I have found that playing Bach on the piano is like having someone gently pressure-wash your brain — your thoughts feel clear and clean and beautiful!!
Celebrity sighting in my comments! I think about your work so much, man. And I love that you came here to comment on Bach, not on, ya know, you. (Although that also would've been fine and cool;)
He's my all-time favorite author. I learned a lot from him. He is my remote mentor. I even learned this term from him, " The good thing about dead or remote masters is that they can’t refuse you as an apprentice," he wrote in Steal Like an Artist, so I learn many things from writers including you.
And about this topic I have an interesting piece to share with you, I even wrote an article about it which I am going to share soon. It's this piece from Billy Oppenheimer's newsletter (he is Ryan Holiday's assistant). I loved this so much that I experimented it and got great results. It's the following:
"Tim Ferriss says the screenwriter Evan Goldberg is one of the most prolific generators of ideas that Tim has ever come across. On set of Neighbors 2, Tim sat in on a writers’ room brainstorm. The script was projected on a huge screen. One person sat at a keyboard, typing at hyperspeed as everyone else pitched ideas. “Evan said ‘fuck’ every third word,” Tim recalled. “And it was just typed right in.” After, Tim made a comment to Evan about how often he used the word “fuck.” “The important thing is to keep the generating of ideas and the editing of ideas separate,” Evan said. “You can always de-fuck the script later.
I listened to the mentioned podcast that was funny, Tim was saying, " I asked Evan what is the next because Fuck is the every third word."
The results of my experiment was many ideas and sentences that I couldn't put all of them down. I forgot some and had to force myself into recalling the ideas I missed.
That was practical solution and really interesting. You can defuck it later🤣😂😂😂
That's the best description of the effect of playing Bach I have ever heard. As a cellist, the Bach suites were my comfort, my joy and my ultimate challenge. I was fortunate to perform them many times and it was always a thrill.
The blog post nicely illustrates how and why interacting with a chatbot can be useful. The chatbot can generate a range of ideas, many of them bad, and can also iterate on the early ideas you might give the chatbot. None of the ideas or feedback generated by the chatbot might end up in your final creative output, but it can be an effective and cheap partner early on in the process. Ethan Mollick has written a blog post about this: https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/the-practical-guide-to-using-ai-to
Carsten, this is a great comment, and reminds of research by Christakis and others showing that when AI bots are added to a remote problem solving team (the humans don't know they're bots) and made to behave randomly, they still lead the team to better solutions. This sort of thinking-out-loud partner is the main way I've been using ChatGPT so far, and I wonder if perhaps it can help make a bit for some of the missed interactions with remote work? Thanks so much for this apt comment, and for sharing the Mollick post.
Agreed! When I'm stuck starting a piece of writing, I have ChatGPT write 10 examples of a starting paragraph for my article. If I like one, I start writing from there; if not, I pick the best one and say "give me ten more like this one"- then repeat till I get a starting paragraph that I don't hate. When I'm finished, I go back and either just erase that paragraph or completely rewrite it. It's weird to be helped so much by something I don't end up using, but it is super helpful!
When we’re kicking off new designs one of my go to exercises in Crazy 8’s taken from Google Sprints (https://designsprintkit.withgoogle.com/methodology/phase3-sketch/crazy-8s). Once everyone has done their 8 sketches I actually like to cut them apart, let people sort and group them, then as a team we pick the few we want to take further. Which means, if we only have 5 people on the team and we keep 4 of the ideas we’re throwing away 90%… and that’s good. It really normalizes that not every idea needs to be good to be valuable. Most had to exist for the few to emerge.
Similarly, during brainstorming I will jokingly (and with total disregard to neuroscience) encourage teammates to just write down every idea because the only way to get to the deeper ideas is to get the top ones out of the way by putting them on stickies. There is something very real about the need to turn off my internal editor to get creative, whether writing alone or collaborating as a team.
It’s seems like the Bach family tree keeps going back to the well using “Johann” as a creativity prompt for naming infants! Settling on a name for a child is really difficult though.
