It’s graduation time, which means another 70k people with degrees in the “creative arts” are leaving universities to find work.

God bless them, and I mean that literally.

Of these students: a lucky few will graduate directly into consistent employment.  Some step into the silent vacuum of unemployment.  But most occupy a kind of shadow-land of under-employment. They’ll freelance, their hopes rising and falling with each email inquiry.  But what they must not allow to happen is for their creative productivity to rise and fall with those hopes. 

Create to survive - even when there is no project.  This is the reason:

Not only can you not see 10 years down the road, you often can’t see over the next hill. The road is going to split 3 ways and split again.  You will alternatively find yourself fully employed, unemployed, and under-employed. These 3 positions should have no effect on your productivity. Nothing, including your talent level, will do more to determine your creative destiny.

if I can give a graduate (or any other aspiring creative) one thing - something to hold close to heart and depend on - it would be this principal: work creates opportunity.  You don’t create because someone gives you a project.  You create to create projects.  Nothing straightens the road like consistent productivity.

If you’re graduating, you’re at a turning point.  You’ve spent the last 16 years or so being told what to do.  Most of you have done a damn good job, too.  But your life will probably not be like that. So, the next few months are key.

It’s easy to lose steam because nobody is giving you projects to work on.  Graduating is, literally, leaving a system.  In its place is nothing.  You must impose your own to survive.  And that system should involve the daily practice of creating, or eventually, you’ll drift away. A year or 2 from now, you’ll find yourself depressed, wondering where you went wrong. Meanwhile, someone else, who kept going, will have crested a hill and found out that set she designed - the 1 for a movie that didn’t exist - got her a job on a movie that does exist.

Don’t wait for someone to ask you to create something.

Create, even when there is no project. Especially if there is no project. If you’re an interior designer, keep designing just as though you were being given projects in school.  If you’re a screenwriter, keep writing.  If you’re a businessperson, do more than knock on doors; write business plans.  Keep. On.  Creating.  It doesn’t matter that you can’t see where it leads right now.  The road winds to good places as well as scary ones.

First things first: Does the Muse exist?  Is she real?  Oh, yes.  When the Muse shows up, whatever genius you possess shows up with her.  Everything gets easier.  You whoop.  You holler.  You’d invite people over to see what you’re doing, except you don’t need to, because they’re already looking.

And then, you go to lunch.  Or wake up the next morning.  Or start wondering why you don’t work at this level more often.  Was it the morning latte?  The weather?  The deadline, or lack of it?

And then she’s gone.  Poof.  You’re you again, soldiering on at your normal level, which, after all, was good enough to get you this far. The point is, the Muse is not to be trusted.  This is not metaphor.  This is fact.  Did you ever ask for someone’s number at a nightclub, call it the next day, and have a Chinese laundry answer?   That’s how the Muse rolls.

Some people wait for her to show up before getting on with their creative work.  But it’s better to forget her.  I know it’s hard.  Have you ever kissed someone whose mouth tasted like butterscotch?  How are you supposed to forget magic like that?  But like the hot girl at the bar, the Muse doesn’t respond well to begging.  You got some good lines?  She’s heard everything.

Oh - there is 1 thing that works, at least sometimes.  Ignore her. Act like she doesn’t exist.  And just like the hot girl at the bar, she just might find you interesting again. 

The Zeitgeist has changed.  Followers of this blog know I track the zeitgeist, or Z, pretty closely.  The Z is the ghost in our time; the “feeling” of this moment.  Think of it as an amalgam of the prevailing hopes, aspiration, anxieties and fears of now.  And we’ve reached a tipping point.

A couple of years ago, I was having lunch with my friend John Bettis, one of the most successful songwriters in history. John has 800 songs in the ASCAP database, including minor legends like Michael Jackson’s Human Nature and Madonna’s Crazy For You.  John’s songs were just as in demand as ever, but that day he said, “Reed, there are 2 words I can’t use together in a song right now.  Those words are “love” and “forever”.

