover well into adulthood (just look at Julia Child or check out the book Guitar Zero). But it does mean that people who begin deliberate practice as kids are more likely to enjoy the success that makes it possible to keep committing to it. If you’re trying to master a skill while also having to work an unrelated job, care for your family, and deal with the other myriad responsibilities of adult life, you likely will have less room for it than a ten-year-old.

People who discover they want to master a skill or are encouraged to do so by others early in life have an advantage. Once the opportunity for practice is in place, the prospects of high achievement take off. And if practice is denied or diminished, no amount of talent is going to get you there.

In addition to lucky circumstances, high performers benefit from a combination of deliberate practice and innate talents or physical advantages. However much you practice, certain physical limitations are insurmountable. For example, if you’re 165 centimeters tall, you’re unlikely to become a professional basketball player. There are some physical abilities, such as particular kinds of flexibility, that can only be developed at a young age when a person’s skeletal structure is still forming. It’s important to be realistic about your starting point and be aware of any limitations. But that doesn’t mean you can’t develop workarounds or even use them to your advantage.

Another downside of deliberate practice is that the level of focus it requires can mean practitioners miss out on other parts of life. Top performers often devote almost every waking hour to practice, recuperation from practice, and support activities. For example, a professional dancer might spend several hours a day on deliberate practice with all of the remaining hours going toward sleep, low-impact exercise, stretching, preparing nutritious food, icing his feet, and so on. There is enormous satisfaction in the flow states produced by deliberate practice, but practitioners can absolutely miss out on other sources of happiness, such as spending time with friends.

Deliberate practice is part of the exploit phase of new opportunities. Yet sometimes we can end up having too much grit. We can keep persevering with the skill we’re practicing right now, remaining overly passionate, past the point where it serves us. We can wear ourselves out or get hurt or fail to realize when it’s no longer worth practicing a skill. For example, a new technology might mean our skill is no longer valuable. If we keep on deliberate practicing due to sunk costs, we’ll be unlikely to see many long-term benefits from it. A crucial skill in life is knowing when to pivot. Focusing too much on our goals can blind us to risks.

In some fields, expertise is hard to quantify or measure, which makes it less clear how to structure practice. There may be no single target to hit or universal rule for what improves performance.

A final limitation to keep in mind is that, as Ericsson explained, “the cognitive and physical changes caused by training require upkeep. Stop training and they go away.” If someone can’t practice for a period of time, such as due to an injury or having a child, they’re likely to see the skills they developed through deliberate practice deteriorate.

Summary

Deliberate practice isn’t everything, but if you want to keep improving at a skill or overcome a plateau, you’ll benefit from incorporating the principles mentioned in this article. To recap:

• Deliberate practice means practicing with a clear awareness of the specific components of a skill we’re aiming to improve and exactly how to improve them.
• The more we engage in deliberate practice, the greater our capabilities become.
• Our minds and bodies are far more malleable than we usually realize.
• Deliberate practice is structured and methodical.
• Deliberate practice is challenging because it involves constantly pushing yourself out of your comfort zone.
• Deliberate practice requires constant feedback and measurement of informative metrics—not vanity metrics.
• Deliberate practice works best with the help of a teacher or coach.
• Continuing deliberate practice requires a great deal of intrinsic motivation.
• Deliberate practice requires constant, intense focus.
• Deliberate practice leverages the spacing effect—meaning a consistent commitment over time is crucial.
• If you’re content with your current level of skill or just doing something for fun, you don’t necessarily need to engage in deliberate practice
• Deliberate practice is best suited to pursuits where you’re actively aiming for a high level of performance or to break beyond some kind of supposed limit.

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Books about deliberate practice (further reading)

“A world in which deliberate practice is a normal part of life would be one in which people had more volition and satisfaction.” —Karl Anders Ericsson, Peak

If you’d like to learn more about the art and science of deliberate practice, check out any of these books:

• Talent Is Overrated, Geoff Colvin
• The Talent Code, Daniel Coyle
• The Little Book of Talent, Daniel Coyle
• Mastery, Robert Greene
• Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell
• Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success, Matthew Syed
• The Art of Learning, Josh Waitzkin
• Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Carol Dweck
• Teaching Genius: Dorothy Delay and the Making of a Musician, Barbara Lourie Sand
• Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, Angela Duckworth

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We learn from our mistakes. When we screw up and fail, we learn how not to handle things. We learn what not to do.

Failing is a byproduct of trying to succeed. We do our research, make our plans, get the necessary ingredients, and try to put it all together. Often, things don’t go as we wish. If we’re smart, we reflect on what happened and make note of where we could do better next time.

But how many of us make deliberate mistakes? How often do we try to fail in order to learn from it?

If we want to avoid costly mistakes in the future when the stakes are high, then making some now might be excellent preparation.

***

Practicing failure is a common practice for pilots. In 1932, at the dawn of the aviation age, Amelia Earhart described the value for all pilots of learning through deliberate mistakes. “The fundamental stunts taught to students are slips, stalls, and spins,” she says in her autobiography The Fun of It. “A knowledge of some stunts is judged necessary to good flying. Unless a pilot has actually recovered from a stall, has actually put his plane into a spin and brought it out, he cannot know accurately what those acts entail. He should be familiar enough with abnormal positions of his craft to recover without having to think how.”

For a pilot, stunting is a skill attained through practice. You go up in a plane and, for example, you change the angle of the wings to deliberately stall the craft. You prepare beforehand by learning what a stall is, what the critical variables you have to pay attention to are, and how other pilots address stalls. You learn the optimal response. But then you go up in the air and actually apply your knowledge. What’s easy and obvious on the ground, when you’re under little pressure, isn’t guaranteed to come to you when your plane loses lift and function at 10,000 feet. Deliberately stalling your plane, making a conscientious mistake when you have prepared to deal with it, gives you the experience to react when a stall happens in a less controlled situation.

The first time your plane unexpectedly stops working in mid-flight is scary for any pilot. But those who have practiced in similar situations are far more likely to react appropriately. “An individual’s life on the ground or in the air may depend on a split second,” Earhart writes. “The slow response which results from seldom, if ever, having accomplished the combination of acts required in a given circumstance may be the deciding factor.” You don’t want the first stall to come at night in poor weather when you have your family in the cabin. Much better to practice stalling in a variety of situations ahead of time—that way, when one happens unexpectedly, your reactions can be guided by successful experience and not panic.

Earhart advises that in advance, the solution to many problems can be worked out on paper, “but only experience counts when there is no time to think a process through. The pilot who hasn’t stalled a plane is less likely to be able to judge correctly the time and space necessary for recovery than one who has.”

If you practice failing every so often, you increase your flexibility and adaptability when life throws obstacles in your way. Of course, no amount of preparation will get you through all possible challenges, and Earhart’s own story is the best example of that. But making deliberate mistakes in order to learn from them is one way to give ourselves optionality when our metaphorical engine stops in midair.

If we don’t practice failing, we can only safely fly on sunny days.

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“Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If in your bold creative way you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe.” —G.K. Chesterton

We can break the creative process down into the following three steps:

1. Gain a deep understanding of a particular system and its rules.
2. Step outside of that system and look for something surprising that subverts its rules.
3. Use what you find as the basis for making something new and creative.

It may not be simple to do, but it is reliable and repeatable.

In Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, philosopher Daniel C. Dennett describes this process of understanding a system in order to step outside of it as “jootsing,” using a term coined by Douglas Hofstadter. “Jootsing” means “jumping out of the system.”

Dennett explains that jootsing is the method behind creativity in science, philosophy, and the arts: “Creativity, that ardently sought but only rarely found virtue, often is a heretofore unimagined violation of the rules of the system from which it springs.” The rules within a system could be things like the idea that a painting must have a frame, a haiku must only have seventeen syllables, or a depiction of landscape must have a blue sky. But galleries hang paintings without frames all the time. Haiku without seventeen syllables win international contests. And landscape paintings don’t need to contain a sky, let alone a blue one.

***

Creativity, as Dennett describes it, is not about pure novelty. The concept of jootsing shows us that constraints and restrictions are essential for creativity.

Breaking rules you don’t know exist is not a statement. It’s a common refrain that much of modern art could be the work of a five-year-old. Yet while a five-year-old could produce a random combination of elements that looks similar to a famous work of modern art, it would not be creative in the same way because the child would not be jootsing. They wouldn’t have an understanding of the system they now sought to subvert.

Limitations are essential because they give us a starting point and a shape to work against.

While amateurs may attempt to start from scratch when trying to make something creative in a new area, professionals know they must first get in touch with the existing territory. Before even contemplating their own work, they take the time to master the conventional ways of doing things, to know what the standards are, and to become well-versed in the types of work considered exemplary. Doing so can take years or even the best part of a career. Dennett summarizes: “It helps to know the tradition if you want to subvert it. That’s why so few dabblers or novices succeed in coming up with anything truly creative.”

***

Understanding a system first is necessary for creativity for two reasons. First, it provides something comprehensible to use as a starting point, and second, it makes it possible to come up with something more interesting or useful. If you try to start a creative effort from nothing, you’ll end up with mere chaos.

Dennett writes: “Sit down at a piano and try to come up with a good new melody and you soon discover how hard it is. All the keys are available, in any combination you choose, but until you can find something to lean on, some style or genre or pattern to lay down and exploit a bit, or allude to, before you twist it, you will come up with nothing but noise.”

Creativity often begins with accidents that end up showing a new possibility or reveal that violating a particular rule isn’t as harmful as expected. Elsewhere in the book, Dennett suggests that any computer model intended to generate creativity must include mistakes and randomness, “junk lying around that your creative process can bump into, noises that your creative process can’t help overhearing.”

***

Most of us say we want to be creative—and we want the people we work with and for to be creative. The concept of jootsing reveals why we often end up preventing that from happening. Creativity is impossible without in some way going against rules that exist for a good reason.

Psychologists Jacob Getzels and Phillip Jackson studied creativity in the 1950s. Their findings were repeated across many studies and described what was termed as the Getzels-Jackson effect: “The vast majority—98 percent—of teachers say creating is so important that it should be taught daily, but when tested, they nearly always favor less creative children over more creative children.”

Kevin Ashton, in How to Fly a Horse, explains why. Teachers favor less creative children “because people who are more creative also tend to be more playful, unconventional, and unpredictable, and all of this makes them harder to control. No matter how much we say we value creation, deep down, most of us value control more. And so we fear change and favor familiarity. Rejecting is a reflex.” Ashton notes that the Getzels-Jackson effect is also present in the organizations we are a part of in adulthood. When the same tests are applied to decision-makers and authority figures in business, science, and government, the results are the same: they all say they value creation, but it turns out they don’t value creators.

***

If you want people to be creative, you can’t complain or punish them when they question a system that is “typically so entrenched that it is as invisible as the air you breathe,” as Dennett says. You need to permit a lot of exploration, including ideas that don’t work out. Not everything outside of a system proves worth pursuing. And often the rules that are most beneficial to break are those that seem the most load-bearing, as if meddling with them will cause the whole system to collapse. It might—or it might make it much better.

You also need to permit the making of mistakes if you want to foster creativity, because that often ends up leading to new discoveries. Dennett writes, “The exploitation of accidents is the key to creativity, whether what is being made is a new genome, a new behavior, or a new melody.” Most accidents never end up being profitable or valuable in a measurable way. But they’re necessary because they’re part of the process of developing something new. Accidents fuel creativity.

In the book Loonshots, Safi Bahcall explores, among other ideas, how to nurture and develop those seemingly crazy ideas that turn out to be paradigm-shifting innovations. He gives many examples of now ubiquitous technologies that were initially laughed at, rejected, or buried. He notes that it’s not easy to immediately buy in to radical developments, and if we want to have environments where creating is possible, then we have to give creativity space and understanding. “It’s worth keeping in mind,” he says, “that revving the creative engine to fire at higher speeds . . . means more ideas and more experiments, which also means, inevitably, more failed experiments.”

