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Take what you get and commit to a process to ...
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Most criticism shared in the internet age is useless, or worse, harmful. It’s useless because it often personalizes the criticism to be about the creator, not the work. And it’s useless because most critics are unskilled and ungenerous.
These critics have told us a lot about themselves, but nothing much about the book. They’re actually helpful in one respect: they’re making it really clear that this is a book for people who like books similar to this one.
As a teenager and later in film school, he insisted on screening his films for a paying audience. “Fifty cents, a dollar, it didn’t matter, as long as they paid something.” He discovered early on that paying audiences cared more and demanded more. Again and again, his work was booed and met with derision. Paying money gave you the right to boo.
It’s hard to be open to feedback, to be flexible, and to stay unblocked when you’re busy defending the work you’ve already done.
You are not your work. Your work is a series of choices made with generous intent to cause something to happen.
We can always learn to make better choices.
We don’t write because we feel like it. We feel like it because we write.
Write until You’re No Longer Afraid to Write It doesn’t matter whether you call yourself a “writer.” It doesn’t matter if you’re a singer or a traffic engineer. Write more. Write about your audience, your craft, your challenges. Write about the trade-offs, the industry, and your genre. Write about your dreams and your fears. Write about what’s funny and what’s not. Write to clarify. Write to challenge yourself. Write on a regular schedule. Writing isn’t the same as talking, because writing is organized and permanent. Writing puts you on the hook. Don’t you want to be on the hook?
determination is precisely what’s needed to write poetry or create art.
Determination of the will opens the door for us to trust ourselves enough to actually find the words.
To do it without commentary or drama. To do it without regard for things that are out of your control.
Simply to chop the wood and carry the water. Again and again.
The internet brings uninvited energy, positive and negative, to the work we set out to do.
If you want to create your work, it might pay to turn off your wi-fi for a day.
Flow is the result of effort. The muse shows up when we do the work. Not the other way around.
UCLA professor Robert Bjork has argued that desirable difficulty is actually required for us to upskill and move to another level.
Desirable difficulty is the hard work of doing hard work. Setting
Learning almost always involves incompetence.
Batting practice is a practice. Writing every day is a practice. Learning to see is a practice. You’re never done, and you’re never sure.
If you want to complain that you don’t have any good ideas, please show me all your bad ideas first.
There’s a huge clue here about what to do next: get a pencil. That’s what’s scarce. People who will draw up plans. People who will go first.
And thus the idea of morning pages, of typing up everything that comes to mind, or the “yes, and” of improv. Each of these tactics is a way of persuading the other half of our brain that we’re actually capable of doing this work on demand.
Good needs to be defined before you begin. What’s it for and who’s it for? If it achieves its mission, then it’s good. If it doesn’t, then either you were unlucky, incorrect, or perhaps, what you created didn’t match what you set out to do.
You won’t run out. This isn’t your one and only shot. There’s no perfect idea, just the next thing you haven’t shipped yet. No one is keeping you from posting your video. No one is keeping you from blogging every day. No one is keeping you from hanging your artwork. The only way to get through the steps is to do the steps.
The people you bring your work to want to know what it rhymes with, what category it fits in, what they’re supposed to compare it to.
It’s so much easier to say, “It’s just me.” It’s simply what I felt like creating. Because then we’ll ignore you. And then you’re off the hook.
It’s not that Gil’s songs are better than yours, or that Hemingway’s writing is better than yours. It’s that they shipped their work, and you hesitated.
There’s plenty of time to make it better later. Right now, your job is to make it.
Build streaks.
Seek the smallest viable audience. Make it for someone, not everyone.
The professional creative works to change the culture. Not all of the culture, certainly, but a pocket of it.
If culture is sufficient to establish what we eat, how we speak, and ten thousand other societal norms, why isn’t it able to teach us a process to make art? Isn’t it possible for the culture to normalize goal setting and passion and curiosity and the ability to persuade? It can.
Creativity doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.
Art solves problems in a novel way, and problems always have constraints.
Have you ever noticed that big-budget comedies are almost never funny?
The world is filled with overconfident people. Overconfidence leads to malpractice, to fraud, and to broken promises. Over-confidence is arrogance.
Trusting yourself doesn’t require delusional self-confidence. Trusting yourself has little to do with the outcome.
Anyone who has ever learned to walk, talk, or ride a bike has gained these skills without full assurance that the effort would lead to success on any given day. But only the effort is under our control. The results are not.
By searching for (and then embracing) a practice that contributes to the people we care about, we can find a path forward. That path won’t always work, but we can trust ourselves enough to stick with it, to lean into it, to learn to do it better.
The alternative is corrosive. When we begin to distrust our own commitment to the practice, we’re left with nothing but fear. When we require outcomes as proof of our worth, we become brittle, unable to persist in the fac...
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Be paranoid about mediocrity.
Learn new skills.
You are in charge of how you spend your time. In charge of the questions you ask. In charge of the insight that you produce.
As the artist George Ferrandi said, “If you have to ask ‘should I keep going?’ the answer is ‘yes.’”
Where Do Ideas Come from?
Ideas come in spurts, until you get frightened.
Useful ideas come from being awake and alert enough to actually notice. But sometimes ideas sneak in when we’re asleep and too numb to be afraid.
Ideas don’t need a passport, and often cross borders (of all kinds) with impunity.
The path forward is about curiosity, generosity, and connection. These are the three foundations of art. Art is a tool that gives us the ability to make things better and to create something new on behalf of those who will use it to create the next thing.
