It’s A Series Of Really Simple Instructions
In 1983, Apple introduced the Lisa, the first personal computer with a graphical user interface, marking the moment when computers began to look and feel the way we think of them today: a desktop of icons, files, and windows, navigated with a mouse or trackpad. This innovation transformed a niche tool for experts into a mainstream device, stirring widespread fear, confusion, and intrigue about the capabilities and consequences of computers. Five months after the Lisa debuted, Steve Jobs spoke at the International Design Conference in Aspen, where he tried to demystify the computer as “the most mundane thing you could ever imagine”—a machine that merely executes basic instructions at incredible speed. “Let’s say,” Jobs said, “that in the blink of your eye, I could run out there, grab a bouquet of fresh spring flowers, run back in here, and snap my fingers. You would all think I was a magician. And yet, I would be doing a series of really simple instructions: running out there, grabbing some flowers, running back, snapping my fingers. But I could just do them so fast that you would think that there was something magical going on. And it’s the exact same thing with a computer. We tend to think there’s something magical going on, when in reality, computers just execute a series of simple instructions really fast.”
Some things that tend to be seen as magical, mysterious, or extraordinary, when in reality, there’s something simple or mundane going on—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
How Can It Be Done In A Second?
As the legendary graphic designer Paula Scher has become a master of her craft, she’s experienced an interesting problem. “A lot of clients like to buy process,” she explains. “they think they’re not getting their money’s worth if you solve the problem too fast.” For example: in 1998, Citibank and The Travelers Insurance Company merged. They hired Scher to create a new logo. In their first meeting, on a napkin, Scher drew what became the iconic Citi logo. As Scher got up to leave the room, someone from the Citi team asked, How can it be that it’s done in a second? “It’s done in a second and 34 years,” Scher replied. “It’s done in a second [and] every experience and everything that’s in my head.” There’s nothing magical or mysterious about Scher’s ability to work so fast. There’s something much simpler going on: she’s spent more than three decades honing her craft.
There’s Nothing Secret About It
During a “thank you” speech at a 2015 gala held to honor his creative achievements, Bob Dylan demystified his songwriting process. For decades, it had been repeated and mythologized, Dylan said, “that there was no precedent for what I was doing.” “I’m glad for my songs to be honored like this,” he said. “But you know, they didn’t get here by themselves…These songs didn’t come out of thin air. I didn’t just make them up out of whole cloth. Contrary to what people have said, there was a precedent.” Dylan talked about the songs and the artists that he obsessively and repeatedly listened to. The folk song John Henry, for instance. “If you sang John Henry as many times as me,” he said, before reciting the lyrics, “‘John Henry was a steel-driving man / Died with a hammer in his hand / John Henry said a man ain’t nothin’ but a man / Before I let that steam drill drive me down / I’ll die with that hammer in my hand.’ If you had sung that song as many times as I did, you’d have written ‘How many roads must a man walk down?’ too.” And songs like, “Come along boys and listen to my tale / Tell you of my trouble on the old Chisholm Trail.” “If you sung all these ‘come all you’ songs all the time, you’d write, “Come gather ‘round people wherever you roam, admit that the waters around you have grown / Accept that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone / If your time to you is worth saving / And you better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone / The times they are a-changin’—You’d have written that too. There’s nothing secret about it.”
A Self-Enlarging, Unstoppable Process
In the 1920s, Russian-German meteorologist Wladimir Köppen discovered something surprising. Ice ages aren’t caused by extremely cold weather. They are caused by consistently cool weather. It starts with a mild summer. If it stays cool enough that some of a winter’s snow sticks around until the following winter, the leftovers create a cooling effect: the sunlight rebounds off the snowy surface and returns to space at a lower temperature. The lower temperature makes it easier for some of a winter’s snow to stick around until the following winter. And so the process repeats. “The process is self-enlarging, unstoppable,” John McPhee writes in In Suspect Terrain, “and once the ice is really growing it moves.” Little by little, a small base of snow becomes a planetary ice sheet. In his work, McPhee takes a similarly glacial, incremental approach. Along with In Suspect Terrain, he has written more than 30 books and published over 80 articles just in The New Yorker. He’s also taught writing at Princeton for over 40 years. “If somebody says to me, ‘You’re a prolific writer’—it seems so odd,” McPhee says. Because there’s nothing magical or extraordinary about what he does. He just writes a little bit every day. He just “puts a little drop in a bucket each day,” as he put it, “and that’s the key. Because if you put a drop in a bucket every day, after three hundred and sixty-five days, the bucket’s going to have some water in it.” On any given day, it may not appear like anything is happening, but over time, this drop-by-drop process becomes self-enlarging, unstoppable.
It Comes Out Like I Had Thought Of All This At The Same Time
Jerry Seinfeld was once thinking about golf announcers whispering. He then found something in his notebook about how people whisper when they talk about tipping. “Now we make what’s called a charm bracelet,” Seinfeld said, explaining his creative process. When you notice a connection between two or more things, Seinfeld said, “You say, ‘Oh, there’s something there.’ And now we make what’s called a charm bracelet: You take these things and you find a way to associate them.” “So that’s the whole process: I’m thinking about this [one] thing and then remember this [other] thing, and then you go, ‘Oh there’s something there—let me connect those things.’” What appears in a performance to be a spontaneous insight is really an assembly of scattered pieces, gathered and stitched together over time. “It comes out on stage like I had thought of all this at the same time,” Seinfeld admitted. “Which, of course, I didn’t.” (You can watch how the “whispering” joke came out on stage here).
They All Think We Have Some Big Secret
In the paper I mentioned a few weeks ago—The Mundanity of Excellence—Daniel Chambliss tells the story of a group of coaches from around the world visiting a U.S. Olympic Team practice. “The visiting coaches were excited at first,” Chambliss writes, “then soon they grew bored, walking back and forth, glancing down at their watches, wondering, after the long flight out to California, when something dramatic was going to happen.” “They all have to come to see what we do,” the U.S. coach said. “They think we have some big secret.” There is no big secret. There rarely is. With things that appear magical, mysterious, or extraordinary, there’s usually something simple and mundane actually going on.