Sixat6

You Become Creative By Creating

Dr. Andrew Huberman talks about how the brain circuits that turn on before those involved in creativity are of the stress system. He used three analogies to explain this. 1) It’s like you have to wade through sewage before you can swim in clear water. 2) It’s like when you try to lift your max on the bench press—it takes time to work up to that weight. 3) It’s like your best creative work is on the other side of a door at the top of a staircase—it takes time and effort to get up the stairs and through that door. In other words, Huberman says, you become creative by creating. That’s the theme of this SIX at 6:

The Mumble Track

John Legend’s songs start with what he calls “the mumble track.” “It’s just me humming and mumbling nonsense,” he said. “And then the mumbles start to suggest different tones and rhythms, and then eventually, the lyrics emerge.”

Get Back

In Peter Jackson’s documentary series “The Beatles: Get Back,” three of the four Beatles are in the studio. “Lennon’s late again,” Paul McCartney says as he plugs his guitar into an amplifier. “Feeling the pressure of their approaching deadline,” the on-screen text reads, “Paul searches for [a] song.” With Ringo Starr and George Harrison sitting across from him, McCartney starts strumming, humming, and mumbling. At first, it sounds like nonsense. But within a few minutes, a melody starts to take shape. And then, out of the mumbles, some of the Beatles’ most enduring lyrics emerge. “Get back,” McCartney lets out. “Get back. Get back. Get back to where you once belonged.” George starts strumming. Ringo heads to his drums. Lennon enters, picks up his guitar, and seamlessly joins the composition. And just like that, from humming and mumbling nonsense, a Beatles classic was created.

Keep Forcing It, Forcing It, Forcing It

Borrowing from the first edition of this newsletter—in a conversation with the DJ and producer Zane Lowe, John Mayer picked up an acoustic guitar and demonstrated his songwriting process. “Well, I don’t always do it,” he admitted, “because it requires a stupid bravery all the time.” He strums a couple of chords. A nice melody begins to form—“you can sit here all day [doing this] and go, ‘okay, maybe that’s something.’” “But if you don’t go,” and then he improvises vocals, “sunlights beating on the corner of the walls / and I’m a Mr. know-it-all / heaven calls / get yourself right / get yourself right,” he stops playing, raises his finger to his mouth, “if you’re not ouija boarding immediately, you’re wasting time.” You just stare at the corner of the wall, Mayer explains then improvises some more, “stare at the corner of the wall / try to get it going on / but I can’t sometimes / you just keep going ’til you get something,” he stops singing. “You gotta keep forcing it, forcing it, forcing it…it doesn’t matter [what comes out of your mouth].”

The Down-Up Theory

In high school, Judd Apatow began his lifelong practice of interviewing his comedy and writing heroes. From interviewing hundreds of legendary artists, he said, he developed a very simple theory of creativity. He calls it the Down-Up theory: “get the ideas DOWN then fix them UP.” “Give yourself permission to suck. Anything goes. Just get something down.” Even if it’s nonsense—keep forcing it, forcing it, forcing it. “Then in a different session,” Apatow says, “go into fix-up mode.”

Just Start

Before I started this newsletter, I told Ryan Holiday I was just waiting to know for certain what I wanted to write about. “Just start,” he said. You’re trying to map out the whole 9 innings,” he said. “Just throw the first pitch…You’re better off starting imperfectly than being paralyzed by the delusion of perfection.”

Use Time As A Filter

A core principle of The Notecard System is to use time as a filter. If you underline or highlight as you read, you find that with the passage of some time, most things that you underlined or highlighted don’t hold up as interesting or useful. “Using time as a filter” has held up as useful— with note-taking and beyond…

If We Forget It Tomorrow, It’s No Good

Paul McCartney talks about how The Beatles used time as a filter to create so many memorable songs. “There was no recording devices,” McCartney explains. So if they weren’t in the studio when they had an idea, “we had to remember it…There was no such thing as cassettes or anything to put the idea down on, so you just had to remember.” He said they began to realize this was actually a good thing. “We said, if we forget it tomorrow, it’s no good. How can we expect the public to remember it if we can’t, and we only wrote it yesterday? So we realized that we were writing songs that were memorable not because we wanted them to be memorable, but because we had to remember them.”

Quick No, Long Yes

Matthew McConaughey is known in Hollywood as a “Quick No, Long Yes.” “My No’s are quick,” he said on the Daily Stoic podcast. But before he says Yes to anything, he explained, he does the following. For 2 weeks, McConaughey lives in the “Yes I’m in” frame of mind. If during those 2 weeks, he finds himself dreading the idea of being away from for so long, playing this or that character, working with so-and-so, etc.—he begins to lean towards saying No. But then, for two weeks, he lives in the “No I’m out” frame of mind. “If I sleep well during those 2 weeks,” McConaughey said, “that’s a pretty good sign that I shouldn’t do it.” But, if during those 2 weeks, he’s woken up in the middle of the night by thoughts of, ahh, I gotta play that character. I’m going to regret it so bad if I don’t do this. I have to do it—”well, that’s a good reason to say, ‘I’m in,’” McConaughey said. “But I give myself about 2 weeks in each frame of mind—Yes I’m in, No I’m out—and then I measure what keeps me up at night.”