The Z was in a different place.  Kesha and the YOLO ethos was riding high. A lyric like Kesha’s Dirty Love came across as empowering to a generation of girls making the duck-face on Facebook:
                      I just want your dirty love
                      I just want your dirty love
                      All I need is to get in-between your sheets

But the Z never stops moving.  Hooking up has hit a wall and it’s taken some of the YOLO energy with it.  There were hints at the Grammy’s 2 years ago, when leading artists embraced the turn towards the comfort of nostalgia.  Bruno Mars looked like he just stepped off the Temptations’ tour bus. Adele, the big winner, was singing about broken hearts - and looked like a 1950’s English housewife. This year, Lady Gaga looked quaint and out-of-date with her “shock” gear. 

Meanwhile, MIchael “Sinatra” Buble has the #1 record in America.  He’s singing nothing but romance, baby, complete with big band.  Just like Justin Timberlake, who added the tuxedo.  It’s official: romance is back.

Note to John: time to start pitching those love songs again, pal.

           Conspicuous by their absence are a great many items, some noble, like performing civic duties, some pleasurable, like being in love, or experiencing the taste of a really good single malt whisky.  These are desirable, but the list makes no such exhaustive claims.  The list seeks only to define a day as good - a day worth living - and whatever else is going on looks after itself.

This is what I believe: do any three of the four items in a day, and you stand a good chance of going to bed with some peace.  Fail to do them, and a million bucks in your bank account won’t ease your sense of disquiet.   Not immediately, perhaps, but over time, the list will have its due.

           Happy travels.

       Reed

This post is also available here, at Bluerocktexas.com, where it was originally published in the Blue Rock Review:

http://review.bluerocktexas.com/files/v2/the-list.pdf

To all those who study the neuroscience of creativity:

Over the last 12 months, I’ve read 30 scholarly papers (seemed like a nice round number, and I had to quit somewhere) in neuroscience and neuropsychology. I was quite workmanlike about it, and even hired a research assistant to track down references in the papers so I could focus on reading.

Some of what I read was thrilling.  Some seemed trivial.  But taken as a whole, I believe your various disciplines are making a grave error with real consequences. This error has to do with value. 

In a few sentences, you’re going to read what seems like an insult.  It isn’t, really; it just turns something that seems settled upside down, which can be startling.  I ask you to withhold judgment in the spirit of predictive coding, which was referenced in a couple of the papers I read.  Predictive coding is an efficiency strategy of the brain that makes it stop paying attention to things it sees repeatedly.  Instead, it just predicts what it’s seeing.  The observation I’m about to make is like that.  As soon as you read it, you’ll likely be flooded with predictive coding like, “Right, he’s anti-science, I know the drill,” and then fill in a lot of conclusions about my motives or even mental competence.  But the thing you proved about predictive coding is that nobody’s immune, right?  Nobody.

Yes.  I realize I’m speaking in metaphor, here.  Anyway, here’s the apparent insult/startling observation:

                        Scientists hate mystery with an exalted hate.

I acknowledge the confrontation in this.  Carl Sagan, the 1^st scientist I ever saw on TV, became a rock star by helping us all fall in love with the mystery of science.  His heir apparent, Neil deGrasse Tyson, has used this language.  I have a few scientist friends, mostly made doing research for my novels.  The closest they get to poetry is when they talk about how much they love “the mystery.”  Then, something interesting happens.       

                     They go back to work destroying that mystery.          

 This is an interesting kind of love, yes?  When one’s intuitive response to a thing is to want very, very much to turn it into its opposite?  I had a girlfriend in college who wanted to love me this way.  Eventually, I figured out it wasn’t love.

Now, you might claim that by dismantling this mystery, you can appreciate it even more.  And this is true on one level.  But it’s also true that once you love a mystery in your way, it’s destroyed.  So, you love mystery in the same way some hunters love the animals they kill.  This is not a glib statement.  I grew up in a culture of hunting, on a working cattle ranch.  It’s a fact that some hunters have moments of authentic, powerful admiration for a mature buck, even as they train a rifle on its heart.