As individuals, if we want to be creative, we need to give ourselves space to play and experiment without a set agenda. Amos Tversky famously said that the secret to doing good work is being a little unemployed so you always have hours in the day to waste as you wish. During that wasted time, you’ll likely have your best, most creative ideas.

If your schedule is crammed with only room for what’s productive in an obvious way, you’ll have a hard time seeing outside of the existing system.

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“Technological progress requires above all tolerance toward the unfamiliar and the eccentric.”

— Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches

Writing in The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress, economic historian Joel Mokyr asks why, when we look at the past, some societies have been considerably more creative than others at particular times. Some have experienced sudden bursts of progress, while others have stagnated for long periods of time. By examining the history of technology and identifying the commonalities between the most creative societies and time periods, Mokyr offers useful lessons we can apply as both individuals and organizations.

What does it take for a society to be technologically creative?

When trying to explain something as broad and complex as technological creativity, it’s important not to fall prey to the lure of a single explanation. There are many possible reasons for anything that happens, and it’s unwise to believe explanations that are too tidy. Mokyr disregards some of the common simplistic explanations for technological creativity, such as that war prompts creativity or people with shorter life spans are less likely to expend time on invention.

Mokyr explores some of the possible factors that contribute to a society’s technological creativity. In particular, he seeks to explain why Europe experienced such a burst of technological creativity from around 1500 to the Industrial Revolution, when prior to that it had lagged far behind the rest of the world. Mokyr explains that “invention occurs at the level of the individual, and we should address the factors that determine individual creativity. Individuals, however, do not live in a vacuum. What makes them implement, improve and adapt new technologies, or just devise small improvements in the way they carry out their daily work depends on the institutions and the attitudes around them.” While environment isn’t everything, certain conditions are necessary for technological creativity.

He identifies the three following key factors in an environment that impact the occurrence of invention and innovation.

The social infrastructure

First of all, the society needs a supply of “ingenious and resourceful innovators who are willing and able to challenge their physical environment for their own improvement.” Fostering these attributes requires factors like good nutrition, religious beliefs that are not overly conservative, and access to education. It is in part about the absence of negative factors—necessitous people have less capacity for creativity. Mokyr writes: “The supply of talent is surely not completely exogenous; it responds to incentives and attitudes. The question that must be confronted is why in some societies talent is unleashed upon technical problems that eventually change the entire productive economy, whereas in others this kind of talent is either repressed or directed elsewhere.”

One partial explanation for Europe’s creativity from 1500 to the Industrial Revolution is that it was often feasible for people to relocate to a different country if the conditions in their current one were suboptimal. A creative individual finding themselves under a conservative government seeking to maintain the technological status quo was able to move elsewhere.

The ability to move around was also part of the success of the Abbasid Caliphate, an empire that stretched from India to the Iberian Peninsula from about 750 to 1250. Economists Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein write in The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70–1492 that “it was relatively easy to move or migrate” within the Abbasid empire, especially with its “common language (Arabic) and a uniform set of institutions and laws over an immense area, greatly [favoring] trade and commerce.”

It also matters whether creative people are channeled into technological fields or into other fields, like the military. In Britain during and prior to the Industrial Revolution, Mokyr considers invention to have been the main possible path for creative individuals, as other areas like politics leaned towards conformism.

The social incentives

Second, there need to be incentives in place to encourage innovation. This is of extra importance for macroinventions – completely new inventions, not improvements on existing technology – which can require a great leap of faith. The person who comes up with a faster horse knows it has a market; the one who comes up with a car does not. Such incentives are most often financial, but not always. Awards, positions of power, and recognition also count. Mokyr explains that diverse incentives encourage the patience needed for creativity: “Sustained innovation requires a set of individuals willing to absorb large risks, sometimes to wait many years for the payoff (if any.)”

Patent systems have long served as an incentive, allowing inventors to feel confident they will profit from their work. Patents first appeared in northern Italy in the early fifteenth century; Venice implemented a formal system in 1474. According to Mokyr, the monopoly rights mining contractors received over the discovery of hitherto unknown mineral resources provided inspiration for the patent system.

However, Mokyr points out that patents were not always as effective as inventors hoped. Indeed, they may have provided the incentive without any actual protection. Many inventors ended up spending unproductive time and money on patent litigation, which in some cases outweighed their profits, discouraged them from future endeavors, or left them too drained to invent more. Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton gin, claimed his legal costs outweighed his profits. Mokyr proposes that though patent laws may be imperfect, they are, on balance, good for society as they incentivize invention while not altogether preventing good ideas from circulating and being improved upon by others.

The ability to make money from inventions is also related to geographic factors. In a country with good communication and transport systems, with markets in different areas linked, it is possible for something new to sell further afield. A bigger prospective market means stronger financial incentives. The extensive, accessible, and well-maintained trade routes during the Abbasid empire allowed for innovations to diffuse throughout the region. And during the Industrial Revolution in Britain, railroads helped bring developments to the entire country, ensuring inventors didn’t just need to rely on their local market.

The social attitude

Third, a technologically creative society must be diverse and tolerant. People must be open to new ideas and outré individuals. They must not only be willing to consider fresh ideas from within their own society but also happy to take inspiration from (or to outright steal) those coming from elsewhere. If a society views knowledge coming from other countries as suspect or even dangerous, unable to see its possible value, it is at a disadvantage. If it eagerly absorbs external influences and adapts them for its own purposes, it is at an advantage. Europeans were willing to pick up on ideas from each other. and elsewhere in the world. As Mokyr puts it, “Inventions such as the spinning wheel, the windmill, and the weight-driven clock recognized no boundaries”

In the Abbasid empire, there was an explosion of innovation that drew on the knowledge gained from other regions. Botticini and Eckstein write:

“The Abbasid period was marked by spectacular developments in science, technology, and the liberal arts. . . . The Muslim world adopted papermaking from China, improving Chinese technology with the invention of paper mills many centuries before paper was known in the West. Muslim engineers made innovate industrial uses of hydropower, tidal power, wind power, steam power, and fossil fuels. . . . Muslim engineers invented crankshafts and water turbines, employed gears in mills and water-raising machines, and pioneered the use of dams as a source of waterpower. Such advances made it possible to mechanize many industrial tasks that had previously been performed by manual labor.”

Within societies, certain people and groups seek to maintain the status quo because it is in their interests to do so. Mokyr writes that “Some of these forces protect vested interests that might incur losses if innovations were introduced, others are simply don’t-rock-the-boat kind of forces.” In order for creative technology to triumph, it must be able to overcome those forces. While there is always going to be conflict, the most creative societies are those where it is still possible for the new thing to take over. If those who seek to maintain the status quo have too much power, a society will end up stagnating in terms of technology. Ways of doing things can prevail not because they are the best, but because there is enough interest in keeping them that way.

In some historical cases in Europe, it was easier for new technologies to spread in the countryside, where the lack of guilds compensated for the lower density of people. City guilds had a huge incentive to maintain the status quo. The inventor of the ribbon loom in Danzig in 1579 was allegedly drowned by the city council, while “in the fifteenth century, the scribes guild of Paris succeeded in delaying the introduction of printing in Paris by 20 years.”

Indeed, tolerance could be said to matter more for technological creativity than education. As Mokyr repeatedly highlights, many inventors and innovators throughout history were not educated to a high level—or even at all. Up until relatively recently, most technology preceded the science explaining how it actually worked. People tinkered, looking to solve problems and experiment.

Unlike modern times, Mokyr explains, for most of history technology did not emerge from “specialized research laboratories paid for by research and development budgets and following strategies mapped out by corporate planners well-informed by marketing analysts. Technological change occurred mostly through new ideas and suggestions occurring if not randomly, then in a highly unpredictable fashion.”

When something worked, it worked, even if no one knew why or the popular explanation later proved incorrect. Steam engines are one such example. The notion that all technologies function under the same set of physical laws was not standard until Galileo. People need space to be a bit weird.

Those who were scientists and academics during some of Europe’s most creative periods worked in a different manner than what we expect today, often working on the practical problems they faced themselves. Mokyr gives Galileo as an example, as he “built his own telescopes and supplemented his salary as a professor at the University of Padua by making and repairing instruments.” The distinction between one who thinks and one who makes was not yet clear at the time of the Renaissance. Wherever and whenever making has been a respectable activity for thinkers, creativity flourishes.

Seeing as technological creativity requires a particular set of circumstances, it is not the norm. Throughout history, Mokyr writes, “Technological progress was neither continuous nor persistent. Genuinely creative societies were rare, and their bursts of creativity usually short-lived.”

Not only did people need to be open to new ideas, they also needed to be willing to actually start using new technologies. This often required a big leap of faith. If you’re a farmer just scraping by, trying a new way of ploughing your fields could mean starving to death if it doesn’t work out. Innovations can take a long time to defuse, with riskier ones taking the longest.

How can we foster the right environment?

So what can we learn from The Lever of Riches that we can apply as individuals and in organizations?

The first lesson is that creativity does not occur in a vacuum. It requires certain necessary conditions to occur. If we want to come up with new ideas as individuals, we should consider ourselves as part of a system. In particular, we need to consider what might impede us and what can encourage us. We need to eradicate anything that will get in the way of our thinking, such as limiting beliefs or lack of sleep.

We need to be clear on what motivates us to be creative, ensuring what we endeavor to do will be worthwhile enough to drive us through the associated effort. When we find ourselves creatively blocked, it’s often because we’re not in touch with what inspires us to create in the first place.

Within an organization, such factors are equally important. If you want your employees to be creative, it’s important to consider the system they’re part of. Is there anything blocking their thinking? Is a good incentive structure in place (bearing in mind incentives are not solely financial)?

Another lesson is that tolerance for divergence is essential for encouraging creativity. This may seem like part of the first lesson, but it’s crucial enough to consider in isolation.

As individuals, when we seek to come up with new ideas, we need to ask ourselves the following questions: Am I exposing myself to new material and inspirations or staying within a filter bubble? Am I open to unusual ways of thinking? Am I spending too much time around people who discourage deviation from the status quo? Am I being tolerant of myself, allowing myself to make mistakes and have bad ideas in service of eventually having good ones? Am I spending time with unorthodox people who encourage me to think differently?

Within organizations, it’s worth asking the following questions: Are new ideas welcomed or shot down? Is it in the interests of many to protect the status quo? Are ideas respected regardless of their source? Are people encouraged to question norms?

A final lesson is that the forces of inertia are always acting to discourage creativity. Invention is not the natural state of things—it is an exception. Technological stagnation is the norm. In most places, at most times, people have not come up with new technology. It takes a lot for individuals to be willing to wrestle something new from nothing or to question if something in existence can be made better. But when those acts do occur, they can have an immeasurable impact on our world.

The post The Ingredients For Innovation appeared first on Farnam Street.

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“If I have seen further,” Isaac Newton wrote in a 1675 letter to fellow scientist Robert Hooke, “it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

It can be easy to look at great geniuses like Newton and imagine that their ideas and work came solely out of their minds, that they spun it from their own thoughts—that they were true originals. But that is rarely the case.

Innovative ideas have to come from somewhere. No matter how unique or unprecedented a work seems, dig a little deeper and you will always find that the creator stood on someone else’s shoulders. They mastered the best of what other people had already figured out, then made that expertise their own. With each iteration, they could see a little further, and they were content in the knowledge that future generations would, in turn, stand on their shoulders.

Standing on the shoulders of giants is a necessary part of creativity, innovation, and development. It doesn’t make what you do less valuable. Embrace it.

Everyone gets a lift up

Ironically, Newton’s turn of phrase wasn’t even entirely his own. The phrase can be traced back to the twelfth century, when the author John of Salisbury wrote that philosopher Bernard of Chartres compared people to dwarves perched on the shoulders of giants and said that “we see more and farther than our predecessors, not because we have keener vision or greater height, but because we are lifted up and borne aloft on their gigantic stature.”

Mary Shelley put it this way in the nineteenth century, in a preface for Frankenstein: “Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos.”

