“A poem is never finished, only abandoned”
— Paul Valery

Many have generalized this quote to apply to all artistic endeavors.  On a video for current.tv, Ira Glass pointed out that all artists have excellent taste.  They have a clear taste or vision of what work in a particular medium could be, and they create because they are driven to demonstrate that taste.  But, there’s often a gap between the artist’s taste and his skill level.  That gap causes endless frustration, and in part gets to the phenomenon behind the above quote.  Often, an artist’s taste exceeds his skill (or materials), thus can never finish a particular work; only abandon it and move on to the next project. 

Tonight, I’m contemplating this choice for my movie.  I’ve been working on it off and on for two years now, and have completed two full revisions of it.  On one hand, I could continue pounding my head against it, trying to make it entertaining to general audiences.  I’m contemplating a complete re-cut that would help do just that, and I’d learn a whole lot along the way.  I have no idea how long it would take given that it’s taken me two years to get here. 

On the other hand, I could just decide that the audience for this movie is only those who have participated in the Race Across America or are endurance cycling enthusiasts.  If so, I don’t have to worry about all the exposition that motivates the major re-cut.  I could just continue with the current cut and finish in a month or so.  And move on to other projects.  Of course, this path involves a lowering of expectations for myself — always a bit difficult for me.

Hmmmm.….  (where the heck did I put poor Yorick)

While I ponder this like Hamlet, do go watch the Ira Glass video.  It’s incredibly handy for anyone in the storytelling trade.  Heck, I might go so far as to say anyone doing any kind of creative work, but then, I’m a fan.  Click the link, then click On Storytelling, then on Ira Glass.

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1. RAAM: Finish line

‘

‘If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top … that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver,’ Fuller once wrote. ‘But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings.’

[from the New Yorker article by Elizabeth Kolbert]

Often, the biggest hurdle in solving a problem is finding the outdated or invalid assumptions you’re habitually making.  These assumptions are the piano tops in our thinking.  Alaska Airlines provides a great example of how getting rid of an assumption allowed them to redesign the check-in process to save $8 million a year.  (Documented in Hustle & Flow at fastcompany.com; via Signal vs Noise):

‘

The new design will create significant cost savings. Seventy-three percent of Alaska’s Anchorage passengers now check in using kiosks or the Web, compared with just 50% across the airline industry.

I wonder how many old-school assumptions the rest of the airlines are making.  Perhaps if they found them, bankruptcy wouldn’t be the industry norm.  It also makes me think of Amory Lovins’ TED talk on ending US dependence on foreign oil (his book describes his plan in detail).  One of the basic assumptions he breaks is that ending the oil dependency is a costly, complex problem.  He then goes on to show that the solution is not complex and pays for itself as it’s implemented.  How many of our world’s most pressing problems are blocked on the assumption that solutions are complex and costly? 

It’s not just a business problem — this happens everywhere.  Scientific discoveries get hidden or confused by unconscious assumptions in interpreting data.  Writers get stuck resolving their plot lines.  The “ah ha!” moment usually comes when you discover the unnecessary assumption you’ve been making.  Suddenly your thinking is clear and a solution seems almost obvious (though often feels unconventional).

Another example: In Million Dollar Murray, Malcolm Gladwell points out that public policy on homelessness is based on the assumption that homelessness follows a Gaussian bell curve — that the majority of homeless people were permanently so.  He shows that homelessness follows more of a power-law curve — that most homeless people are only in that situation for a few months, then never again.  Only a few homeless people are regularly on the streets.  If you change the assumption, thus the policy, you could save governments millions and better serve both the temporarily and permanently homeless.

All this reminds me of my favorite scene from The Contender.  It’s not actually in the movie, but in the deleted scenes section of the DVD.  While I agree it was superfluous to the movie, it is a gem of a scene.  In it, the White House Press Secretary and Chief of Staff are sitting in the oval office, exhausted by the incredibly difficult process of confirming a new Vice President (expertly played by Joan Allen).  The President (Jeff Bridges) comes in, sits down and says,

‘

“You got five apes in a cage. You got a banana hanging by a string in the middle of the cage. You got some stairs going to the banana. Now, pretty soon, one of those apes is gonna go for the banana. As soon as he hits the stairs, you take a hose and you spray all five apes with freezing cold water for five minutes.

Now, some time passes, and pretty soon another one of the apes is going to make the same attempt with the same result: all five apes get sprayed with the cold water.

Now you turn off the cold water. You never use it again. One of the apes is going to go for the banana. He hits the stairs. The other four apes pounce on him, and beat the shit out of him. OK. Understandable.

Now you replace one of those original apes with a new ape. After a while, that new ape, he’s going to spy that banana, and when he goes for the stairs, the other four apes are going to jump on him and beat the shit out of him. Right?

Now time passes. You replace another one of the original apes with a new ape. That new ape is going to go for the banana. The other four apes are going to beat the shit out of him — including the first new ape, who as no idea why he’s enthusiastically beating the shit out of this poor guy, nor why he, himself, had the shit beat out of him. Ok?

Now, you keep replacing the original apes with new apes until finally, you’ve got a cage filled with five apes who have never had the freezing cold water sprayed on them, and nevertheless, not one of the apes will ever attempt to climb those stairs again.

Why not?

Because, that’s the way it’s always been done around here.” 

By the end, the apes operate under the assumption that reaching for the banana is bad, and must be punished.  But, that assumption is outdated; made, in fact, before any of them came to the cage.  In reality, since we’ve shut off the water, there’s nothing other than that assumption that prevents any ape from getting the banana.  Just like people who clung to piano tops don’t see the life preservers. 

It’s so easy to be ruled by assumptions you’re not aware of.  I think it’s helpful to break these assumptions whenever possible. 