This is why I prefer to say you hate mystery with an exalted hate.  I don’t mean you despise it.  You don’t hate mystery the way Hitler hated Jews.  Your hate is exalted, like the hate of a committed gardener towards weeds.  The gardener kills weeds because he wishes they were something else, like a patch of fescue, or a domesticated flower.  What you value is data, which mystery yields in its death.  Gardeners kill weeds with an authentic love for the garden in their hearts.  You kill mystery with the love for data in your hearts.

I can acknowledge that your systematic conversion of mystery into data has yielded inestimable benefits to humanity.  But, can you acknowledge it has also, in some ways, impoverished us?  This is the question of value with which I began.  This question has mattered for a long time, but now it’s the imperative question.  This is because now:

                 You want to be the gardeners of our brains. The gardeners of us.

This is something we need to discuss.  As I said, I’ve read a lot of your work over the last year.  Implicit in almost all of it is the assumption the brain is a garden that would be better off without any weeds.  You get very excited by research that hints of a brain that runs harder, faster, and even, by a narrow definition, more creatively.  But there’s a problem:

               The line between weed and flower is often imperceptible and arbitrary.

I see no evidence in your work that you recognize this. 

Right now, you’re working very hard to love the mystery of what it means to be human in your way.  When you have completed this act of love, what will you do with the data this death yields?  There is a tipping point hovering on the outskirts of your work.  Soon -not next year, but eventually - you will possess the recipes to the most exquisitely-powerful weed killers. You will be sharpshooters of the mind.  3 days a week, I teach creativity in a university setting.  Year after year, the baseline creativity scores of my students trend lower.  I recognize this is complicated.  But I also know that more and more of my students are prescribed drugs shown to depress creativity.  Meanwhile:

               You and your colleagues are re-framing more of human behavior in the language of defect.  Of weeds.

Depression, I already know about.  But a paper I read describes optimism as illness. Anything outside the mean, then.  I know how this ends.  I live in suburban Nashville, and from my house, not a weed can be seen for blocks.  These lawns are masterpieces of science.  They are holocausts to weeds.  You know what? Spring now mostly happens far above us, in the canopies of trees.  The lawns are crushed the moment color ignites.  I worry that you think your love for your work insulates you from making some devastating choices.  But every weed in my neighborhood was killed with love for a perfect lawn.

I speak not of the haunted soul unable to leave her home, or the tortured person plagued by invisible voices.  But everyone has places in the brain that clunk, and clank, and even rub us raw.  From such places we make our modest art. The bull thistle pricks the skin, but it yields a brief, potent beauty.

             So, I raise a solitary flag and demand you respect the mystery of the flaw; the mystery of the wound.

For millennia, humans have given dignity and value to the wound.  Shakespeare said, “ … by a wound, I must be cur’d.”  The great religions teach we are healed by wounds.  I worry that because these are mythologies you assume they say nothing of value.  Mythologies are not about the value of data.  Mythologies are about understanding human experience.  The great jazz bassist and composer Charlie Mingus said,

              “I’m going to keep finding out the kind of man I am through my music.”

Mingus speaks here of the broken parts that direct the voyage of life. Repeat Mingus’ words out loud a few times, just to feel their strangeness in your mouth.  When they no longer feel alien, you will understand the mystery of the wound.

Of the thousands of pages I’ve published, only a few glimmer toward greatness.  Every one of those came from the broken place.  I swear to you those lines are what make my life worth living.  Likewise, of the countless hours of music I’ve made, there are only a few that made the hair on my arms stand up.  They are beautiful, but not like a perfect lawn.  More like the bull thistle or wild carrot, right before they die.         

The last great myth written in our culture was The Lord of the Rings.  In this myth, the world was saved by powerful men who voluntarily chose not to exercise that power.   In our own national myth, George Washington did the same, by first choosing not to become King, and then, by not running for reelection for his 3^rd term.  Writing in his Circular to the States, President Washington said,

            “For … it is yet to be decided, whether the Revolution must ultimately be considered as a blessing or a curse: a blessing or a curse, not to the present age alone, for with our fate will the destiny of unborn Millions be involved.”