There are giants in every field. Don’t be intimidated by them. They offer an exciting perspective. As the film director Jim Jarmusch advised, “Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light, and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery—celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: ‘It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.’”

That might sound demoralizing. Some might think, “My song, my book, my blog post, my startup, my app, my creation—surely they are original? Surely no one has done this before!” But that’s likely not the case. It’s also not a bad thing. Filmmaker Kirby Ferguson states in his TED Talk: “Admitting this to ourselves is not an embrace of mediocrity and derivativeness—it’s a liberation from our misconceptions, and it’s an incentive to not expect so much from ourselves and to simply begin.”

There lies the important fact. Standing on the shoulders of giants enables us to see further, not merely as far as before. When we build upon prior work, we often improve upon it and take humanity in new directions. However original your work seems to be, the influences are there—they might just be uncredited or not obvious. As we know from social proof, copying is a natural human tendency. It’s how we learn and figure out how to behave.

In Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, Nassim Taleb describes the type of antifragile inventions and ideas that have lasted throughout history. He describes himself heading to a restaurant (the likes of which have been around for at least 2,500 years), in shoes similar to those worn at least 5,300 years ago, to use silverware designed by the Mesopotamians. During the evening, he drinks wine based on a 6,000-year-old recipe, from glasses invented 2,900 years ago, followed by cheese unchanged through the centuries. The dinner is prepared with one of our oldest tools, fire, and using utensils much like those the Romans developed.

Much about our societies and cultures has undeniably changed and continues to change at an ever-faster rate. But we continue to stand on the shoulders of those who came before in our everyday life, using their inventions and ideas, and sometimes building upon them.

Not invented here syndrome

When we discredit what came before or try to reinvent the wheel or refuse to learn from history, we hold ourselves back. After all, many of the best ideas are the oldest. “Not Invented Here Syndrome” is a term for situations when we avoid using ideas, products, or data created by someone else, preferring instead to develop our own (even if it is more expensive, time-consuming, and of lower quality.)

The syndrome can also manifest as reluctance to outsource or delegate work. People might think their output is intrinsically better if they do it themselves, becoming overconfident in their own abilities. After all, who likes getting told what to do, even by someone who knows better? Who wouldn’t want to be known as the genius who (re)invented the wheel?

Developing a new solution for a problem is more exciting than using someone else’s ideas. But new solutions, in turn, create new problems. Some people joke that, for example, the largest Silicon Valley companies are in fact just impromptu incubators for people who will eventually set up their own business, firm in the belief that what they create themselves will be better.

The syndrome is also a case of the sunk cost fallacy. If a company has spent a lot of time and money getting a square wheel to work, they may be resistant to buying the round ones that someone else comes out with. The opportunity costs can be tremendous. Not Invented Here Syndrome detracts from an organization or individual’s core competency, and results in wasting time and talent on what are ultimately distractions. Better to use someone else’s idea and be a giant for someone else.

Why Steve Jobs stole his ideas

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it. They just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while; that’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.” 

— Steve Jobs

In The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World, Anthony Brandt and David Eagleman trace the path that led to the creation of the iPhone and track down the giants upon whose shoulders Steve Jobs perched. We often hail Jobs as a revolutionary figure who changed how we use technology. Few who were around in 2007 could have failed to notice the buzz created by the release of the iPhone. It seemed so new, a total departure from anything that had come before. The truth is a little messier.

The first touchscreen came about almost half a century before the iPhone, developed by E.A. Johnson for air traffic control. Other engineers built upon his work and developed usable models, filing a patent in 1975. Around the same time, the University of Illinois was developing touchscreen terminals for students. Prior to touchscreens, light pens used similar technology. The first commercial touchscreen computer came out in 1983, soon followed by graphics boards, tablets, watches, and video game consoles. Casio released a touchscreen pocket computer in 1987 (remember, this is still a full twenty years before the iPhone.)

However, early touchscreen devices were frustrating to use, with very limited functionality, often short battery lives, and minimal use cases for the average person. As touchscreen devices developed in complexity and usability, they laid down the groundwork for the iPhone.

Likewise, the iPod built upon the work of Kane Kramer, who took inspiration from the Sony Walkman. Kramer designed a small portable music player in the 1970s. The IXI, as he called it, looked similar to the iPod but arrived too early for a market to exist, and Kramer lacked the marketing skills to create one. When pitching to investors, Kramer described the potential for immediate delivery, digital inventory, taped live performances, back catalog availability, and the promotion of new artists and microtransactions. Sound familiar?

Steve Jobs stood on the shoulders of the many unseen engineers, students, and scientists who worked for decades to build the technology he drew upon. Although Apple has a long history of merciless lawsuits against those they consider to have stolen their ideas, many were not truly their own in the first place. Brandt and Eagleman conclude that “human creativity does not emerge from a vacuum. We draw on our experience and the raw materials around us to refashion the world. Knowing where we’ve been, and where we are, points the way to the next big industries.”

How Shakespeare got his ideas

“Nothing will come of nothing.”  

— William Shakespeare,<em> King Lear</em>

Most, if not all, of Shakespeare’s plays draw heavily upon prior works—so much so that some question whether he would have survived today’s copyright laws.

Hamlet took inspiration from Gesta Danorum, a twelfth-century work on Danish history by Saxo Grammaticus, consisting of sixteen Latin books. Although it is doubtful whether Shakespeare had access to the original text, scholars find the parallels undeniable and believe he may have read another play based on it, from which he drew inspiration. In particular, the accounts of the plight of Prince Amleth (which has the same letters as Hamlet) involves similar events.

Holinshed’s Chronicles, a co-authored account of British history from the late sixteenth century, tells stories that mimic the plot of Macbeth, including the three witches. Holinshed’s Chronicles itself was a mélange of earlier texts, which transferred their biases and fabrications to Shakespeare. It also likely inspired King Lear.

Parts of Antony and Cleopatra are copied verbatim from Plutarch’s Life of Mark Anthony. Arthur Brooke’s 1562 poem The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet was an undisguised template for Romeo and Juliet. Once again, there are more giants behind the scenes—Brooke copied a 1559 poem by Pierre Boaistuau, who in turn drew from a 1554 story by Matteo Bandello, who in turn drew inspiration from a 1530 work by Luigi da Porto. The list continues, with Plutarch, Chaucer, and the Bible acting as inspirations for many major literary, theatrical, and cultural works.

Yet what Shakespeare did with the works he sometimes copied, sometimes learned from, is remarkable. Take a look at any of the original texts and, despite the mimicry, you will find that they cannot compare to his plays. Many of the originals were dry, unengaging, and lacking any sort of poetic language. J.J. Munro wrote in 1908 that The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet “meanders on like a listless stream in a strange and impossible land; Shakespeare’s sweeps on like a broad and rushing river, singing and foaming, flashing in sunlight and darkening in cloud, carrying all things irresistibly to where it plunges over the precipice into a waste of waters below.”

Despite bordering on plagiarism at times, he overhauled the stories with exceptional use of the English language, bringing drama and emotion to dreary chronicles or poems. He had a keen sense for the changes required to restructure plots, creating suspense and intensity in their stories. Shakespeare saw far further than those who wrote before him, and with their help, he ushered in a new era of the English language.

Of course, it’s not just Newton, Jobs, and Shakespeare who found a (sometimes willing, sometimes not) shoulder to stand upon. Facebook is presumed to have built upon Friendster. Cormac McCarthy’s books often replicate older history texts, with one character coming straight from Samuel Chamberlain’s My Confessions. John Lennon borrowed from diverse musicians, once writing in a letter to the New York Times that though the Beatles copied black musicians, “it wasn’t a rip off. It was a love in.”

In The Ecstasy of Influence, Jonathan Lethem points to many other instances of influences in classic works. In 1916, journalist Heinz von Lichberg published a story of a man who falls in love with his landlady’s daughter and begins a love affair, culminating in her death and his lasting loneliness. The title? Lolita. It’s hard to question that Nabokov must have read it, but aside from the plot and name, the style of language in his version is absent from the original.

The list continues. The point is not to be flippant about plagiarism but to cultivate sensitivity to the elements of value in a previous work, as well as the ability to build upon those elements. If we restrict the flow of ideas, everyone loses out.

The adjacent possible

What’s this about? Why can’t people come up with their own ideas? Why do so many people come up with a brilliant idea but never profit from it? The answer lies in what scientist Stuart Kauffman calls “the adjacent possible.” Quite simply, each new innovation or idea opens up the possibility of additional innovations and ideas. At any time, there are limits to what is possible, yet those limits are constantly expanding.

In Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, Steven Johnson compares this process to being in a house where opening a door creates new rooms. Each time we open the door to a new room, new doors appear and the house grows. Johnson compares it to the formation of life, beginning with basic fatty acids. The first fatty acids to form were not capable of turning into living creatures. When they self-organized into spheres, the groundwork formed for cell membranes, and a new door opened to genetic codes, chloroplasts, and mitochondria. When dinosaurs evolved a new bone that meant they had more manual dexterity, they opened a new door to flight. When our distant ancestors evolved opposable thumbs, dozens of new doors opened to the use of tools, writing, and warfare. According to Johnson, the history of innovation has been about exploring new wings of the adjacent possible and expanding what we are capable of.

A new idea—like those of Newton, Jobs, and Shakespeare—is only possible because a previous giant opened a new door and made their work possible. They in turn opened new doors and expanded the realm of possibility. Technology, art, and other advances are only possible if someone else has laid the groundwork; nothing comes from nothing. Shakespeare could write his plays because other people had developed the structures and language that formed his tools. Newton could advance science because of the preliminary discoveries that others had made. Jobs built Apple out of the debris of many prior devices and technological advances.

The questions we all have to ask ourselves are these: What new doors can I open, based on the work of the giants that came before me? What opportunities can I spot that they couldn’t? Where can I take the adjacent possible? If you think all the good ideas have already been found, you are very wrong. Other people’s good ideas open new possibilities, rather than restricting them.

As time passes, the giants just keep getting taller and more willing to let us hop onto their shoulders. Their expertise is out there in books and blog posts, open-source software and TED talks, podcast interviews, and academic papers. Whatever we are trying to do, we have the option to find a suitable giant and see what can be learned from them. In the process, knowledge compounds, and everyone gets to see further as we open new doors to the adjacent possible.

The post Standing on the Shoulders of Giants appeared first on Farnam Street.

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The breadth and depth of products and services that promise to help us stay organized is almost overwhelming. Indeed, it would seem that to be messy is almost universally shunned, considered a sign of not being “put together,” while being tidy and neat is venerated to the nth degree.

Tim Harford has a different take. In his book Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives, he flips this notion around, showing us that there are situations in which disorder is beneficial, or at the very least that order has been oversold.

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One of the reasons why we put so much time and effort into being organized and tidy is because we make assumptions about what this will do for our productivity. If all our papers are neatly filed and email is neatly sorted, it will be easier to retrieve anything that’s important, right? Maybe not.

Harford cites a paper by Steve Whittaker and researchers at IBM called “Am I Wasting My Time Organizing Email?” to illustrate the fallacy.

Whittaker and his colleagues got permission to install logging software on the computers of several hundred office workers, and tracked around 85,000 attempts to find e-mail by clicking through folders, or by using ad hoc methods—scrolling through the inbox, clicking on a header to sort by (for example) the sender, or using the search function. Whittaker found that clicking through a folder tree took almost a minute, while simply searching took just 17 seconds. People who relied on folders took longer to find what they were looking for, but their hunts for the right e-mail were no more or less successful. In other words, if you just dump all your e-mail into a folder called “archive,” you will find your e-mails more quickly than if you hide them in a tidy structure of folders.

Okay, so taking the time to organize your email may not be as useful as we thought. Computers, after all, are designed as tools to help us work better and faster, so it makes sense that the simple search function would outperform us. But physical filing and keeping our work space neat makes us more productive right?

Once again, maybe not.