I would add that going back to one’s own personal writing well for inspiration can also be helpful. My writing on Substack aside, the bulk of my writing volume occurs daily as I construct narratives in patient charts. I eschew the electronic medical record “templates” as much as I can. Checking boxes to construct choppy and often misleading patient narratives sucks for both patient and doctor.
Before seeing each patient I skim their last visit note (among other data to review), and then head in to pick up “their story” where we left off. Narrative medicine is a very effective way of organizing thoughts, practicing good care, and retaining humanism. It’s probably a good spark for generativity, if not creativity. Reading one’s own previous words can probably be helpful for writers to expand an artistic or intellectual conversation with another great mind - their own from a different moment in time.
I hope you’re not too impressed. I was born with an insatiable curiosity about everyone and everything. Told people I’m a lifelong learner and get bored easily. They diagnosed me with ADHD in my 40’s. It sheds some light on the abundance of interests. Alas, unable to take the credit. Born with a neurodivergent brain.
Do you have any interest in the night sky? Mine is all for pleasure these days. I’ve loved astronomy since I was four years old. Absolutely enchanted with the night sky. After all these years, still awed when peeping through my telescope at galaxies, planets, nebulae.
Absolutely! The night sky never fails to give me a much-needed sense of awe. Both at the sheer scale, beauty, and diversity of the cosmos, but also at the fact that humans looked up and pinpricks of light and, eventually, figured out how far away they are and what they're made of.
Oh man, can't wait to read this. I was just interviewing some folks at IDEO, and my main takeaway was that they operate with a prototype mindset on everything. Thanks for sharing this Josh!
I’ve been super shaped by folks at the Stanford d.school around this thinking. They have a very similar ethos to the IDEO way of thinking. The more I look, the more I see the value of the aspects of a prototyping mindset like a bias toward action and an approach of reframing things. Lots of resonance with Range too. I think that being a good prototyper relies on having a strong *and* broad foundation. I really loved seeing those connections in your book!
Josh, this is great and so connected to some current thinking I'm doing. I'd love to jump into some of your writing...I'm going to check out some posts that catch my eye, but also happy to take recommendations if you have some favorites I should start with.
Josh, we are really on the same wavelength right now. I actually have a "prototype mindset" tag on my master thought list. (I'm really interested in productive constraints right now, and view prototyping as 1) a way to quickly cut down an open problem space so you can start learning 2) a constraint on unhelpful perfectionism. ...Anyway, just cool to see that we're converging on some lines of thought.
One of my favorite pieces about a prototyping mindset is the bias toward action. Helps to curb the inner critic and natural human impulse to overthink things. Learn by doing!
The idea I woke up with (and after reading this article).
Practice is what you do when you don't have time to play.
By itself that statement is only partly true.
Let's take an example of one of the best cricketers in the world: Sachin Tendulkar. For at least half of his early life, all he would have done is play. The game was more interesting that the future result. Then, at some point there would have been "cricket practice". The reason for this is to iron out the errors.
Practice builds:
1- Speed
2- Confidence
3- Mostly—and crucially—it builds anticipation.
However, "play" allows for experimentation. For instance, if you're asked to draw sixteen versions of an elephant, you'll have no choice but to play. It leads to areas where you might not expect, or aren't necessarily looking for. It's often a dead end, much like any diversion. However, play is usually frowned upon.
It's seen as time wasted.
I've heard people on podcasts talking about how they loved being with their families and when they were away (at work) or just doing work, they needed to focus. Hence, they're suggesting that time wasted is time lost. Time lost is money lost.
Practice will get that person to be smarter, faster etc. But it's not allowing them to play. It's not letting them see the world in a disconnected way. The problem with play is primarily "dead ends". It almost never has a direct result, and it's never measurable like practice would be measurable.
Hence, if you don't have time to play, you practice.
It's not that one is superior to the other. If anything, they both need to live side by side. However, the entire emphasis is always on "practice, practice, practice". If you aren't seen to be "working hard" you're seen to be "wasting your time".
------
Good ideas are usually a combination of play and practice. But I'd say it's more about play, than practice, which is why the good ideas don't usually come first.