We’ll See

There’s an old story about a Chinese farmer. The farmer and his son own just one horse that helps operate the hoe needed to turn the soil over. One day, the horse takes off and runs for the hills. The son runs inside and says, “Dad, you’re not going to believe it—the horse ran away. This is horrible. We’re going to die out here.” The father says, “I don’t know if it’s horrible or not, son, we’ll see.” A few days later, the son is sitting on the porch when he sees the horse running toward him. Behind the horse, there are fifty wild stallions. The son runs to open the paddock and then closes it behind all the horses. He runs inside and says, “Dad, you’re not going to believe—the horse returned with fifty other stallions. This is a miracle. We can get into the horse trading business now. We’re going to be rich.” The father says, “I don’t know if it’s a miracle or not, son, we’ll see.” A few more days pass. While the son is trying to harness one of the new stallions, the horse panics, kicks, and shatters the son’s leg. “This is horrible,” the son says. “We’ll see,” the father replies. The next day, hundreds of soldiers on horseback showed up and the general gets off his horse and informs them that a war is on the horizon, and all young men must join the army. The father points at his son’s leg and tells the general that he’d be useless in battle. The general agrees and they ride off. The son can’t believe his luck. “I don’t know if you got lucky or not, son,” the father says. “We’ll see.”

A Second and 34 Years

Of course, not everything has to be filtered through time. A reward for mastery, for instance, is efficiency. In 1998, Citibank and The Travelers Insurance Company merged. They hired the legendary designer Paula 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.” As Scher has become a master of her craft, she’s repeatedly experienced this 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.” After that initial meeting, Scher said, “There were a million meetings…What if you do it this way, or that way? Show it to me on stationery. Show it to me on a card. What if we flip the colors? It’s got to be red on top and blue on the bottom. What do you do with the blue wave? Is it something you use in retail? What if you put that back on the credit card?—those were all the things that were being worked out for nearly two years before the thing launched.” Ultimately, after two years, feeling like they got their money’s worth—Citi went with Scher’s initial sketch. “The design of the logo is never really the hard part of the job, Scher said. “It’s persuading a million people to use it.”

Patience Is Like Clothes

“Patience,” Leonardo da Vinci said, “serves as protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold.” It serves as protection against having a box full of un-interesting and un-useful notecards. And against writing unmemorable songs. And against later regretting having said Yes. And against confusing good luck for bad luck. And against solving the problem too fast.

Harmony Hall

The Vampire Weekend song Harmony Hall was inspired by dissonance. “I was in Antigua,” Vampire Weekend frontman  Ezra Koenig explained , “and there was a place there called Harmony Hall, [which] originally was a slave plantation.” He was struck by “that dissonance of a place called Harmony Hall—implying some sort of peaceful place—but was actually the opposite: a horrific place where people were literally dehumanized.” And as he looked into it more, “every time I would come across this name, Harmony Hall, there was always something dissonant about the history or the place.” So Koenig wrote a song full of dissonant lyrics and titled it, Harmony Hall.

Dissonance—that is the theme of this SIX at 6…

The Writer and the Reader

John Mayer was asked how he defines writer’s block. “Writer’s block,”  he said , “is when the two people inside of you—the writer and the reader—when the reader doesn’t love the writer. Writer’s block is not a failure to write. It is a failure to catch the feedback loop of enjoying what you’re seeing and wanting to contribute more to it.”

The Education of John Adams

John Adams hated school. He often skipped to go fishing or hunting or to fly his kite. When his father pressed him on it, Adams said the teacher was a “churl.” “His father immediately took his side and wasted no time with further talk,”  biographer David McCullough writes . “John was enrolled the next day in a private school down the road where, kindly treated by a schoolmaster named Joseph Marsh, he made a dramatic turn and began studying in earnest.” His interest in flying kites was replaced with reading books, and “in little more than a year, at age fifteen, he was pronounced ‘fitted for college.’” He was admitted to Harvard and granted a partial scholarship. His father sold ten acres of some land he had invested in to cover the rest.