Quite a bit of research has been done on people’s working environments and it would seem that those with big piles of paper and/or clutter on their desks may be just as effective (and sometimes more so) than those pedantic ‘fillers.’

This is not to argue that a big pile of paper is the best possible filing system. But despite appearances, it’s very far from being a random assortment. A messy desk isn’t nearly as chaotic as it at first seems. There’s a natural tendency toward a very pragmatic system of organization based simply on the fact that the useful stuff keeps on getting picked up and left on the top of the pile.

David Kirsh, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, San Diego studies the differences between the working habits of the tidy types (he calls them ‘neats’) and the messy types (he calls them ‘scruffies’). Let’s look at what he found.

…how do people orient themselves after arriving at the office or finishing a phone call? Kirsh finds that “neats” orient themselves with to-do lists and calendars, while “scruffies” orient themselves using physical cues—the report that they were working on is lying on the desk, as is a letter that needs a reply, and receipts that must be submitted for expenses. A messy desk is full of such cues. A tidy desk conveys no information at all, and it must be bolstered with the prompt of a to-do list. Both systems can work, so we should hesitate before judging other people based on their messy desks.

So if both systems work, are there times when it’s actually more advantageous to embrace messiness?

Here Harford hits upon an interesting hypothesis: Messiness may enhance certain types of creativity. In fact, creativity itself may systematically benefit from a certain amount of disorder.

When things are too neat and tidy, it’s easy for boredom to set in and creativity to suffer. We feel stifled.

A messy environment offers disruptions that seem to act as a catalyst for new ideas and creations. If you think about it, we try to avoid these same disruptions when we focus on being more “organized.” But, if you sometimes embrace a little mess, you may be opening yourself up to more creative serendipity:

Messy disruptions will be most powerful when combined with creative skill. The disruption puts an artist, scientist, or engineer in unpromising territory—a deep valley rather than a familiar hilltop. But then expertise kicks in and finds ways to move upward again: the climb finishes at a new peak, perhaps lower than the old one, but perhaps unexpectedly higher.

Think about an “inefficiently” designed office plan that looks wasteful on the surface: What’s lost in efficiency (say, putting two departments that need to talk to each other in separated areas) can be more than made up for in serendipitous encounters.

Brian Eno, considered one of the most influential and innovative figures in music over the last five decades describes it like this:

“The enemy of creative work is boredom, actually,” he says. “And the friend is alertness. Now I think what makes you alert is to be faced with a situation that is beyond your control so you have to be watching it very carefully to see how it unfolds, to be able to stay on top of it. That kind of alertness is exciting.”

Eno created an amazing system for pushing people into ‘alertness.’ He came up with something he called “Oblique Strategies” cards. He would show up at the recording studio with a handful of cards and bring them out whenever it seemed that the group needed a nudge.

Each had a different instruction, often a gnomic one. Whenever the studio sessions were running aground, Eno would draw a card at random and relay its strange orders.

Be the first not to do what has never not been done before
Emphasize the flaws
Only a part, not the whole
Twist the spine
Look at the order in which you do things
Change instrument roles

Can you imagine asking the guitarist of a group to sit behind the drums on a track? These were the type of suggestions that Eno is famous for and it seems to be serving him well; at age sixty-eight he has a new album coming out in January of 2017 and some variation of his cards have been available for purchase since first appearing for public consumption in 1975.

We all won’t be able to embrace a card from Eno’s deck. Some people do well in tidy environments/situations and some do well in messy ones — it’s probably contingent on what you’re trying to achieve. (We wouldn’t go so far as recommending a CEO be disorganized.)

Reading through the book it would seem that the key is, like most things, to give it a try. A little “intentional messiness” could go a long way towards helping you climb out of a rut. And, if you are the tidy type through and through, it’s important not to try and force that on others — you just might be taking away a good thing.

If you like the ideas in Messy, check out Harford’s other book Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure, or check out another important book on things that gain from disorder, Antifragile.

The post Embrace the Mess: The Upside of Disorder appeared first on Farnam Street.

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The whole scientific method is built on a very simple structure: If I do this, then what will happen? That’s the basic question on which more complicated, intricate, and targeted lines of inquiry are built, across a wide variety of subjects. This simple form helps us push deeper and deeper into knowledge of the world. (On a sidenote, science has become such a loaded, political word that this basic truth of how it works frequently seems to be lost!)

Individuals learn this way too. From the time you were a child, you were asking why (maybe even too much), trying to figure out all the right questions to ask to get better information about how the world works and what to do about it.

Because question-asking is such an integral part of how we know things about the world, both institutionally and individually, it seems worthy to understand how creative inquiry works, no? If we want to do things that haven’t been done or learn things that have never been learned — in short, be more creative — we must learn to ask the right questions, ones so good that they’re half-answered in the asking. And to do that, it might help to understand the process, no?

Warren Berger proposes a simple method in his book A More Beautiful Question; an interesting three-part system to help (partially) solve the problem of inquiry. He calls it The Why, What If, and How of Innovative Questioning, and reminds us why it’s worth learning about.

Each stage of the problem solving process has distinct challenges and issues–requiring a different mind-set, along with different types of questions. Expertise is helpful at certain points, not so helpful at others; wide-open, unfettered divergent thinking is critical at one stage, discipline and focus is called for at another. By thinking of questioning and problem solving in a more structured way, we can remind ourselves to shift approaches, change tools, and adjust our questions according to which stage we’re entering.

Why?

It starts with the Why?

A good Why? seeks true understanding. Why are things the way they are currently? Why do we do it that way? Why do we believe what we believe?

This start is essential because it gives us permission to continue down a line of inquiry fully equipped. Although we may think we have a brilliant idea in our heads for a new product, or a new answer to an old question, or a new way of doing an old thing, unless we understand why things are the way they are, we’re not yet on solid ground. We never want to operate from a position of ignorance, wasting our time on an idea that hasn’t been pushed and fleshed out. Before we say “I already know” the answer, maybe we need to step back and look for the truth.

At the same time, starting with a strong Why also opens up the idea that the current way (whether it’s our way or someone else’s) might be wrong, or at least inefficient. Let’s say a friend proposes you go to the same restaurant you’ve been to a thousand times. It might be a little agitating, but a simple “Why do we always go there?” allows two things to happen:

A. Your friend can explain why, and this gives him/her a legitimate chance at persuasion. (If you’re open minded.)

B. The two of you may agree you only go there out of habit, and might like to go somewhere else.

This whole Why? business is the realm of contrarian thinking, which not everyone enjoys doing. But Berger cites the case of George Lois:

George Lois, the renowned designer of iconic magazine covers and celebrated advertising campaigns, was also known for being a disruptive force in business meetings. It wasn’t just that he was passionate in arguing for his ideas; the real issue, Lois recalls, was that often he was the only person in the meeting willing to ask why. The gathered business executives would be anxious to proceed on a course of action assumed to be sensible. While everyone else nodded in agreement, “I would be the only guy raising his hand to say, ‘Wait a minute, this thing you want to do doesn’t make any sense. Why the hell are you doing it this way?”

Others in the room saw Lois to be slowing the meeting and stopping the group from moving forward. But Lois understood that the group was apt to be operating on habit–trotting out an idea or approach similar to what had been done in similar situations before, without questioning whether it was the best idea or the right approach in this instance. The group needed to be challenged to “step back” by someone like Lois–who had a healthy enough ego to withstand being the lone questioner in the room.

The truth is that a really good Why? type question tends to be threatening. That’s also what makes it useful. It challenges us to step back and stop thinking on autopilot. It also requires what Berger calls a step back from knowing — that recognizable feeling of knowing something but not knowing how you know it. This forced perspective is, of course, as valuable a thing as you can do.

Berger describes a valuable exercise that’s sometimes used to force perspective on people who think they already have a complete answer. After showing a drawing of a large square (seemingly) divided into 16 smaller squares, the questioner asks the audience “How many squares do you see?”

The easy answer is sixteen. But the more observant people in the group are apt to notice–especially after Srinivas allows them to have a second, longer, look–that you can find additional squares by configuring them differently. In addition to the sixteen single squares, there are nine two-by-two squares, four three-by-three squares, and one large four-by-four square, which brings the total to thirty squares.

“The squares were always there, but you didn’t find them until you looked for them.”

Point being, until you step back, re-examine, and look a little harder, you might not have seen all the damn squares yet!

What If?

The second part is where a good questioner, after using Why? to understand as deeply as possible and open a new line of inquiry, proposes a new type of solution, usually an audacious one — all great ideas tend to be, almost by definition — by asking What If…?

Berger illustrates this one well with the story of Pandora Music. The founder Tim Westergren wanted to know why good music wasn’t making it out to the masses. His search didn’t lead to a satisfactory answer, so he eventually asked himself, What if we could map the DNA of music? The result has been pretty darn good, with something close to 80 million listeners at present:

The Pandora story, like many stories of inquiry-driven startups, started with someone’s wondering about an unmet need. It concluded with the questioner, Westergren, figuring out how to bring a fully realized version of the answer into the world.

But what happened in between? That’s when the lightning struck. In Westergren’s case, ideas and influences began to come together; he combined what he knew about music with what he was learning about technology. Inspiration was drawn from a magazine article, and from a seemingly unrelated world (biology). A vision of the new possibility began to form in the mind. It all resulted in an audacious hypothetical question that might or might not have been feasible–but was exciting enough to rally people to the challenge of trying to make it work.

The What If stage is the blue-sky moment of questioning, when anything is possible. Those possibilities may not survive the more practical How stage; but it’s critical to innovation that there be time for wild, improbable ideas to surface and to inspire.

If the word Why has penetrative power, enabling the questioner to get past assumptions and dig deep into problems, the words What if have a more expansive effect–allowing us to think without limits or constraints, firing the imagination.

Clearly, Westergren had engaged in serious combinatorial creativity pulling from multiple disciplines, which led him to ask the right kind of questions. This seems to be a pretty common feature at this stage of the game, and an extremely common feature of all new ideas:

Smart recombinations are all around us. Pandora, for example, is a combination of a radio station and search engine; it also takes the biological method of genetic coding and transfers it to the domain of music […] In today’s tech world, many of the most successful products–Apple’s iPhone being just one notable example–are hybrids, melding functions and features in new ways.

Companies, too, can be smart recombinations. Netflix was started as a video-rental business that operated like a monthly membership health club (and how it has added “TV production studio” to the mix). Airbnb is a combination of an online travel agency, a social media platform, and a good old-fashioned bed-and-breakfast (the B&B itself is a smart combination from way back.)

It may be that the Why? –> What if? line of inquiry is common to all types of innovative thinking because it engages the part of our brain that starts turning over old ideas in new ways by combining them with other unrelated ideas, much of them previously sitting idle in our subconscious. That churning is where new ideas really arise.

The idea then has to be “reality-tested”, and that’s where the last major question comes in.

How?

Once we think we’ve hit on a brilliant new idea, it’s time to see if the thing actually works. Usually and most frequently, the answer is no. But enough times to make it worth our while, we discover that the new idea has legs.

The most common problem here is that we try to perfect a new idea all at once, leading to stagnation and paralysis. That’s usually the wrong approach.

Another, often better, way is to try the idea quickly and start getting feedback. As much as possible. In the book, Berger describes a fun little experiment that drives home the point, and serves as a fairly useful business metaphor besides:

A software designer shared a story about an interesting experiment in which the organizers brought together a group of kindergarten children who were divided into small teams and given a challenge: Using uncooked spaghetti sticks, string, tape, and a marshmallow, they had to assemble the tallest structure they could, within a time limit (the marshmallow was supposed to be placed on top of the completed structure.)

Then, in a second phase of the experiment, the organizers added a new wrinkle. They brought in teams of Harvard MBA grad students to compete in the challenge against the kindergartners. The grad students, I’m told, took it seriously. They brought a highly analytical approach to the challenge, debating among themselves about how best to combine the sticks, the string, and the tape to achieve maximum altitude.