Your post makes me rethink my own self-judgment of ideas—in a good way. Experimenting with different ideas, beliefs, systems, etc. is an important part of working through life. I will add, we don't really know if the "bad" ideas we have are actually that bad until we pour them out.
To your first creativity tactic, an interesting exercise is attempting to imitate a writer's style of prose. I've done this with Shakespeare's sonnets. It is painfully difficult, but there is an immense amount of satisfaction in the act. I believe it opens up a different way of thinking.
So well put: "I will add, we don't really know if the "bad" ideas we have are actually that bad until we pour them out." To your second point, I think early in my writing career, trying to freelance for a bunch of different publications was hugely helpful, because it basically amounted to trying to imitate the voice of a given publication. ...And relevant to this post, Bach actually copied over some of Vivaldi's work in his own hand.
Some of the best idea generation techniques that I've read about came from the late magician Stewart James, profiled by David Ben in his book Advantage Play: they are quite inventive and James was a frequent user of the virtual board room and similar concepts.
Tim Hurson's book Think Better, about creative problem solving like Advantage Play is, also talks about brainstorming exercises and getting to what he calls the "third third". Basically, the first 33.3% of ideas you generate on the topic tend to be pretty standard and unimaginative, easy to come up with. The next third takes more work to come up with but they are still somewhat bound by the status quo. The "third third" (and mind you, you need to generate a lot of individual ideas to hit these thresholds, like dozens) is where you have to be extremely creative to come up with unique ideas which you haven't already thought of. I've tried it once or twice: it's tough!
The "third third," I love that! Thanks for sharing this, Mark. Do either (or both) of these books give some thoughts about structuring brainstorming so it isn't completely open? I've been reading a bit of psychology research on brainstorming, and how it is often too open, and now I'm interested in some practical tips on "closing" it a little, so to speak.
Advantage Play deals with solo idea generation. I don't think Think Better delves too deeply into group brainstorming either. I don't remember the source but I believe some have suggested than idea generation should initially be done alone, then brought into a group for review. Also suggested that the initial inputs should be submitted anonymously so the ideas aren't prejudiced based on who submitted them.
I am learning about the letting the bad ideas out. I write, as Joan Didion says: To find out what I think. Sometimes I think crap, but I will still write it down.
Have you heard the story of how the Musical Offering came into being? Fasconating story. One of the main reasons I am trying to learn music theory, to understand how counterpoint is supposed to work and figure out what Bach did in the Musical Offering.
"Sometimes I think crap, but I will still write it down." haha... love it. I didn't know that was a Joan Didion quote, but I also feel that way; I'm often not really sure what I think about something until I try to write about it.
Otherwise, Pete, we are so on the same wavelength right now. I only recently learned the story of the Musical Offering, and I've been reading and watching videos on counterpoint, and listening to the Art of the Fugue over and over. I'm finally starting to hear the separate "voices" as opposed to chords.
Agreed! ...And some of the ideas Einstein thought were bad have turned out to still be stimulating research today. So maybe we often don't even know which of our ideas are best until much later.
At the same time, music writing is full of the 'flashes of brilliance' narrative too. I just watched 'Wham!' on Netflix and there's a story where George Michael's watching TV and just says 'I need to go upstairs now' and writes 'Last Christmas' in a couple hours. Andrew Ridgeley says “When he came back down, such was his excitement, it was as if he had discovered gold". But who knows whether he actually took that long, or whether he'd waded through lots of ideas before getting to that point!
I found that giving myself the permission to produce bad ideas, drafts, etc. can feel deliberating and can help building the momentum brings projects to completion.
What I am wondering about how being prolific connects to range? That is, is there a connection between range of ideas and quality of ideas.
I recall the quote from Santiago Ramón y Cajal in Range standing for range, though if I am not mistaken, that refers to the macro-level of interests and not the micro-level of the range of ideas. Do you have any thoughts on this?
Bach remains one of my favorites to this day. I spent several years working for a classical music publication (Schwann Opus), and that tenure lit a fire under me regarding classical music. Time spent with Bach has always been good time.