Build The System Around The Players

Four months before he was hired as the Denver Broncos head coach, Sean Payton was asked what he would do if he was Nathaniel Hackett (then the head coach) to fix the struggling Broncos. To get better play out of quarterback Russell Wilson,  Payton said , “I’d want to cut up all Russell’s pass plays of 30 or more yards, and I’d want to see some schemes that he felt very comfortable with…Then I’d want to look at another film of his red zone touchdown passes inside the 20. So what I’m asking for is some of [Wilson’s] greatest hits and to make sure that we have those song lyrics available, and if not, let’s put them in.” What he’s asking for is to fix the dissonance between the play calling and Wilson’s strengths. I sent this to a coach who was on Payton’s staff in New Orleans and is now back with him in Denver, and said, “it really is that simple, isn’t it?” He said, “Definitely. It’s one of the biggest things I’ve learned from Sean and the system we ran offensively in New Orleans—we built the system around the players and not the other way around. It’s so simple but because it takes constant work, most people don’t have the patience or creativity for it.”

Express Your Personality

Josh Waitzkin, the chess prodigy who was the subject of the book-turned-movie Searching For Bobby Fischer, stopped playing chess around the age of 18. “I was a naturally creative, aggressive chess player,”  Waitzkin explained . “My style was to create chaos on the chessboard, and my strength lay in finding hidden harmonies.” With this style, Waitzkin won the U.S. Junior Chess Championship at the age of 11 and became an International Master at age 16. Then he got a coach who forced him to study world champions Anatoly Karpov and Tigran Petrosian—“the most positional, conservative chess players.” “Training and studying people whose style was so different from my own,” Waitzkin said, “and whose personalities were different from my own—gradually, I lost my love for the game.” Shortly after Waitzkin left his chess career behind, he got into martial arts. He trained for just two years before he won his first national championship in martial arts. Asked if he took anything from chess into the martial arts, Waitzkin said, “I expressed my personality…which, in my observation of competitors in any discipline, is a really fundamental idea. Those who succeed at the highest level, I think, basically manifest their unique character through their discipline.”

Terrain Fucked

I was a ski instructor for a few winters, and ski instructors have a phrase—terrain fucked. If you see an instructor with a student struggling down on a run that is well beyond their abilities, you would say that instructor terrain fucked the student. The job of the instructor is to match—to find a harmony between—the terrain and the student’s abilities. It is no fun when there is a dissonance between the terrain and your abilities. It is no fun when there is a dissonance between the writer and the reader. Between the student and the teacher. Between your personality and your discipline. Between the players and the system.

In his book  The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance , Waitzkin writes, “I believe that one of the most critical factors in becoming a high performer is the degree to which your relationship to your pursuit stays in harmony with your unique disposition.”

Put On Your Art Eyes

Talking to the comedian Mike Birbiglia, the visual artist Wendy MacNaughton said that the job of the artist is just to “put on art eyes.” “Most of the best drawing in the world,” MacNaughton said, “has nothing to with making a quote-on-quote good drawing. It has to do with seeing what’s right in front of us. I call it, putting on your art eyes.” “That’s what joke writing is too,” Birbiglia said. “The job of a comedian is, like you said, to put on art eyes. It’s listening, looking, and paying attention.”

So that’s the theme of this SIX at 6: the art created by putting on art eyes…

Being For The Benefit of Mr. Kite

In 1967, John Lennon bought an 1843 Victorian circus poster advertising a show “Being For The Benefit of Mr. Kite.”

At the time, the Beatles were working on what would become their eighth studio album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. “Lennon found himself short on new material,” Rolling Stone reported. “A glance at the poster provided a welcomed dose of inspiration.” Lennon said, “I had all the words staring me in the face one day when I was looking for a song.” Borrowing entirely from the poster, Lennon wrote the 7th song on Sgt. Pepper’s, “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” “Everything in the song is from that poster,” Lennon said.

The West Wing

The night before he was scheduled to meet with the TV producer John Wells, Aaron Sorkin didn’t have any ideas to pitch. Sorkin had some friends over and at one point, he and the writer Akiva Goldsman snuck down to the basement to smoke a cigarette. There, Sorkin told Goldsman about the meeting with Wells. On the wall in Sorkin’s basement, there was a poster of his 1995 movie, The American President. Goldsman pointed at it and said, “You know what would make a good TV series? That. If it wasn’t about the romance between the President and the lobbyist, but it was about the Senior Staffers at the White House.” The next day, Sorkin walked into the meeting, he said, “and sitting with John were a number of Warner Bros. TV executives. John said, ‘So what do you want to do?’ Instead of saying that I don’t have anything to pitch, I said, ‘I want to do a show about Senior Staffers at the White House.’ And John reached across and said, ‘You got a deal.’ That’s how the The West Wing happened.”

Chop Suey!