Perhaps you’ll have guessed this already, but the MBA students were no match for the kindergartners. For all their planning and discussion, the structures they carefully conceived invariably fell apart–and then they were out of time before they could get in more attempts.

The kids used their time much more efficiently by constructing right away. They tried one way of building, and if it didn’t work, they quickly tried another. They got in a lot more tries. They learned from their mistakes as they went along, instead of attempting to figure out everything in advance.

This little experiment gets run in the real world all the time by startups looking to outcompete ponderous old bureaucracies. They simply substitute velocity for scale and see what happens — it often works well.

The point is to move along the axis of Why?–>What If–>How? without too much self-censoring in the last phase. Being afraid to fail can often mean a great What If? proposition gets stuck there forever. Analysis paralysis, as it’s sometimes called. But if you can instead enter the testing of the How? stage quickly, even by showing that an idea won’t work, then you can start the loop over again, either asking a new Why? or proposing a new What If? to an existing Why?

Thus moving your creative engine forward.

***

Berger’s point is that there is an intense practical end to understanding productive inquiry. Just like “If I do this, then what will happen?” is a basic structure on which all manner of complex scientific questioning and testing is built, so can a simple Why, What If, and How structure catalyze a litany of new ideas.

Still Interested? Check out the book, or check out some related posts: Steve Jobs on Creativity, Seneca on Gathering Ideas And Combinatorial Creativity, or for some fun with question-asking, What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions.

The post Warren Berger’s Three-Part Method for More Creativity appeared first on Farnam Street.

***

In this short video, Tiffany Shlain, founder of the Webby Awards, offers creative process in ten acts based on her experience in film and art. Consider this an extension to Graham Wallace‘s model of the four stages of the creative process and how we gain creative insight.

1. The Hunch
Any project starts with a hunch, and you have to act on it. It’s a total risk because you’re just about to jump off a cliff, and you have to go for it if you believe in it.

2. Talk About It
Tell your family, tell your friends, tell your community … they’re the ones who are going to support you on this whole treacherous journey of the creative process, so involve them, engage them.

3. The Sponge
I’m going to tons of art shows, I’m watching a lot of movies, I’m reading voraciously. I’m asking questions … and I’m just sponging up ideas and trying to formulate my own idea about the subject.

4. Build
I love the word filmmaker because it has maker in it. My team and I are … building an armature — the architecture for the project.

5. Confusion
Dread. Heart of Darkness. Forest of fire, doubt, fear, every project has this stage for me. But as hard as it is — and it is really hard — any project always gets infinitely better after I’ve rumbled with all of my fears.

6. Just Step Away
Take a breather — literally just step away from the project. And I’ll build this into the schedule. Let it marinate — don’t look at it or think about it.

7. The Love Sandwich
To give constructive feedback, always snuggle it in love — because we’re only human, and we’re vulnerable … Set expectations for where you are in the project, then ask questions in a way that allows for the love sandwich: First, “What works for you?” Then, “What doesn’t work for you?” Then, “What works for you?” again. If you just ask people for feedback, they’ll go straight for the jugular.

8. The Premature Breakthroughlation
You’ll find in a project that you’ll have many small breakthroughs — and you have to celebrate those breakthroughs, because they’re ultimately going to lead to the big breakthrough, which will happen.

9. Revisit Your Notes
I always do this throughout the project, but especially during that last home stretch. Those late nights. Usually near a deadline. … I revisit all my notes and think back, and always find a clue — that missing link that brings it all home.

10. Know When You’re Done

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We look to models of success — be they companies, prescriptions, or people and we attempt to blindly copy them without understanding the role of skill versus luck, the ecosystem in which they thrive, or why they work.

We want the shortcut. We want someone to give us the map without understanding the terrain.

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen companies attempt to solve innovation — as if it were a mathematical formula — with a version of Dragon’s Den or 20% innovation time.

It doesn’t work.

Zero to One

Every moment happens only once.

The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.

So why do we copy?

[I]t’s easier to copy a model than to make something new. Doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1. The act of creation is singular, as is the moment of creation, and the result is something fresh and strange.

We are unique. We are the only animals that build by creating something new.

Other animals are instinctively driven to build things like dams or honeycombs, but we are the only ones that can invent new things and better ways of making them. Humans don’t decide what to build by making choices from some cosmic catalog of options given in advance; instead, by creating new technologies, we rewrite the plan of the world. These are the kind of elementary truths we teach to second graders, but they are easy to forget in a world where so much of what we do is repeat what has been done before.

We are all searching for the elusive formula — the things that if only we’d do them we’d become successful. This is why we flock to the bookstore to learn about how Google innovates only to find that blindly applying the same prescription results in no more success than taking a polar bear and putting it in the desert. There simply is no formula for success. Giving up that notion might be the most helpful thing you can do today.

The paradox of teaching entrepreneurship is that such a formula necessarily cannot exist; because every innovation is new and unique, no authority can prescribe in concrete terms how to be innovative. Indeed, the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas.

In his wonderful book of Fragments, Heraclitus writes: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”

If every moment happens only once, where does this leave us? These are the questions we must explore.

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future is worth reading in its entirety.

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Are there no traits that distinguish creative people? If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it would be complexity. They show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes – instead of being an ‘individual’, each of them is a ‘multitude’. These qualities are present in all of us, but usually we are trained to develop only one pole of the dialectic. We might grow up cultivating the aggressive, competitive side of our nature, and disdain or repress the nurturant, cooperative side. A creative individual is more likely to be both aggressive and cooperative, either at the same time or at different times, depending on the situation. Having a complex personality means being able to express the full range of traits that are potentially present in the human repertoire.

1. Creative individuals have a great deal of physical energy, but they are also often quiet and at rest.
2. Creative individuals tend to be smart, yet also naive at the same time.
3. A third paradoxical trait refers to the related combination of playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility.
4. Creative individuals alternate between imagination and fantasy at one end, and a rooted sense of reality at the other.
5. Creative people seem to harbor opposite tendencies on the continuum between extroversion and introversion.
6. Creative individuals are also remarkably humble and proud at the same time.
7. Creative individuals to a certain extent escape this rigid gender role stereotyping [of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’].
8. Creative people are both traditional and conservative and at the same time rebellious and iconoclastic.
9. Creative persons are very passionate about their work, yet they can be extremely objective about it as well.
10. The openness and sensitivity of creative individuals often exposes them to suffering and pain yet also a great deal of enjoyment.

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***

The value of playing cannot be over-stated. From Einstein and Seneca to Steve Jobs and Google.

“Bob Fagan, a researcher who has spent fifteen years studying the behavior of grizzly bears, discovered bears who played the most tended to survive the longest.” Jaak Panksepp concluded something similar in Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions, where he wrote, “One thing is certain, during play, animals are especially prone to behave in flexible and creative ways.”

In Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, Greg Mckeown argues that “when we play, we are engaged in the purest expression of our humanity, the truest expression of our individuality.”

Play expands our minds in ways that allow us to explore: to germinate new ideas or see old ideas in a new light. It makes us more inquisitive, more attuned to novelty, more engaged.

Play fuels exploration in at least three ways.

First, play broadens the range of options available to us. It helps us to see possibilities we otherwise wouldn’t have seen and make connections we would otherwise not have made. It opens our minds and broadens our perspective. It helps us challenge old assumptions and makes us more receptive to untested ideas . It gives us permission to expand our own stream of consciousness and come up with new stories.

Or as Albert Einstein once said, “When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.”*

Second, play is an antidote to stress, and this is key because stress, in addition to being an enemy of productivity, can actually shut down the creative, inquisitive, exploratory parts of our brain. You know how it feels: you’re stressed about work and suddenly everything starts going wrong. You can’t find your keys, you bump into things more easily, you forget the critical report on the kitchen table. Recent findings suggest this is because stress increases the activity in the part of the brain that monitors emotions (the amygdala), while reducing the activity in the part responsible for cognitive function (the hippocampus)—the result being, simply, that we really can’t think clearly.

Play causes stress to (temporarily) melt away.

Finally, as Edward M. Hallowell, a psychiatrist who specializes in brain science, explains, play has a positive effect on the brain. “The brain’s executive functions,” he writes in Shine: Using Brain Science to Get the Best from Your People, “include planning, prioritizing, scheduling, anticipating, delegating, deciding, analyzing— in short, most of the skills any executive must master to excel in business.” Play stimulates parts of the brain involved in logical reasoning and carefree exploration.

Hallowell continues:

Columbus was at play when it dawned on him that the world was round. Newton was at play in his mind when he saw the apple tree and suddenly conceived of the force of gravity. Watson and Crick were playing with possible shapes of the DNA molecule when they stumbled upon the double helix. Shakespeare played with iambic pentameter his whole life. Mozart barely lived a waking moment when he was not at play. Einstein’s thought experiments are brilliant examples of the mind invited to play.

Perhaps Roald Dahl said it best: “A little nonsense now and then is cherished by the wisest men.”

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“You need all kinds of influences, including negative ones, to challenge what you believe in.”

— Bill Murray

“Any year that passes in which you don’t destroy one of your best-loved ideas is a wasted year,” says Charlie Munger. If only it were that easy. It’s mentally hard to come to an opinion and even harder to give up that attachment and admit that we were wrong. That’s one reason Henry Singleton opted for flexibility instead of predetermined plans.

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.”

The idea is to live in the middle of ideas, believing in them enough to take action but not enough so they become too big of an anchor when something better comes along. More than acknowledging the uncertainty of beliefs you need to embrace it. Keats called this ability “negative capability.” Roger Martin argues that successful thinking involves integrating several different ideas while maintaining the ability to act. It is through the exploration of these opposing ideas, or uncertainty if you will, that we come to better outcomes.

I came across this passage in Dani Shapiro’s Still Writing that speaks to the necessity of failure and uncertainty in the creative process.

When writers who are just starting out ask me when it gets easier, my answer is never. It never gets easier. I don’t want to scare them, so I rarely say more than that, but the truth is that, if anything, it gets harder. The writing life isn’t just filled with predictable uncertainties but with the awareness that we are always starting over again. That everything we ever write will be flawed. We may have written one book, or many, but all we know — if we know anything at all — is how to write the book we’re writing. All novels are failures. Perfection itself would be a failure. All we can hope is that we will fail better. That we won’t succumb to fear of the unknown. That we will not fall prey to the easy enchantments of repeating what may have worked in the past. I try to remember that the job — as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy — of the artist is to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it. To be birthed by it. Each time we come to the end of a piece of work, we have failed as we have leapt — spectacularly, brazenly — into the unknown.

Shapiro further highlights the parallels between writing and the broader parallels with the creative life:

The writing life requires courage, patience, persistence, empathy, openness, and the ability to deal with rejection. It requires the willingness to be alone with oneself. To be gentle with oneself. To look at the world without blinders on. To observe and withstand what one sees. To be disciplined, and at the same time, take risks. To be willing to fail—not just once, but again and again, over the course of a lifetime.

[…]
The page is your mirror. What happens inside you is reflected back. You come face-to-face with your own resistance, lack of balance, self-loathing, and insatiable ego—and also with your singular vision, guts, and fortitude.No matter what you’ve achieved the day before, you begin each day at the bottom of the mountain. Isn’t this true for most of us?

Still Writing will help you discover the mindset for a creative life.

The post Giving up Your Best Loved Ideas and Starting Over appeared first on Farnam Street.

***

If you believe Thomas Kuhn’s theory outlined in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, then the pace of change happens slowly at first and then all at once.

Innovation: The Attacker’s Advantage, an out-of-print book from 1984 takes a timeless look at this theory and applies it to innovation. This is the Innovator’s Dilemma long before the innovator’s dilemma.

The perspective of Richard Foster, the book’s author, is that there is a battle going on in the marketplace between innovators (or attackers) and defenders (who want to maintain their existing advantage).

Some companies have more good years than bad years. What’s the secret behind their success? Foster argues it’s their willingness to cannibalize “their current products and processes just as they are the most lucrative and begin the search again, over and over.