Love this. Reminds me of a book by Becky Blades, Start More Than You Can Finish. Sometimes you have to start lots of different things before you can get to the ones worth finishing or to finish the ones already started.
I hadn't heard of that book before this comment, but I already love it;) Creativity researcher Howard Gruber used the phrase "network of enterprise," but I think he was talking about the same thing, and it was clear he wasn't suggesting that everything would be finished. ...I'm about to order Becky's book right now. Thanks for the note!
It always irks me that the the three standout composers is always listed as Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. Bach and Beethoven, no argument there, but it really should be Bach, Haydn, Beethoven. Haydn innovated the forms that would take music into the 19th century and beyond. Yes, Mozart was the wunderkind, but Haydn's music is more expansive and innovative. Mozart has his moments, but most of it leaves me feeling like I just stepped into a painting by Fragonard (where's the vomit emoji when you need it!).
Haha..fair! Haydn came in 16th in the BBC poll of composers, and Stravinsky came in second. In any case, your point is well taken, and I really think the Mozart prodigy story is why he's probably the most famous composer — even for people who couldn't pick out any of his work. Versions of his childhood are in at least a half-dozen bestselling books I've read. ...I love your Fragonard comparison there — funny and insightful — and appreciate this comment.
I have found that playing Bach on the piano is like having someone gently pressure-wash your brain — your thoughts feel clear and clean and beautiful!!
Celebrity sighting in my comments! I think about your work so much, man. And I love that you came here to comment on Bach, not on, ya know, you. (Although that also would've been fine and cool;)
He's my all-time favorite author. I learned a lot from him. He is my remote mentor. I even learned this term from him, " The good thing about dead or remote masters is that they can’t refuse you as an apprentice," he wrote in Steal Like an Artist, so I learn many things from writers including you.
And about this topic I have an interesting piece to share with you, I even wrote an article about it which I am going to share soon. It's this piece from Billy Oppenheimer's newsletter (he is Ryan Holiday's assistant). I loved this so much that I experimented it and got great results. It's the following:
"Tim Ferriss says the screenwriter Evan Goldberg is one of the most prolific generators of ideas that Tim has ever come across. On set of Neighbors 2, Tim sat in on a writers’ room brainstorm. The script was projected on a huge screen. One person sat at a keyboard, typing at hyperspeed as everyone else pitched ideas. “Evan said ‘fuck’ every third word,” Tim recalled. “And it was just typed right in.” After, Tim made a comment to Evan about how often he used the word “fuck.” “The important thing is to keep the generating of ideas and the editing of ideas separate,” Evan said. “You can always de-fuck the script later.
I listened to the mentioned podcast that was funny, Tim was saying, " I asked Evan what is the next because Fuck is the every third word."
The results of my experiment was many ideas and sentences that I couldn't put all of them down. I forgot some and had to force myself into recalling the ideas I missed.
That was practical solution and really interesting. You can defuck it later🤣😂😂😂
That's the best description of the effect of playing Bach I have ever heard. As a cellist, the Bach suites were my comfort, my joy and my ultimate challenge. I was fortunate to perform them many times and it was always a thrill.
The blog post nicely illustrates how and why interacting with a chatbot can be useful. The chatbot can generate a range of ideas, many of them bad, and can also iterate on the early ideas you might give the chatbot. None of the ideas or feedback generated by the chatbot might end up in your final creative output, but it can be an effective and cheap partner early on in the process. Ethan Mollick has written a blog post about this: https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/the-practical-guide-to-using-ai-to
Carsten, this is a great comment, and reminds of research by Christakis and others showing that when AI bots are added to a remote problem solving team (the humans don't know they're bots) and made to behave randomly, they still lead the team to better solutions. This sort of thinking-out-loud partner is the main way I've been using ChatGPT so far, and I wonder if perhaps it can help make a bit for some of the missed interactions with remote work? Thanks so much for this apt comment, and for sharing the Mollick post.
