From Suck To Not Suck

In 1995, Pixar released Toy Story, the first feature film animated entirely on a computer. Since, Pixar has produced hit after hit: A Bug’s Life, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars, Ratatouille, WALL-E, Inside out, Monsters, Inc., and on and on. Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull writes in Creativity, Inc., “Early on, all of our movies suck…I choose that phrasing because saying it in a softer way fails to convey how bad the first versions of our films really are.” Catmull repeats, “Pixar films are not good at first, and our job is to make them go, as I say, ‘from suck to not-suck.’” He says, “This idea—that all the movies we now think of as brilliant were, at one time, terrible—is a hard concept for many to grasp.” And so this week, we will try to grasp the idea that all great things suck for a long time before they get good.

The Consistency of the Work

When Kobe Bryant was 12, he played a 25-game basketball season without scoring a single point. “I was terrible,” he said. “Awful.” Not a single point. Not a free throw, not a lucky bounce, not a breakaway layup—not a single point. When asked about that season, Kobe said it taught him to take the long view. “I wasn’t the most athletic,” he said. “I had to look long term. I had to say, ‘Ok, this year I’m going to get better at this. Next year, that.’ And so forth and so on. And patiently, I got better.” Patiently, he repeats. “It was piece by piece. It was the consistency of the work. The consistency of the work: Monday, get better. Tuesday, get better. Wednesday, get better. You do that over a period of time—three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten *years—*you get to where you want to go.” “It’s simple,” he said. “It’s simple math.”

The Seeds of The Grapes of Wrath

In August of 1936, **John Steinbeck was approached by the chief editor from the San Francisco News. News wanted Steinbeck to report on the mass migration of poor farm people to California. Steinbeck bought an old bakery truck—the “pie wagon,” he called it—filled it with blankets, food, and cooking equipment, then drove down to the San Joaquin Valley. The migrant farmers lived in camps provided by the government. Steinbeck stopped at several camps. The poverty and the filth of these camps was shocking. A man, his wife, and their children slept together under dirty old carpets. Children wore coarse hemp sacks for clothing. From malnutrition, people’s reactions were slow. Instead of making eye contact, Steinbeck wrote, “eyes have the glazed, faraway look of a sleepwalker’s eyes.” Steinbeck was appalled. He decided he would write a “big book” on the migrants’ problems. After a second month-long trip in the camps, in late 1937, Steinbeck began writing the big book. The working title was “The Oklahomans,” and its focus was on the irrepressible character of the migrants. But in late January or early February of 1938, Steinbeck destroyed the manuscript because it sucked. Next, instead of a book about the migrants, he considered a book about those doing injustices to the migrants. In February of 1938, he began writing “L’Affaire Lettuceberg” about a wealthy family that owned a lettuce farm and exploited migrant farmers. Three months later, Steinbeck showed a 60,000-word draft of “L’Affaire Lettuceberg” to his wife Carol. Carol thought it was terrible. So Steinbeck burned the manuscript of “L’Affaire Lettuceberg.” In a letter to his publisher, Steinbeck wrote, “this book is finished and it is a bad book and I must get rid of it. It can’t be printed.” In May of 1938, Steinbeck returned to focusing on the migrants but this time, on one family in particular. And in six months, Steinbeck finished a 200,000-word novel, The Grapes of Wrath, about the Joad’s, a family of tenant farmers forced to migrate from Oklahoma’s dying Dust Bowl to California’s corrupt Promised Land. In 1939, the year of its release, The Grapes of Wrath was the best-selling book in the world. In 1940, it won the National Book Award then the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. To date, it has sold more than 14 million copies. It’s often referred to as “The Great American Novel.”

It took two years of sucking to “clear the air so completely for this book,” Steinbeck said.