It is about the inexorable and yet stealthy challenge of new technology and the economics of sub situation which force companies to behave like the mythical phoenix, a bird that periodically crashed to earth in order to rejuvenate itself.

The book isn’t about improving process but rather changing your mindset. This is the Attacker’s Advantage.

Henry Ford understood this mindset. In My Life and Work, he wrote,

If to petrify is success, all one has to do is to humor the lazy side of the mind; but if to grow is success, then one must wake up anew every morning and keep awake all day. I saw great businesses become but the ghost of a name because someone thought they could be managed just as they were always managed, and though the management may have been most excellent in its day, its excellence consisted in its alertness to its day, and not in slavish following of its yesterdays. Life, as I see it, is not a location, but a journey. Even the man who most feels himself ‘settled’ is not settled—he is probably sagging back. Everything is in flux, and was meant to be. Life flows. We may live at the same number of the street, but it is never the same man who lives there.

[…]

It could almost be written down as a formula that when a man begins to think that he at last has found his method, he had better begin a most searching examination of himself to see whether some part of his brain has not gone to sleep.

Foster recognizes that innovation is “born from individual greatness” but exists within the context of a marketplace where the S-curve dominates and questions such as “how much change is possible, when it will occur, and how much it will cost,” are critical factors.

Companies are often blindsided by change. Everything is profitable until it isn’t. But leading companies are supposed to have an advantage. Or, are “the advantages outweighed by other inherent disadvantages?” Foster argues this is the case.

The roots of this failure lie in the assumptions behind the key decisions that all companies have to make. Most of the managers of companies that enjoy transitory success assume that tomorrow will be more or less like today. That significant change is unlikely, is unpredictable, and in any case will come slowly. They have thus focused their efforts on making their operations ever more cost effective. While valuing innovation and espousing the latest theories on entrepreneurship, they still believe it is a highly personalized process that cannot be managed or planned to any significant extent. They believe that innovation is risky, more risky than defending their present business.

Some companies make the opposite assumption. They assume tomorrow does not resemble today.

They have assumed that when change comes it will come swiftly. They believe that there are certain patterns of change which are predictable and subject to analysis. They have focused more on being in the right technologies at the right time, being able to protect their positions, and having the best people rather than on becoming ever more efficient in their current lines of business. They believe that innovation is inevitable and manageable. They believe that managing innovation is the key to sustaining high levels of performance for their shareholders. They assume that the innovators, the attackers, will ultimately have the advantage, and they seek to be among those attackers, while not relinquishing the benefits of the present business which they actively defend. They know they will face problems and go through hard times, but they are prepared to weather them. They assume that as risky as innovation is, not innovating is even riskier.

These beliefs are based on a different understanding of competition.

The S-Curve

The S-curve is a graph of the relationship between the effort put into improving a product or process and the results one gets back for the investment. It’s called the S-curve because when the results are plotted, what usually appears is a sinuous line shaped like an S, but pulled to the right at the top and pulled to the left at the bottom.

Initially, as funds are put into developing a new product or process, progress is very slow. Then all hell breaks loose as the key knowledge necessary to make advances is put in place. Finally, as more dollars are put into the development of a product or process, it becomes more and more difficult and expensive to make technical progress. Ships don’t sail much faster, cash registers don’t work much better, and clothes don’t get much cleaner. And that is because of limits at the top of the S-curve.

Limits are the key to understanding the S-curve in the innovation context. When we approach a limit, “we must change or not progress anymore.” Management’s ability to recognize limits and change course becomes key.

If you are at the limit, no matter how hard you try you cannot make progress. As you approach limits, the cost of making progress accelerates dramatically. Therefore, knowing the limit is crucial for a company if it is to anticipate change or at least stop pouring money into something that can’t be improved. The problem for most companies is that they never know their limits. They do not systematically seek the one beacon in the night storm that will tell them just how far they can improve their products and processes.

Foster argues that if you don’t understand limits and S-curves, you get blindsided by change. I think that’s too neat of an argument — you can understand limits and S-curves and still get blindsided, but the odds are reduced. You can think of the S-curve as the blindsided curve or the attacker’s curve, depending on your perspective.

For the S-curve to have practical significance there must be technological change in the wind. That is, one competitor must be nearing its limits, while others, perhaps less experienced, are exploring alternative technologies with higher limits. But this is almost always the case. I call the periods of change from one group of products or processes to another, technological discontinuities. There is a break between the S-curves and a new one begins to form. Not from the same knowledge that underlays the old one but from an entirely new and different knowledge base.

I think this argument is starting to sound a lot like the Innovator’s Dilemma but 15 years sooner.

Technological discontinuities are arriving with increasing frequency because we’re in the early stages of the technological revolution. Eventually, these developments will revert to the mean, and disruptive innovation will become less frequent and incremental innovation more common. Disruptive innovation favors the attacker, whereas incremental favors the incumbent — going from Zero to One will be harder.

As limits are approached, incremental improvement becomes increasingly expensive.

At the same time, the possibility of new approaches often emerges—new possibilities that frequently depend on skills not well developed in leader companies. As these attacks are launched, they are often unnoticed by the leader, hidden from view by conventional economic analysis. When the youthful attacker is strong he is quite prepared for battle by virtue of success and training in market niches. The defender, lulled by the security of strong economic performance for a long time and by conventional management wisdom that encourages him to stay his course, and buoyed by faith in evolutionary change, finds it’s too late to respond. The final battle is swift and the leader loses.

This means the standard “stick to your knitting” argument becomes contextual and thus psychologically difficult. Sometimes the best strategy may be to move to something unfamiliar. I’d argue that the competitive drive for efficiency makes a lot of companies increasingly fragile. Most dangerous of all, they are blind to their fragility.

The S-curve, limits and attacker’s advantages are at the heart of these problems and they also provide the key to solving them. For example, there are people, call them limitists, who have an unusual ability to recognize limits and ways around them. They ought to be hired or promoted. There are others who can spot ways to circumvent limits by switching to new approaches. They are essential too. Imaginary products need to be designed to understand when a competitive threat is likely to become a reality. Hybrid products that seem to be messy assemblages of old and new technologies (like steam ships with sails) can sometimes be essential for competitive success. Companies can set up separate divisions to produce new technologies and products to compete with old ones. S- curves can be sketched and used to anticipate trouble.

None of this is easy. And it won’t happen unless the chief executive replaces his search for efficiency with a quest for competitiveness.

[…]

Most top executives understand, I think, that technological change is relevant to them and that it is useless and misleading to label their business as high-tech or low-tech. What they don’t have is a picture of the engines of the process by which technology is transformed into competitive advantage and how they can thus get their hands on the throttle.

“If change occurs at the time learning starts to slow,” wrote Phillip Moffitt in a 1980s Esquire article entitled The Dark Side of Excellence, “… then there is a chance to avoid the dramatic deterioration. If we call this the ‘observation point,’ when you can see the past and the future, then there is time to reconsider what one is doing.”

Understanding Limits

Limits are important because of what they imply for the future of the business. For example, we know from the S-curve that as the limits are approached it becomes increasingly expensive to carry out further development. This means that a company will have to increase its technical expenditures at a more rapid pace than in the past in order to maintain the same rate of progress of technical advance in the marketplace, or it will have to accept a declining rate of progress. The slower rate of change could make the company more vulnerable to competitive attack or presage price and profit declines. Neither option is very attractive; they both signal a tougher environment ahead as the limits are approached. Being close to the limits means that all the important opportunities to improve the business by improving the technology have been used. If the business is going to continue to grow and prosper in the future, it will have to look to functional skills other than technology—say marketing, manufacturing or purchasing. Said another way, as the limits of a technology are reached, the key factors for success in the business change. The actions and strategies that have been responsible for the successes of the past will no longer suffice for the future. Things will have to change. Discontinuity is on the way. It is the maturing of a technology, that is the approach to a limit, which opens up the possibility of competitors catching up to the recognized market leader. If the competitors better anticipate the future key factors for success, they will move ahead of the market leaders.

[…]

If one knows that the technology has little potential left, that it will be expensive to tap, and that another technology has more potential (that is, is further from its limits), then one can infer that it may be only a matter of time before a technological discontinuity erupts with its almost inevitable competitive consequence.

Thus finding the limit becomes important.

Finding the Limit

All this presumes we know the answer to the question “Limits of what?” The “what,” as Owens Corning expressed it, was the “technical factors of our product that were most important to the customer.” The trick is relating these “technical factors,” which are measurable attributes of the product or process to the factors that customers perceive as important when making their purchase decision. This is often easy enough when selling products to sophisticated industrial users because suppliers and customers alike have come to focus on these variables, for example, the specific fuel consumption of a jet engine or the purity of a chemical. But it is much tougher to understand these relationships in the consumer arena. How does one measure how clean our clothes are? Do we do it the same way at home as the scientists do in the lab? Do we really measure “cleanness,” or its “brightness” or a “fresh smell” or “bounce?” All of these are attributes of “clean” clothes which may have nothing whatsoever to do with how much dirt is in the clothes. … These are complicated questions to answer because different consumers will feel differently about these factors, creating confusion in the lab. Further, once the consumer has expressed his preference it may be difficult to measure that preference in technical terms. For example, what does “fit” mean? What are the limits of “fit”? If the attribute that consumers want cannot be expressed in technical terms, clearly its limit cannot be found.

Further complicating the seemingly simple question of “limits of what?” is the realization that the consumer’s passion for more of the attribute may be a function of the levels of the attribute itself.

For example, in the detergent battles of the 1950s, P&G and its competitors were all vying to make a product that would produce the “cleanest” clothes. It was soon discovered that in fact the clothes were about as clean as they could ever get. The dirt had been removed, but the clothes often had acquired a gray, dingy look that the consumer associated with dirt. In fact, the gray look was caused by torn and frayed fibers, but the consumer did not appreciate this apparently arcane technical detail. Rather than fight with consumers P&G decided to capitalize on their misperceptions and add “optical brighteners” to the detergent. These are chemicals that reflect light. When they were added to the detergent and were retained on the clothes, they made the clothes appear brighter and therefore cleaner in the consumer’s eyes, even though in the true sense they weren’t any cleaner.

The consumers loved it, and bought all the Tide they could get in order to get their clothes “clean,” that is optically bright.

[…]

Another complication with performance parameters is that they keep changing. Frequently this change is due to the consumer’s satisfaction with the present levels of product performance; optical brightness in our prior example. This often triggers a change in what customers are looking for. No longer will they be satisfied with optical brightness alone; now they want “bounce” or “fresh smell,” and the basis of competition changes. These changes can be due to a change in the social or economic environment as well. For example, new environmental laws (which led to biodegradable detergents), a change in the price of energy, or the emergence of a heretofore unavailable competitive product like the compact audio disc or high-definition TV. These changes in performance factors should trigger the establishment of new sets of tests and standards for the researchers and engineers involved in new product development. But often they don’t. They don’t because these changes are time-consuming and expensive to make, and they are difficult to think through. Thus it often appears easier to just not make the change. But, of course, this decision carries with it potentially significant competitive risks.

The people that should see these changing preferences, the salesmen, often do not because they have a strong incentive to sell today’s products. So the very people that the organization has put into place to stay close to the customer often fail to keep the organization informed of a changing landscape. And if they do, it’s still a complicated process to get companies to act on that information.

… The people we rely on to keep us close to the customer and new developments often do not. So our structure and systems work to confirm our disposition to keep doing things the same way. As Alan Kantrow, editor at the Harvard Business Review, puts it, “Our receptor sites are carrying the same chemical codes that we carry. We are thus likely to see only what we expect and want to see.” The chief executive says, “I’ve done good things. We’re scanning our environment.” But in fact he is scanning his own mind

Even if sales and marketing do perceive the need for change, they may not take their discovery back to their technical departments for consideration. If the technical departments do hear about these developments, they may not be able to do much about them because of the press of other projects. So all in all, changes in customer preferences get transmitted slowly, usually only after special studies are done specifically to examine changing customer preferences. All this means that answering the “limits of what” question can be tricky under the best of circumstances, and much tougher in an ongoing business.