Agreed! When I'm stuck starting a piece of writing, I have ChatGPT write 10 examples of a starting paragraph for my article. If I like one, I start writing from there; if not, I pick the best one and say "give me ten more like this one"- then repeat till I get a starting paragraph that I don't hate. When I'm finished, I go back and either just erase that paragraph or completely rewrite it. It's weird to be helped so much by something I don't end up using, but it is super helpful!
When we’re kicking off new designs one of my go to exercises in Crazy 8’s taken from Google Sprints (https://designsprintkit.withgoogle.com/methodology/phase3-sketch/crazy-8s). Once everyone has done their 8 sketches I actually like to cut them apart, let people sort and group them, then as a team we pick the few we want to take further. Which means, if we only have 5 people on the team and we keep 4 of the ideas we’re throwing away 90%… and that’s good. It really normalizes that not every idea needs to be good to be valuable. Most had to exist for the few to emerge.
Similarly, during brainstorming I will jokingly (and with total disregard to neuroscience) encourage teammates to just write down every idea because the only way to get to the deeper ideas is to get the top ones out of the way by putting them on stickies. There is something very real about the need to turn off my internal editor to get creative, whether writing alone or collaborating as a team.
It’s seems like the Bach family tree keeps going back to the well using “Johann” as a creativity prompt for naming infants! Settling on a name for a child is really difficult though.
I would add that going back to one’s own personal writing well for inspiration can also be helpful. My writing on Substack aside, the bulk of my writing volume occurs daily as I construct narratives in patient charts. I eschew the electronic medical record “templates” as much as I can. Checking boxes to construct choppy and often misleading patient narratives sucks for both patient and doctor.
Before seeing each patient I skim their last visit note (among other data to review), and then head in to pick up “their story” where we left off. Narrative medicine is a very effective way of organizing thoughts, practicing good care, and retaining humanism. It’s probably a good spark for generativity, if not creativity. Reading one’s own previous words can probably be helpful for writers to expand an artistic or intellectual conversation with another great mind - their own from a different moment in time.
This is so cool! Love this article! Found your blog through a note posted by Jeremy Caplan of Wonder Tools. So glad I did! Fantastic content!
So glad to have you here Cindy! And my goodness what a bio...as a writer who minored in astronomy in college, I'm very impressed;)
Hi David,
I hope you’re not too impressed. I was born with an insatiable curiosity about everyone and everything. Told people I’m a lifelong learner and get bored easily. They diagnosed me with ADHD in my 40’s. It sheds some light on the abundance of interests. Alas, unable to take the credit. Born with a neurodivergent brain.
Do you have any interest in the night sky? Mine is all for pleasure these days. I’ve loved astronomy since I was four years old. Absolutely enchanted with the night sky. After all these years, still awed when peeping through my telescope at galaxies, planets, nebulae.
Take care,
~ Cindy
Absolutely! The night sky never fails to give me a much-needed sense of awe. Both at the sheer scale, beauty, and diversity of the cosmos, but also at the fact that humans looked up and pinpricks of light and, eventually, figured out how far away they are and what they're made of.
Love this piece, David! A great reminder to be consistent and keep moving.
Lots of resonance with the prototyping mindset: https://joshbrake.substack.com/p/the-power-of-the-prototyping-mindset
Oh man, can't wait to read this. I was just interviewing some folks at IDEO, and my main takeaway was that they operate with a prototype mindset on everything. Thanks for sharing this Josh!
I’ve been super shaped by folks at the Stanford d.school around this thinking. They have a very similar ethos to the IDEO way of thinking. The more I look, the more I see the value of the aspects of a prototyping mindset like a bias toward action and an approach of reframing things. Lots of resonance with Range too. I think that being a good prototyper relies on having a strong *and* broad foundation. I really loved seeing those connections in your book!
Always happy to chat more about prototyping!
Josh, this is great and so connected to some current thinking I'm doing. I'd love to jump into some of your writing...I'm going to check out some posts that catch my eye, but also happy to take recommendations if you have some favorites I should start with.
