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!!
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
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.
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".
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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.
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!
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.
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.
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!).
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!!
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
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!
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
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.
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!
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.
And to further prove your point, David, we need only to look at Einstein and Edison!
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.
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.
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!).