There are limits to limits, of course. First, just because you’re approaching a limit doesn’t mean there is an effective substitute that can solve the problem better. However, “if there is an alternative, and it is economic, then the way the competitors do battle in the industry will change.” Second, it’s possible to be wrong about limits and thus draw the wrong conclusions.

A great example of this is Simon Newcomb, the celebrated astronomer, who in 1900 said “The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery and known forms of force, can be united in a practical machine by which men shall fly long distances through the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration to be.” Two years later, he clarified, “Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical and insignificant, if not utterly impossible.” It wasn’t even a year before the Wright brothers proved him wrong at Kitty Hawk.

Diminishing Returns

One mistake we make is to confuse time and effort.

It is not the passage of time that leads to progress, but the application of effort. If we plotted our results versus time, we could not by extrapolation draw any conclusion about the future because we would have buried in our time chart implicit assumptions about the rate of effort applied. If we were to change this rate, it would increase or decrease the time it would take for performance to improve. People frequently make the error of trying to plot technological progress versus time and then find the predictions don’t come to pass. Most of the reason for this is not the difficulty of predicting how the technology will evolve, since we have found the S-curve to be rather stable, but rather predicting the rate at which competitors will spend money to develop the technology. The forecasting error is a result of bad competitive analysis, not bad technology analysis.

Thus, it might appear that a technology still has a great potential but in fact what is fuelling its advance is rapidly increasing amounts of investment.

Psychologically, we believe the more effort we put in, the more results we should see. This has disastrous effects in organizations unable to recognize limits.

Often there is more than one S-curve; the gap between them represents a discontinuity.

Efficiency Versus Effectiveness

Effectiveness is set when a company determines which S-curve it will pursue (e.g., vacuum tubes or solid state). Efficiency is the slope of the present curve. Effectiveness deals with sustaining a strategy-efficiency with the present utilization of resources. Moving into a new technology almost always appears to be less efficient than staying with the present technology because of the need to bring the new technology up to speed. The cost of progress of an established technology is compared with that of one in its infancy, even though it may eventually cost much less to bring the new technology up to the state of the art than it did to bring the present one there. To paraphrase a comment I’ve heard many times at budget meetings: “In any case the new technology development cost is above and beyond what we’re already paying. Since it doesn’t get us any further than we presently are, it cannot make sense.” The problem with that argument is that someday it will be ten or twenty or thirty times more efficient to invest in the new technology, and it will outperform the existing technology by a wide margin.

There are many decisions that put effectiveness and efficiency at odds with each other, particularly those involving resource allocation. This is one of the toughest areas to come to grips with because it means withdrawing resources from the maturing business.

[…]

In addition, many companies have management policies that, interpreted literally, impede moving from one S-curve to another. For example, “Our first priority will be to protect our existing businesses.” Or “We will operate each business on a self-sustaining basis; each will have to provide its own cash as well as make a contribution to corporate overhead.” These rules are established either in a period of relaxed competition or out of political necessity.

The fundamental dilemma is that it always appears to be more economic to protect the old business than to feed the new one at least until competitors pursuing the new approach get the upper hand. Conventional financial theory has no practical way to take account of the opportunity cost of not investing in the new technology. If it did, the decision to invest in the present technology would often be reversed.

Metrics become distorted, and defenders believe they are more productive than they are. Attackers and defenders look at productivity differently.

Even if a defender succeeds in managing his own S-curve better, chances are he will not be able to raise his efficiency by more than, say, 50 percent. Not much use against an attacker whose productivity might be climbing ten times faster because he has chosen a different S-curve. All too frequently the defender believes his productivity is actually higher than his attacker’s and ignores what the attacker potentially may have to offer the customer. Defenders and attackers often have a different perspective when it comes to judging productivity. For the attacker, productivity is the improvement in performance of his new product over his old product divided by the effort he puts into developing the new product. If his technology is beginning to approach the steep part of its S-curve, this could be a big number. The defender, however, observes the productivity through the eyes of the market, which may still be treating the new product as not much more than a curiosity. So in his eyes the attacker’s productivity is quite low. We’ve seen this happen time and again in the electronics industry. Products such as microwaves, audio cassettes and floppy discs failed at first to meet customer standards, but then, almost overnight, they set new high-quality standards and stormed the market.

Even if the defender admits that the attacker’s product may have an edge, he is likely to say it is too small to matter. Since the first version of a wholly new product is frequently just marginally better than the existing product, the defender often thinks the attacker’s productivity is lower, not higher than his own. The danger comes in using this erroneous perception to figure out what is going to happen next. Too often defenders err by thinking that the attacker’s second generation new product will require enormous resources and result in little progress. We know differently. We know from the mathematics of adolescent S-curves that once the first crack appears in the market dam, the flood cannot be far behind. And further, it won’t cost nearly as much since the first product has absorbed much of the start-up costs. No doubt this will be a big shock to the defender who will tell the stock market analysts, “Well, the attacker was just lucky. There was nothing in his record to suggest he could have pulled this thing off.” All true. From the defender’s viewpoint there was nothing in the attacker’s record to suggest that a change was coming. But the underlying forces were at work nevertheless, and in the end they appeared.

Innovation: The Attacker’s Advantage explores why leaders lose and what you can do about it.

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Echoing Einstein and Seneca, Asimov believes that new ideas come from combining things together. Steve Jobs thought the same thing.

What if the same earth-shaking idea occurred to two men, simultaneously and independently? Perhaps, the common factors involved would be illuminating. Consider the theory of evolution by natural selection, independently created by Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace.

There is a great deal in common there. Both traveled to far places, observing strange species of plants and animals and the manner in which they varied from place to place. Both were keenly interested in finding an explanation for this, and both failed until each happened to read Malthus’s “Essay on Population.”

Both then saw how the notion of overpopulation and weeding out (which Malthus had applied to human beings) would fit into the doctrine of evolution by natural selection (if applied to species generally).

Obviously, then, what is needed is not only people with a good background in a particular field, but also people capable of making a connection between item 1 and item 2 which might not ordinarily seem connected.

Undoubtedly in the first half of the 19th century, a great many naturalists had studied the manner in which species were differentiated among themselves. A great many people had read Malthus. Perhaps some both studied species and read Malthus. But what you needed was someone who studied species, read Malthus, and had the ability to make a cross-connection.

That is the crucial point that is the rare characteristic that must be found. Once the cross-connection is made, it becomes obvious. Thomas H. Huxley is supposed to have exclaimed after reading On the Origin of Species, “How stupid of me not to have thought of this.”

[…]

Making the cross-connection requires a certain daring. It must, for any cross-connection that does not require daring is performed at once by many and develops not as a “new idea,” but as a mere “corollary of an old idea.”

It is only afterward that a new idea seems reasonable. To begin with, it usually seems unreasonable. It seems the height of unreason to suppose the earth was round instead of flat, or that it moved instead of the sun, or that objects required a force to stop them when in motion, instead of a force to keep them moving, and so on.

The paradox here is that crazy people are good at seeing new connections too, one notable difference being the outcome.

As a brief aside, I wonder if people are creative, in part because they are autodidacts rather than being autodidacts because they are creative? The formal education system doesn’t exactly encourage creativity. Generally, there are right and wrong answers. We’re taught to get the right answer. Autodidacts try new things, often learning negative knowledge instead of positive knowledge.

When you’re right about connections that others cannot see, you are called a creative genius. When you’re wrong, however, you’re often labelled mentally ill.

This comes back to Keynes: “Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for the reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.”

A great way to connect things is with a commonplace book.

The post How Do People Get New Ideas? appeared first on Farnam Street.

***

While ‘managing by bestseller’ is a misguided approach to fixing organizational problems, there is a lot to be learned from the leading experts and entrepreneurs on what’s different about building a business today.

Make Your Mark: The Creative’s Guide to Building a Business with Impact, edited by Jocelyn Glei, features insights from twenty-one leading experts and entrepreneurs to explore the principles that propel some of today’s most successful companies.

It’s about “applying the forces of business to creativity.”
In the foreword to the book, Scott Belsky, the Founder of Behance and author of Making Ideas Happen, points to one of the fundamental problems with creativity: it’s often undiscoverable. And if it’s undiscoverable, it has no impact.

Creativity has many definitions.

For me, creativity is solving problems in new ways and conceiving new ways of looking at the world.

Creativity can be expressed in many forms, like art, science, and thought.

But creativity is all too often undiscoverable and incomprehensible.

Art, without distribution and discovery, moves nobody. Did it ever exist? Science, without clear explanation and advocacy, won’t be understood by the masses. Will it make an impact?

Creation, he argues, “must be made accessible for consumption.” Creativity alone is not enough. We need to make it consumable by channeling and packaging it.

The best businesses are purpose-driven. But you can’t go far without an incredible product experience. What guides all great product development are the twin ideals of “an unstoppable enthusiasm for bringing something great into the world and a relentless focus on usability.” Making good products takes time.

Enter Sebastian Thrun, the leader behind the team that created Google Glass and the Google Self-Driving Car. He’s also the co-founder of Udacity, which is trying to disrupt education by improving the learning experience. Thrun does a Q&A in the book, and it’s one of the best things I’ve read recently.

How do you focus your energies at the beginning of a project?

When thinking about products, I like to use a mountain-climbing analogy. The first step is to pick a peak. Don’t pick a peak because it’s easy. Pick a peak because you really want to go there; that way you’ll enjoy the process.

The second thing is to pick a team you trust and that’s willing to learn with you. Because the way mountain climbing really works is that you can’t climb the entire route perfectly. You have to know that you are going to make mistakes, that you’ll have to turn around, and that you’ll have to recover.

You also have to maintain your sense of purpose. For a long time, it may feel like you’re on the wrong path, but you must have the resilience to forge ahead. You just have to keep moving uphill.

It’s about the process, not the outcome.

For me, the journey is much more delightful if you can derive pleasure from the process every day, rather than at the end of the year. If your goal is to IPO and get rich, then you’re going to be in for a very long, very sad ride. Because most people don’t IPO and don’t get rich.

Our most important asset is our time, so I think it’s best to manage your time well right now and be happy about it, rather than focus on some deferred goal, like buying a fancy car in the future. The data shows that people who are rich aren’t any happier, so you might as well derive your happiness from what you are doing today.

How does iteration figure into your process? Do you think it’s best to create a functional prototype as soon as possible?

To return to the mountain idea, if you think about it, there’s no other way to get up the mountain than taking a hundred thousand steps. You could have all the meetings and all the documentation and work for weeks on end to make the perfect plan. But in my opinion, all you’ve done at that point is lost time. You’ve done nothing. You’ve learned nothing.

Sure, if this mountain has been climbed ten thousand times before, then you just get the book, and the maps, and you follow the same steps. But that’s not innovation. Innovation is about climbing a mountain that no one has climbed before. So there ought to be some unknowns along the way because no one has solved the problem yet.

And when you’re innovating, sheer thinking just won’t work. What gets you there is fast iteration, and fast failing. And when you fail, you’ve done something great: you’ve learned something. In hindsight, it might look a little embarrassing, and people will say, “You should’ve known that.” But the truth is you couldn’t have known because it’s unchartered territory. Almost every entrepreneur I know has failed massively many, many times along the way.

What’s the most common mistake that people make when they’re developing a product?

One mistake I see a lot is the eternal thinker, the perfectionist. This is the person that builds all the components without putting them together, because there’s perfection in component development. And they have this idea that if you only put things together right before launch, everything will go fine. Of course, that never happens.

The second mistake I see is more of a character issue, which is being discouraged by failure. Where you do something three or four times, spend half a year in development, and think, “Oh my god, I’m not there yet, let me change my career . . .” So that’s a lack of perseverance.