Thanks, David. I hope that you find some ideas that pique your curiosity. Here a few pieces that I think might resonate with you as places to start:
Psychological safety as a pre-requisite and foundation for a fruitful prototyping mindset: https://joshbrake.substack.com/p/psychological-safety-is-the-lifeblood
Thoughts on how a scientific foundation I'm involved with really gets the prototyping mindset: https://joshbrake.substack.com/p/scialog-gets-the-prototyping-mindset
How thinking *inside* the box can help you be more creative: https://joshbrake.substack.com/p/use-edgecraft-to-enhance-your-creativity
Oh, and of course, the post that was directly inspired by Range :) https://joshbrake.substack.com/p/federers-formula
Would *love* to hear if anything resonates and dialogue more!
Josh, we are really on the same wavelength right now. I actually have a "prototype mindset" tag on my master thought list. (I'm really interested in productive constraints right now, and view prototyping as 1) a way to quickly cut down an open problem space so you can start learning 2) a constraint on unhelpful perfectionism. ...Anyway, just cool to see that we're converging on some lines of thought.
One of my favorite pieces about a prototyping mindset is the bias toward action. Helps to curb the inner critic and natural human impulse to overthink things. Learn by doing!
The idea I woke up with (and after reading this article).
Practice is what you do when you don't have time to play.
By itself that statement is only partly true.
Let's take an example of one of the best cricketers in the world: Sachin Tendulkar. For at least half of his early life, all he would have done is play. The game was more interesting that the future result. Then, at some point there would have been "cricket practice". The reason for this is to iron out the errors.
Practice builds:
1- Speed
2- Confidence
3- Mostly—and crucially—it builds anticipation.
However, "play" allows for experimentation. For instance, if you're asked to draw sixteen versions of an elephant, you'll have no choice but to play. It leads to areas where you might not expect, or aren't necessarily looking for. It's often a dead end, much like any diversion. However, play is usually frowned upon.
It's seen as time wasted.
I've heard people on podcasts talking about how they loved being with their families and when they were away (at work) or just doing work, they needed to focus. Hence, they're suggesting that time wasted is time lost. Time lost is money lost.
Practice will get that person to be smarter, faster etc. But it's not allowing them to play. It's not letting them see the world in a disconnected way. The problem with play is primarily "dead ends". It almost never has a direct result, and it's never measurable like practice would be measurable.
Hence, if you don't have time to play, you practice.
It's not that one is superior to the other. If anything, they both need to live side by side. However, the entire emphasis is always on "practice, practice, practice". If you aren't seen to be "working hard" you're seen to be "wasting your time".
------
Good ideas are usually a combination of play and practice. But I'd say it's more about play, than practice, which is why the good ideas don't usually come first.
Your post makes me rethink my own self-judgment of ideas—in a good way. Experimenting with different ideas, beliefs, systems, etc. is an important part of working through life. I will add, we don't really know if the "bad" ideas we have are actually that bad until we pour them out.
To your first creativity tactic, an interesting exercise is attempting to imitate a writer's style of prose. I've done this with Shakespeare's sonnets. It is painfully difficult, but there is an immense amount of satisfaction in the act. I believe it opens up a different way of thinking.
So well put: "I will add, we don't really know if the "bad" ideas we have are actually that bad until we pour them out." To your second point, I think early in my writing career, trying to freelance for a bunch of different publications was hugely helpful, because it basically amounted to trying to imitate the voice of a given publication. ...And relevant to this post, Bach actually copied over some of Vivaldi's work in his own hand.
Some of the best idea generation techniques that I've read about came from the late magician Stewart James, profiled by David Ben in his book Advantage Play: they are quite inventive and James was a frequent user of the virtual board room and similar concepts.
Tim Hurson's book Think Better, about creative problem solving like Advantage Play is, also talks about brainstorming exercises and getting to what he calls the "third third". Basically, the first 33.3% of ideas you generate on the topic tend to be pretty standard and unimaginative, easy to come up with. The next third takes more work to come up with but they are still somewhat bound by the status quo. The "third third" (and mind you, you need to generate a lot of individual ideas to hit these thresholds, like dozens) is where you have to be extremely creative to come up with unique ideas which you haven't already thought of. I've tried it once or twice: it's tough!