Here’s mine for the day: that the only way for me to be productive on a project is to spend all day working on it (this assumption ignores the evidence that I’ll procrastinate endlessly, searching for a huge block of time to work).   To break it, I’ve spent no more than 1 hour on any given project.  As a result, I’ve gotten a bunch done.  It feels good.

What unconscious assumptions are you making?  Go find one today and break it. 

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I think all creative people excel at this in some way.  Meanwhile, countless mentors prescribe doing some creative work every day.  I’ve often paraphrased the maxim, “When all hell breaks loose, make art.”  So, it’s important to get stuff done regularly.

I’m becoming a huge fan of incrementalism: doing tiny bits of work instead of huge projects.  This practice is a great remedy for my delusions of grandeur.  Over the past few weeks, I’ve been satisfying myself with tiny little projects: given 15 minutes, I’ll set up lights for a photo.  I won’t shoot; not enough time.  But I’ll set them up so in a future 15 minutes, I’ll get to shoot.  The result — other than my dining room being filled with photography gear — is that I’m getting work done and feeling better for it. 

Early this week, I got several bits of bad news in just a few hours time.  I was all geared up for a lovely bout of melancholy.  Instead, though, I looked at my list of stuff I wanted to do, and just started back on the list — doing little things I know I wanted to do.  In about an hour, I was feeling great again.  Doing microscopic creative projects was a better remedy for the blues than anything I’ve previously encountered.  I guess they were right: “make art”.  (I note that it doesn’t say “make great art”). 

Today I was noodling on this, and for whatever reason, JFK’s famous quote came to mind: “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”  Yeah, I don’t know why it propped into my head either, but I decided to riff on it a bit.  It always helps me to have a little catchy mantra to remind myself to do things — like make art when blue. 

Here’s what I came up with: “Ask not how time constrains you — ask how you can exploit your time.”  Not as melodious as JFK, but it gets the job done.  And, I like how it demonstrates the master/slave role reversal.

However it’s phrased, the lesson I’m learning comes down to — accept no excuses; make stuff; I’ll feel better for it. 

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Funny how paths don't go straight, but in more of a circle.  It's a bit like the movie It's a Wonderful Life (visible in it's entirety on google) - Jimmy Stewart keeps trying to travel to distant lands and adventures, only to come to appreciate later what he already had all around him in his home town. 

My story is just like the classic:  Once upon a time I worked in a fortress of software and grew to hate it.  I thought I was bored of tech, so I left the land of technology for the radiant fields of creativity.  I made movies in the land of filmmaking, hunted Definitive Moments in the land of photography, wrote stories in the halls of fiction, and even rode the roller coaster of startups.

I noticed that these creative careers didn't seem all romantic and glowy as they had seemed.  In fact, because I had walked away from everything I was good at (in the tech world) to do things I had barely done before, it was quite a bit harder.  Further, it never really "felt right".

Meanwhile, I was constantly playing with tech - probably about 40hrs / week.

So, I climbed a craggy rock in my mind and thought about what I enjoy: imagining new things, creatively solving problems, building things that hadn't existed before, synthesizing new ideas, working on something that demanded an intensity in balance with how passionate I felt about it, working with others, learning new things.  These are all things I can do in any field. It's all design - whether it be software design, graphic design, story design, etc.

Why not do all that in a field I have a ton of experience, skills, and interest?  Meanwhile, I can get an extra helping in the so called "creative" arts. 

After 5 years, I finally had come to understand wisdom in Hugh MacLeod's book, How to be Creative, namely: "Keep your day job".   (I read that book 4 years ago; I guess it took one year per word to sink in)

I hadn't gotten burned out by tech at my old job, but by the fact that I was up in the senior management cloud, managing people instead of doing all those creative things I listed above. 

With that, I turned my metaphorical horse around and rode back home to the land of tech - via a convenient sunset, of course.

Now, this all doesn't mean I'm abandoning everything I did in the last five years - I've had too much fun doing it.  I'm just realizing that there's ways to have my cake and eat it too.

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3. Video vs still photography, pt 3

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It doesn’t matter what you choose, just choose and never look back. When we are given the opportunity to change our minds down the road, or when we try to predict how happy we will be with something or someone, we invariable fail and find ourselves unhappy. Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, says that based on his research, we are happiest when we have no options. This fascinating presentation given at the TED conference describes his findings. Very interesting. (link to TEDTalks post)
Perhaps this is why creativity thrives not on boundless possibility, but on having limitations. I’ve read that two common traits of successful leaders are 1) that they make decisions quickly and move on, and 2) are always optimistic. Perhaps this explains it. It also fits the advice a friend once gave me: don’t try to figure out the rest of your life; just pick a project and do it; then do another; then another.
In other words, don’t think so much.

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My friend handed down her judgment on my to-do lists after listening to me whine to her for an hour about how I felt that I had not accomplished anything this year. I flourished my project list as evidence — so many great ideas and not a one started.
Like a good follower of Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, I’ve diligently recorded everything that I’d like to done. The idea is to save all these ideas in a system that allows me to quickly and efficiently get things done. Because I get things done, I can trust the system, and because I trust the system, I feel less stress. That’s the idea anyway. The problem is that my creative mind thinks up 5–10 interesting projects each day, but, being merely human, I can only finish one a day at best. So they accumulate. Even with brutal triage sessions, the list grows. It becomes a mass of unfulfilled desire — demanding my attention, yet denying satisfaction. I’d put tremendous pressure on myself to get things done. I’d procrastinate like mad or when I would work, I’d be filled with resentment.
So, maybe she’s right. I’m going to give it a try — I’m banishing my to-do and project lists for the next few months to see how things go. This leaves me with only one question: “What do I want to do today?“
Curiously, I’m already much happier and much more motivated to get stuff done.

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