The last one I see is being driven by fear. When your competitor does something new, you become fearful and decide that you’re going to change course. But every single time you do this, you’re already behind your competitor and that’s just a bad idea. You have to have faith in yourself, and believe in your vision.

At some time, everybody is driven by fear. But we need to—as much as we can—take fear out of the game. One way to do this is to imagine that you are already successful. You’ve looked into the future, and you’ve succeeded. What would you enjoy doing today given that knowledge?

Clearly, certain personality types are more comfortable with iteration and failure than others. Do you think you can learn to be if it doesn’t come naturally?

It’s obvious to me that there’s a certain personality type that can deal with failure more than others. But I think this awareness can also be acquired, especially when you realize that the failures that come out of experimentation really don’t relate to you as a person. It’s just the course of innovation; failure is a systemic part of that process.

For instance, if you’re driving a car, and after three hundred miles the car runs out of gas, no one takes offense because the “failure” is inherent to the car, not to you. It’s not your failure to operate the car correctly. We all know that you have to refill the gas tank; that’s just the way it is. So if we think of failure in innovation in the same way—as having to refill the gas tank regularly—we can take it much less personally.

That’s a great metaphor. So you think the idea of constant—and playful—experimentation is the best mind-set for innovation?

It’s very uncommon for people to have the attitude of “Wow, I don’t know.” In childhood, researchers call this a “growth mind-set”—this idea that you’re comfortable with the fact that you just don’t know something yet, or that you just can’t do something yet. But most people are raised with this feeling that they know everything.

But if you know everything, you can’t possibly innovate, right? It’s impossible, because there is nothing new to learn or discover.

There’s this funny saying that I like: “After high school, kids know everything, after their bachelor’s degree, they know something, and after a PhD, they now know that they know nothing.”

I think that the ability to see how much more there is to know and be humble about it is actually a good thing. Returning to the mountain metaphor, every mountain climber I know of feels small in the mountains and enjoys the feeling of being small. No matter what you do, the mountain is always bigger than you are.

Make Your Mark is the third book in 99u’s “missing curriculum” for creative leaders. The two prior ones are Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind and Maximize Your Potential: Grow Your Expertise, Take Bold Risks & Build an Incredible Career.

The post Building a Business and Making Your Mark appeared first on Farnam Street.

***

“If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better.”

In January 2006, Disney announced it would spend $7.4 billion to buy its “cousin” Pixar Animation Studios. Many wondered about the fate of Disney Animation Studios itself – would Disney shut down the division that forged its identity, but had stagnated since its success in the early 1990s with films like The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast? Would it leave hand-drawn animation behind in favor of computer animation?

Within months, the question was settled. Disney CEO Bob Iger named Pixar’s John Lasseter and Ed Catmull to head Disney Animation, and the duo decided to leave the divisions separate and autonomous.

The decision played out brilliantly. Not only has Pixar continued to release hits like Ratatouille, Wall-E, Up, and Toy Story 3, Disney Animation recently released the best-selling animated movie of all time – Frozen – on the heels of its other well-received animated films, Wreck-it Ralph and Tangled.

***

This kind of success seemed far from reality in 1986 when Steve Jobs decided to purchase a small, struggling division of Lucasfilm with one product: the Pixar Image Computer. As Catmull explains in his book Creativity Inc.:

From the outside, Pixar probably looked like your typical Silicon Valley startup. On the inside, however, we were anything but. Steve Jobs had never manufactured or marketed a high-end machine before, so he had neither the experience nor the intuition about how to do so. We had no sales people and no marketing people and no idea where to find them. Steve, Alvy Ray Smith, John Lasseter, me—none of us knew the first thing about how to run the kind of business we had just started. We were drowning.

By 1990, the team had realized Pixar’s future was not in selling machines, but selling art. Still, it was a tough time. Even as Pixar produced computer-animated TV ads and shorts, the company was losing too much money. Jobs tried to sell it more than once – luckily, without success.

Pixar caught its first break in 1991 when Disney’s Jeff Katzenberg asked the company to produce three computer-animated features, which Disney would distribute and own. (These would go on to become Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, and Toy Story 2.)

By the end of 1995, Pixar was a public company, and Toy Story a legitimate hit. Amid the success, Catmull had his first existential crisis as President of Pixar Animation:

For twenty years, my life had been defined by the goal of making the first computer graphics movie. Now that goal had been reached, I had what I can only describe as a hollow, lost feeling. As a manager, I felt a troubling lack of purpose. Now what? The thing that had replaced it seemed to be the act of running a company, which was more than enough to keep me busy, but it wasn’t special. Pixar was now public and successful, yet there was something unsatisfying about the prospect of merely keeping it running. It took a serious and unexpected problem to give me a new sense of mission.

Catmull realized that although it had put out a great film, Pixar had a large group of employees who were reluctant to sign on for a second project. With the creative team behind Toy Story being given tremendous resources and status, the production team – responsible for executing thousands of movie-making details – felt marginalized.

In the process of solving his organizational problem, Catmull realized a new purpose: Fostering a sustainable organizational culture.

As I saw it, our mandate was to foster a culture that would seek to keep our sightlines clear, even as we accepted that we were often trying to engage with and fix what we could not see. My hope was to make this culture so vigorous that it would survive when Pixar’s founding members were long gone, enabling the company to continue producing original films that made money, yes, but also contributed positively to the world. This sounds like a lofty goal, but it was there for all of us from the beginning. We were blessed with a remarkable group of employees who valued change, risk, and the unknown and who wanted to rethink how we create. How could we enable the talents of these people, keep them happy, and not let the inevitable complexities that come with any collaborative endeavor undo us along the way? That was the job I assigned myself—and the one that still animates me to this day.

From there, Creativity, Inc. explores the process of developing the culture envisioned in his post-Toy Story hangover. Given his success at Pixar, and then Disney, some of the key points are worth examining.

In the end, it’s about people, not ideas.

If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it, or throw it away and come up with something better.

[…]

Why are we confused about this? Because too many of us think of ideas as being singular, as if they float in the ether, fully formed and independent of the people who wrestle with them. Ideas, though, are not singular. They are forged through tens of thousands of decisions, often made by dozens of people.

Solicit criticism from a trusted group:

I want to stress that you don’t have to work at Pixar to create a Braintrust. Every creative person, no matter their field, can draft into service those around them who exhibit the right mixture of intelligence, insight, and grace.

[…]

Here are the qualifications required: The people you choose must (a) make you think smarter and (b) put lots of solutions on the table in a short amount of time. I don’t care who it is, the janitor or the intern or one of your most trusted lieutenants: If they can help you do that, they should be at the table.

Failure is necessary for creative work:

Says [Director] Andrew [Stanton]: “You wouldn’t say to somebody who is first learning to play the guitar, ‘You better think really hard about where you put your fingers on the guitar neck before you strum, because you only get to strum once, and that’s it. And if you get that wrong, we’re going to move on.’ That’s no way to learn, is it?”

[…]

Even though people in our offices have heard Andrew say this repeatedly, many still miss the point. They think it means accept failure with dignity and move on. The better, more subtle interpretation is that failure if a manifestation of learning and exploration. If you’re not experiencing failure, then you are making a far worse mistake: You are being driven by a desire to avoid it.

Protect the New:

When I advocate for protecting the new, then, I am using the word somewhat differently. I am saying that when someone hatches an original idea, it may be ungainly and poorly defined, but it is also the opposite of established and entrenched—and that is precisely what is most exciting about it. If, while in this vulnerable state, it is exposed to naysayers who fail to see its potential or lack the patience to see it evolve, it could be destroyed. Part of our job is to protect the new from people who don’t understand that in order for greatness to emerge, there must be phases of not-so-greatness.

Conflict is Essential to Creative Progress

As director Brad Bird sees it, every creative organization—be it an animation studio or a record label—is an ecosystem. “You need all the seasons,” he says. “You need storms. It’s like an ecology. To view lack of conflict as optimum is like saying a sunny day is optimum. A sunny day is when the sun wins out over the rain. There’s no conflict. You have a clear winner. But if every day is sunny and it does’t rain, things don’t grow. And if it’s sunny all the time—if, in fact, we don’t ever have night—all kinds of things don’t happen and the planet dries up. The key is to view conflict as essential, because that’s how we know the best ideas will be tested and survive. You know, it can’t only be sunlight.”

Creativity Inc. is an engaging look inside the creativity engine at Pixar.

The post Ideas Are Not Singular appeared first on Farnam Street.

For example, in the 1800s, the standardization of design of mechanical devices such as gears, pulleys, chains, and cams led to a manufacturing boom. In the 1900s, the gasoline engine led to innovations in automobiles, motorcycles, and airplanes. By the 1950s, it was the integrated circuit proliferating in numerous applications. In each of these cases, the development of complementary components led to a wave of inventions.

Today’s components are often about information, technology, and computing.

Would-be inventors have all the world’s information, global reach, and practically infinite computing power. They have open-source software and abundant APIs that allow them to build easily on each other’s work. They can use standard protocols and languages. They can access information platforms with data about things ranging from traffic to weather to economic transactions to human genetics to who is socially connected with whom, either on an aggregate or (with permission) individual basis. So one way of developing technical insights is to use some of these accessible technologies and data and apply them in an industry to solve an existing problem in a new way.

Regardless of your business, there is a core of knowledge and conventional wisdom that your industry is based upon. Maybe it’s logistics, maybe it’s biology, chemistry or storytelling. Whatever that core is, “that’s your technology. Find the geeks, find the stuff, and that’s where you’ll find the technical insights you need to drive success.”

That’s also the area to look for — where conventional wisdom might be wrong. What was once common sense becomes common practice. When everyone agrees on some fundamental assumptions about how the industry works, the opposite point of view can lead to disruption.

Another possible source of innovation is to start with a solution to one problem and then look at ways to use the same solution on other problems.

New technologies tend to come into the world in a very primitive condition, often designed for very specific problems. The steam engine was used as a nifty way to pump water out of mines long before it found its calling powering locomotives. Marconi sold radio as a means of ship-to-shore communications, not as a place to hear phrases like “Baba Booey!” and “all the children are above average.” Bell labs was so underwhelmed by the commercial potential of the laser when it was invented in the ‘60s that it initially put off patenting it. Even the Internet was initially conceived as a way for scientists and academics to share research. As smart as its creators were, they could never have imagined its future functionality as a place to share pictures and videos, stay in touch with friends, learn anything about anything, or do the other amazing things we use it for today.

Schmidt gives his favorite example of building upon a solution developed for a narrow problem.

When Google search started to ramp up, some of our most popular queries were related to adult-oriented topics. Porn filters at the time were notoriously ineffective, so we put a small team of engineers on the problem of algorithmically capturing Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of porn, “I know it when I see it.” They were successful by combining a couple of technical insights: They got very good at understanding the content of an image (aka skin), and could judge its context by seeing how users interacted with it. (When someone searches for a pornography-related term and the image is from a medical textbook, they are unlikely to click on it, and if they do they won’t stay on the site for long.) Soon we had a filter called SafeSearch that was far more effective in blocking inappropriate images than anything else on the web—a solution (SafeSearch) to a narrow problem (filtering adult content).

But why stop there? Over the next couple of years we took the technology that had been developed to address the porn problem and used it to serve broader purposes. We improved our ability to rate the relevance of images (any images, not just porn) to search queries by using the millions of content-based models (the models of how users react to different images) that we had developed for SafeSearch. Then we added features that let users search for images similar to the ones they find in their search results (“I like that shot of Yosemite-go find more that look just like that”). Finally, we developed the ability to start a search not with a written query (“half dome, yosemite”), but a photograph (that snapshot you took of Half Dome when you visited Yosemite). All of these features evolved from technology that had initially developed for the SafeSearch porn filter. So when you are looking at screen upon screen of Yosemite photos that are nearly identical to the ones you took, you can thank the adult entertainment industry for helping launch the technology that is bringing them to you.

How Google Works is full of interesting insights into the inner workings of a company we’re all fascinated with.

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