The "third third," I love that! Thanks for sharing this, Mark. Do either (or both) of these books give some thoughts about structuring brainstorming so it isn't completely open? I've been reading a bit of psychology research on brainstorming, and how it is often too open, and now I'm interested in some practical tips on "closing" it a little, so to speak.
Advantage Play deals with solo idea generation. I don't think Think Better delves too deeply into group brainstorming either. I don't remember the source but I believe some have suggested than idea generation should initially be done alone, then brought into a group for review. Also suggested that the initial inputs should be submitted anonymously so the ideas aren't prejudiced based on who submitted them.
I am learning about the letting the bad ideas out. I write, as Joan Didion says: To find out what I think. Sometimes I think crap, but I will still write it down.
Have you heard the story of how the Musical Offering came into being? Fasconating story. One of the main reasons I am trying to learn music theory, to understand how counterpoint is supposed to work and figure out what Bach did in the Musical Offering.
"Sometimes I think crap, but I will still write it down." haha... love it. I didn't know that was a Joan Didion quote, but I also feel that way; I'm often not really sure what I think about something until I try to write about it.
Otherwise, Pete, we are so on the same wavelength right now. I only recently learned the story of the Musical Offering, and I've been reading and watching videos on counterpoint, and listening to the Art of the Fugue over and over. I'm finally starting to hear the separate "voices" as opposed to chords.
And to further prove your point, David, we need only to look at Einstein and Edison!
Agreed! ...And some of the ideas Einstein thought were bad have turned out to still be stimulating research today. So maybe we often don't even know which of our ideas are best until much later.
Such a great discussion point, the 'creative tap' idea. I love this video from John Mayer where he talks about this process https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfHEOL-sDy4.
At the same time, music writing is full of the 'flashes of brilliance' narrative too. I just watched 'Wham!' on Netflix and there's a story where George Michael's watching TV and just says 'I need to go upstairs now' and writes 'Last Christmas' in a couple hours. Andrew Ridgeley says “When he came back down, such was his excitement, it was as if he had discovered gold". But who knows whether he actually took that long, or whether he'd waded through lots of ideas before getting to that point!
I found that giving myself the permission to produce bad ideas, drafts, etc. can feel deliberating and can help building the momentum brings projects to completion.
What I am wondering about how being prolific connects to range? That is, is there a connection between range of ideas and quality of ideas.
I recall the quote from Santiago Ramón y Cajal in Range standing for range, though if I am not mistaken, that refers to the macro-level of interests and not the micro-level of the range of ideas. Do you have any thoughts on this?
Bach remains one of my favorites to this day. I spent several years working for a classical music publication (Schwann Opus), and that tenure lit a fire under me regarding classical music. Time spent with Bach has always been good time.
"Time spent with Bach has always been good time." ...Beautifully put. Thanks for sharing this, Erin.
Love this. Reminds me of a book by Becky Blades, Start More Than You Can Finish. Sometimes you have to start lots of different things before you can get to the ones worth finishing or to finish the ones already started.
I hadn't heard of that book before this comment, but I already love it;) Creativity researcher Howard Gruber used the phrase "network of enterprise," but I think he was talking about the same thing, and it was clear he wasn't suggesting that everything would be finished. ...I'm about to order Becky's book right now. Thanks for the note!
It always irks me that the the three standout composers is always listed as Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. Bach and Beethoven, no argument there, but it really should be Bach, Haydn, Beethoven. Haydn innovated the forms that would take music into the 19th century and beyond. Yes, Mozart was the wunderkind, but Haydn's music is more expansive and innovative. Mozart has his moments, but most of it leaves me feeling like I just stepped into a painting by Fragonard (where's the vomit emoji when you need it!).
Haha..fair! Haydn came in 16th in the BBC poll of composers, and Stravinsky came in second. In any case, your point is well taken, and I really think the Mozart prodigy story is why he's probably the most famous composer — even for people who couldn't pick out any of his work. Versions of his childhood are in at least a half-dozen bestselling books I've read. ...I love your Fragonard comparison there — funny and insightful — and appreciate this comment.