This is where we are in your work.  I know you will continue.  You should continue.  But you should respect the mystery of the wound.  You should acknowledge the beauty of the flaw that directs the journey toward meaning.  Look again at the picture at the top of this letter.  The girl’s head is encased in a flowering weed the suburban gardener will happily kill.  Sometimes, you’re killing ignorance, and that’s fine.  Who wants to speak up for ignorance?  Not me.  But sometimes, you’re killing an invaluable mystery that connects human creativity to meaning.  If you can see this distinction, perhaps we can survive your love for data and continue to create work of significance and meaning.  If you can’t, we can expect to gradually become little more than perfectly-trimmed lawns of sickening uniformity.  

Sincerely,

Reed Arvin

Nashville, July 31, 2012

            Sally Ride died yesterday.  She meant much to our family.  Here’s her official NASA picture, with a model of the shuttle in the background.  The other picture shows a similar shuttle model made by my Uncle Clu and signed by Sally, which sits in my office. Also in the picture is my Mom, being given flight instruction in the cockpit of a 747.  Her instructor is the late Lionel “Al” Alford, then President of Boeing Military in Wichita, where 747s were converted into Air Force 1.  Mom’s wearing sunglasses because she’s completely blind.

            Sally Ride was important to us because she was a pioneer who didn’t make a big deal about it.  She was the 1^st American woman in space, which she downplayed, and she was gay, which she was virtually silent about. My Mom was the 1^st blind woman judge in America, which she never mentioned to anyone.  During her brilliant law career, she was often asked about what it was like going to law school as a blind woman in the 40’s.  She replied she never thought about it.  She was asked what it was like being a partner in a law firm as a woman in the 1950’s.  Same answer.  She was asked how she could serve as a judge without benefit of sight.  She said she just got on with it. 

            I don’t mean here to diminish the struggles of women, straight or gay.  But there’s something to be said for getting on with things, and shutting people up with excellence.  Mom explored the world with 4 out of 5 senses, always open, always learning.  That’s why Al took her into a 747 cockpit - because he knew she’d get it.

Mom’s still here, at 90 years old.  She has congestive heart failure, the use of 1 arm, and vertigo.  In January, she lost her husband of 63 years.  And, of course, she’s still blind.  She’s also still getting on with it - living completely independently.  Recently, I said to her, “Mom - if assisted living isn’t for a 90 year-old living alone with a bum arm, heart failure, and no eyes, who is it for?

            She replied, “Somebody other than me.”

            That’s what pioneers are made of.  They’re too busy exploring the world to join a lot of causes.  Sally Ride has taken some criticism for not being more outspoken about being gay.  But I know something about pioneers, because I grew up in a house with one.  They just get on with it.  So: Ride, Sally, Ride.  Soon enough, you’ll have company.  When you see a fellow pioneer named Kay, say, “Hi”.  You 2 will have a lot to talk about.

                                           __________

Right: So, I’ve had a social media vacation for 6 weeks to focus on work.  No twitter, no blogs, no nada.  The result is 62 pages of text on the new book and lots of new stuff to share.  I’ll start in earnest in a few days, with an open letter to neuroscientists who study creativity. Wanted to get this 1 about Sally out as a mark of respect to her life.

Just a quick post today - I’m focused on writing (Simpleology software helps keep me on track).  But there was a stellar interview in the WSJ today with Ed Catmull, President and co-founder of Pixar.  I was interested because obviously, John Lassetter gets 10x the pub.  But I’m always interested in the less public side of creative teams.  Usually, they’re indispensable - the guy who keeps everything humming.

Catmull was interviewed at the Journal’s annual All Things Digital conference.  Catmull described how Pixar’s response to failure is what defines it.

“We’ve had 3 films that have had significant failures inside.  Toy Story 2 had a complete redo while we were doing it …

The story sucked.  We basically had to replace the creative leadership of the film 9 months before it was to be delivered, and start over again … That move became the defining moment for Pixar.  It was where we established the standards, the fact that we were willing to throw the film away.”