System of a Down songwriter Serj Tankian was stuck on the bridge of a song. He had the opening verse, the chorus, and the second verse. No bridge. Sitting with the producer Rick Rubin in Rubin’s home library, Tankian was explaining his frustration over finishing the song. Rubin told him to pick a book off the shelf, open to any page, and look for the first phrase to catch his eye. Tankian grabbed the Bible, opened it, and read, “Father, father, why have you forsaken me?” That became the bridge of Chop Suey!—the first single on their second album Toxicity and one of their most popular. The music video was the first metal song to be viewed over one billion times on YouTube. Out of curiosity, I searched, “System of a Down iconic lyrics.” The top result:

“My experience is,” Rubin said, “when you are open and looking for these clues in the world, they’re happening all the time. And they’re happening often right when you need them.”

Could I Do Something With That?

Jerry Seinfeld was asked about how he comes up with jokes. The interviewer said—take the chopsticks bit, for example, how did you come up with that? (Seinfeld has this joke that begins, “I see the Chinese are hanging in there with the chopsticks. Obviously, they’ve seen the fork…”) He came up with it, duh, at a Chinese restaurant. He said he wears art eyes everywhere. “I’m never not working on material,” he said. “Every second of my existence, I’m thinking, ‘could I do something with that?’”

Walking Past Ideas

“Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day,” the science fiction writer Orson Scott Card said. “The good [artists] are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.” To see them, put on your art eyes. Pay attention. See what’s right in front of you. Think, could I do something with that?

The Philosophy of Caring, But Not That Much

Herbie Cohen, “the world’s greatest negotiator,” advised President Jimmy Carter during  the Iran hostage crisis  and President Ronald Reagan during  the Reykjavík Summit . He helped resolve the NFL players’ strike in 1987. He was helicoptered in to settle police strikes, negotiate with terrorists, work out the terms and close the deal. Over time, Herbie took the tactics and tricks he used in these high-pressure situations and spun them into a general life philosophy—“a kind of Jewish Buddhism,” his son Rich writes in  The Adventures of Herbie Cohen . “He preaches engaged detachment, characterized as ‘caring, but not that much.’ More than a business strategy, he considers this a way of life.’”

That’s the theme of this SIX at 6: the philosophy of caring, but not that much…

Get Over Yourself

In the elimination game of the 1997 NBA Semifinals, Kobe Bryant shot 4 airballs late in the game. His team lost 98-93. He was asked how he handled this humiliating season-ending performance. He said he did two things. First, he detached—he told himself, “get over yourself. You feel embarrassed? Get over yourself. You’re worried about how people may perceive you? Get over yourself. You’re not that important.” Second, he engaged—he asked himself, “why did those air balls happen?” Kobe was then a rookie, drafted straight out of high school—the year before, he played thirty-five games with plenty of rest time in between games. In the NBA, there’s 82 games just in the regular season. So by the playoffs, Kobe said, “I didn’t have the legs. If you look at those shots—every shot was on line, but every shot was short.” It was clear what he needed to work on: “I gotta get stronger. I gotta train differently. The weight training program that I’m doing—I gotta tailor it for an 82-game season, so that when the playoffs come around, my legs are stronger and that ball gets there.”

Who Cares?

The legendary snowboarder Shaun White was asked about how he would mentally prepare for an Olympic run. He said he had the same routine before every big competition. Before he dropped into the halfpipe, Shaun said, “I say, ‘who cares?’ At the end of the day, who cares? What’s the big deal? I’m here, I’m going to try my best, and who cares? I’m going to go on from this regardless of what happens. Even though my whole world is wrapped up in this…who cares?”

Lower The Stakes

When an artist is stuck, music producer Rick Rubin writes, “one of the best strategies is to lower the stakes.” He explains, “We tend to think that what we’re making is the most important thing in our lives and that it’s going to define us for all eternity. Consider moving forward with the more accurate point of view that it’s a small work.” Rubin references Oscar Wilde, who famously said that some things are too important to be taken seriously. “Art is one of those things,” Rubin writes. “Setting the bar low, especially to get started, frees you play, explore, and test without attachment to results.”

Prepare, Prepare, Prepare, Then Throw It All Away

The director Mike Nichols made four straight box office hits, which included two Academy Awards nominations and an Oscar for Best Director. Then he made a movie that flopped. For the next seven years, he didn’t make a movie. He was worried, to borrow from Kobe, about how people would perceive him and his movies. He eventually got over himself and looking back, he said, “those seven years of not making movies taught me more about making movies than the years I spent making movies.” What did it teach him? “Relax,” he said. “Prepare as much as you can. Prepare, prepare, prepare, then show up, and throw it all away. Just show up and see what happens.”

The Symptom of A Nervous Breakdown

“One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown,” Bertrand Russell said, “is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.” Get over yourself. You’re not that important. Whether it’s the Olympics, the NBA playoffs, a hostage negotiation, or a movie release—care, but not that much. Prepare, prepare, prepare, then show up, and say, who cares?