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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tim Harford
Read between
June 4 - June 4, 2023
I want to convince you that there can sometimes be a certain magic in mess.
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.
When the music magazine Pitchfork listed its top 100 albums of the 1970s, Brian Eno had a hand in more than a quarter of them. Distractibility can indeed seem like an “issue,” or even a curse. But that’s if we’re looking only at the hill-climbing part of the creative process. Distractible brains can also be seen as brains that have an innate tendency to make those useful random leaps.
The people who were most easily distracted were also the ones whose first album had been released, whose poetry had been published in The New Yorker, or whose play was showing off-Broadway.
Clearly, these people were not so completely incapable of focus that they couldn’t finish the album, the poem, or the script. There needs to be at least some hill-climbing between the random leaps. But looking at these achievements, the word “hyperactivity” takes on more positive connotations. One is reminded of the sardonic headline in The Onion: “RITALIN CURES NEXT PICASSO.”
“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.”20
He moves about, searching for ideas that will pique his curiosity, extend his horizons, and hopefully make a big impact. ‘I don’t view myself as a practitioner of a particular skill or method,’ he tells me. ‘I’m constantly looking at what’s the most interesting problem that I could possibly work on. I really try to figure out what sort of scientist I need to be in order to solve the problem I’m interested in solving.’”24 The nomadic approach isn’t just about feeding Aiden’s natural curiosity, although he has plenty of that. It pays off whenever he hits a dead end. For example, in his
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The top scientists switched topics frequently. Over the course of their first hundred published papers, the long-lived high-impact researchers switched topics an average of forty-three times. The leaps were less dramatic than the ones Erez Aiden likes to take, but the pattern is the same; the top scientists keep changing the subject if they wish to stay productive. Erez Aiden is less of an outlier than one might think. As Brian Eno says, the friend of creative work is alertness, and nothing focuses your attention like stepping onto unfamiliar ground.
project switching seems to work in the arts as well as the sciences. David Bowie himself is a great example. In the few years before he went to Berlin, Bowie had been collaborating with John Lennon, had lived in Geneva, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, and had acted in a feature film, The Man Who Fell to Earth, as well as working abortively on its soundtrack. He had been drafting an autobiography. In Berlin, he produced and cowrote Iggy Pop’s albums in between working on his own. Another example is Michael Crichton, who in the 1970s and 1980s had written several novels, directed the mid-budget
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Every single one of this galaxy of creative stars had multiple projects on the go at the same time.28
Two leading creativity researchers, Howard Gruber and Sara Davis, have argued that the tendency to work on multiple projects is so common among the most creative people that it should be regarded as standard practice.31 Gruber had a particular interest in Charles Darwin, who throughout his life alternated between research in geology, zoology, psychology, and botany, always with some projects in the foreground and others in the background, competing for his attention. He undertook his celebrated voyage with the Beagle with “an ample and unprofessional vagueness in his goals.”
Gruber and Davis call this pattern of different projects at different stages of fruition a “network of enterprises.” Such a network of parallel projects has four clear benefits, one of them practical and the others more psychological. The practical benefit is that the multiple projects cross-fertilize. The knowledge gained in one enterprise provides the key to unlock another.
Søren Kierkegaard called this “crop rotation.” One cannot use the same field to grow the same crop indefinitely; eventually the soil must be refreshed, by planting something new, or simply taking a break.
box means I never have to worry about forgetting. One of the biggest fears for a creative person is that some brilliant idea will get lost because you didn’t write it down and put it in a safe place. I don’t worry about that because I know where to find it. It’s all in the box.38
Tidy Teams Have More Fun but Messy Teamwork Gets More Done
most irreplaceable social connections were the distant ones. Jobs were often discovered through personal contacts, but not because they were handed out by close friends. Instead, the jobs were rooted out by following up leads from distant contacts—old acquaintances from college, perhaps, or colleagues from a previous job. More recent data-driven research—for example, using millions of mobile-phone call records—backs up Granovetter’s claim that the vital ties are the weak ones.
creative collaboration is all about a sense of dissonance. You don’t just take a nice, neatly packaged idea from a stranger and put it into a fresh context. It is the ill-matched social gears grinding together that produces the creative spark.
“team harmony” is overrated: he wants “goal harmony” instead, a team focused on achieving a common goal rather than having members get along with one another. When
when you give people an important enough problem to solve together, they can put aside their differences. A good problem contains the seeds of its own solution. Rather than lubricating people with drinks at a networking reception, or getting them to play silly games at a team-building event, the way to get conflicting teams to gel is to give them something worth doing together—something where failing to cooperate simply isn’t an option.
Sommer repeatedly found that apparently trivial freedoms, such as the right to paint your own wall, help people define personal space, and make people happier and more productive.11
“People suddenly put into ‘good design’ did not seem to wake up and love it,” he wrote. What they loved instead was control over the space in which they had to live or work. And that control typically leads to mess. The psychologist Craig Knight admits that a space that workers design for themselves will almost always look rather ugly. “It doesn’t look as good as something a designer would have chosen, and it never will.”32
Pixar’s boss Ed Catmull agreed. “People encountered each other all day long, inadvertently, which meant a better flow of communication and increased the possibility of chance encounters. You felt the energy in the building.”35 No doubt that is true. But something else matters just as much as serendipity: autonomy. Junior staff were able to stand up to Steve Jobs, the owner, the legend, the control freak’s control freak—and to get their own way about something that mattered to them. That was more important than all the riveted steel and elegant brickwork Pixar’s success could buy.