Considering how many days (weeks?) Pixar invests in a few seconds of film, taking that decision must have been incredibly hard.  Catmull admits there was pressure from Disney not to do it rather than miss the delivery date.  In the end, Pixar did the hardest thing of all: they redid the film and made the date.  

Man, this is a hard balance.  I blew up a novel once after ayear - but I knew in my gut it wasn’t going to work - not to a high standard, anyway - and rather than cash the check, I swallowed hard and started over.  Toughest professional decision of my life.

But don’t miss this: Catmull’s not afraid to admit they failed.  I love the straightforwardness of, “the story sucked.”  Well, alrightie then. 

Catmull reminds me that everybody fails.  Hey - everybody fails.  It’s okay.  Just face it head on, set the explosives, and get on with things.  This is one way you define your future.

The majestic building above is the monastery at Novy Dvur, Czech Republic. It was designed by John Pawson, a former English teacher who dropped out of architecture school.  How good is he?  He designed Ralph Lauren’s house.  I can’t imagine a more demanding client, but on the other hand, it’s a hell of a compliment to Pawson - who also designed a home for Ian Schrager, the visionary developer of some of the world’s most iconic boutique hotels.  So, yeah: Pawson’s the man. He also religiously follows a useful technique for innovation: physicalizing.

Rather than explain what physicalizing means, I’ll post a picture of the interior of Pawson’s architectural offices.

This wall is a tacit acknowledgment that staring at a blank piece of paper and thinking really hard is one of the least-effective ways to make things.  Better to engage more of the brain by getting potential combinations where we can see and rearrange them.  For Pawson, that means taking and collecting photographs.  He describes photography as “a daily practice” - in monastic terms, essentially.  The pictures on his office wall are an idea bank of textures, colors and shapes - raw materials he combines to uncover the previously hidden.

Physicalizing depends on a tolerance for ambiguity, a key characteristic in creativity.  The truth is most of what we collect is never used; a lot of what we do use ends up used in a way we couldn’t anticipate.  As a result, collecting ideas is an investment with a highly uncertain return.  That’s very, very difficult for some people to understand. 

This might help.

This is the leather-wrapped door handle of a Mini Paceman concept automobile.  Like the rest of the car, it was designed by Anders Warming, Head of Design at the Mini division at BMW. Before Warming put pencil to paper on the Mini, he assembled a massive collection of images - from rock bands to houses to old computers - and mounted them on a wall. The door handle above was inspired by a photo of an old leather soccer ball.  Did he know what the soccer ball would mean when he took the photograph?  He did not.  Warming is now a fervent convert to physicalizing on an idea wall.  He was quoted in the WSJ, “Now we can’t take it down.  It’s our working tool.”

Is this just for designers?  No.  Most of the created world is “designed”, if the definition is opened up a bit.  A supply chain isn’t art in the conventional sense, but it’s still a design, which means it can be represented by cards or plastic soldiers or whatever you like.  There’s probably a psychological reason why creative artists gravitate to the process, but that doesn’t mean it’s less useful for other enterprises.

Aren’t sites like Pinterest idea walls? In theory, yes - but with significant disadvantages.  1st, most blog content is archived away, out of sight and mind.  2nd, information can’t be easily recombined.  Ideally, you should be able to move stuff around as easily as pieces in a jigsaw puzzle.  And finally, Pinterest is social media, which means what’s posted is curated to make the poster look cool. That misses the point of physicalizing ideas entirely.

So, how do I use this? There are 2 advantages to physicalizing ideas, and you want to take advantage of both. First, expand your idea pool.  Step 1 here is to move beyond collecting things just to post online to make yourself look cooler.  Instead, invest in collecting ideas/images/objects in which you sense meaning or utility.  These 2 activities are different enterprises.  Someone might “like” your finished product; the raw pieces, probably not.

Second, before you work on a project, assemble as much as you can into a place where you can see everything. This will almost certainly require moving off-line.  Take another look at John Pawson’s office.  That’s a significant space commitment - and it includes the space beyond the wall itself.  There’s clear area for a long view, where you can see big swaths of stuff.  But you can move in and rearrange as needed.  That’s how combinatorial innovation happens.