The Most Serious Booking Error Ever

In the mid sixties, Steve Martin read in a book about comedy that this is the formula for getting a laugh: build tension then release it with the punchline. Martin began to not only notice that all comedians use that formula but also that some comedians used vocal tics and tricks and belly slaps and hand gestures to essentially say: this is the punchline, laugh. So Martin decided to try what no other comedian would dare try: he got rid of punchlines. He built tension, but he didn’t release it. “Theoretically, it would have to come out sometime,” Martin writes in Born Standing Up. “But if I kept denying them the formality of a punchline, the audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation.” And theoretically, a person’s laugh is stronger, realer, when they choose to laugh than when they’re told to laugh. “At least that was the theory,” Martin writes. Martin took his theory to the stage. Reviews came in. “This so-called ‘comedian’ should be told that jokes are supposed to have punchlines,” one said. Another called his act, “The most serious booking error in the history of Los Angeles music.” A few years later: “[Martin’s] twenty-five minute routine failed to establish any comic identity that would make the audience remember him or the material.” In the early seventies, a friend saw Martin perform and called it: “anti-comedy.” In 1975, an angry audience member said to his girlfriend loud enough for Martin and everyone else to hear, “I don’t understand any of this.” A month after he released his first album, Let’s Get Small, in 1977, David Felton published a piece in Rolling Stone. “This isn’t comedy,” Felton wrote, but hang on, “it’s campfire recreation for the bent at heart…[Martin has] this higher insight. He breaks down barriers. He allows us to see the comedian in all of us.” Let’s Get Small went on to sell a million and a half copies. In 1978, Martin’s second album, A Wild and Crazy Guy, sold two and a half million copies. He was on the cover of Rolling Stone and Newsweek. He sold out a fifteen thousand seat venue in Toronto, then twenty-two thousand in St. Louis, twenty-nine thousand in Chicago, and forty-five thousand in New York.

After a decade of sucking, Martin writes, “I was now the biggest concert comedian in show business, ever.”

You Gotta Start With Shit

The great screenwriter, director, and novelist Peter Farrelly was asked if he gets writer’s block. “No,” he said, “my natural state is writer’s block. Every day, I sit down and go, ‘f*ck, I got nothing.’ But I always say, ‘I’d rather write shit than nothing.’ Because with shit, you got something to work with. You make it less shitty and then not horrible and then decent and then pretty good and then good and then very good and then excellent. But you gotta start with shit.” Everyone does. “When you read a book or a screenplay and you think, ‘Wow, I could never do this.’ Well don’t forget: that person didn’t start with that. They started with shit—that they fixed and fixed and fixed and fixed and fixed and fixed and fixed and fixed and fixed and fixed and fixed and fixed…until it’s decent.”

Dare To Suck

Ed Sheeran’s Shape of You was the first song to hit 2 billion streams on Spotify. Now at more than 3.3 billion streams, it is still the most streamed song on Spotify. After he wrote Shape of You, Sheeran said, “I thought it was a shitty song. I went home and was like, ‘aw man, I can’t write songs.’” And so now, “whenever someone asks me for my best bit of advice,” Sheeran said, “I say, ‘dare to suck.’” Closing the circle, Catmull credits Pixar’s success to this: “we dare to attempt.” Dare to attempt writing something that sucks. Dare to be terrible. Dare to start with shit. Dare to go from suck to not suck.

The Defining Feature of Language

Language is one of humanity’s greatest inventions. And one of the defining features of language is restriction. The English alphabet restricts us to 26 letters.

Bounded by these 26 letters, we can write an unlimited number of books, screenplays, poems, scientific theories, computer code, and on and on and on. All created by rearranging the same 26 letters of our restricted alphabet. And so that’s the theme of this week’s SIX at 6: the virtue of restrictions and constraints.

Content Dictates Form

When asked, Lin-Manuel Miranda says Wait For It is one of the best songs he’s ever written. “Stephen Sondheim has these maxims that he goes by in terms of writing,” Miranda said, “and one of the most important is, ‘content dictates form.’ And Wait For It is the the ideal of content dictating form.” The idea for Wait For It came to Miranda after he learned that Aaron Burr’s wife Theodosia was married when they first met…to a guy fighting for the British. “And Aaron Burr basically waited for that dude to die or fall out of the picture.” So in Wait For It, “everything about Burr is not only in the lyrics of the song but in the melody. That was exciting. Especially when I got to the bridge and was just like, ‘Oh, this doesn’t sound like anything Hamilton would do. Hamilton wouldn’t wait for fucking anything.’ It just sounded really character specific.” Confined by the character traits of Aaron Burr, Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote, he believes, the best song he’s ever written.

Narrow It Down. Narrow It Down. Narrow It Down

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a young girl is assigned to write a five-hundred-word essay about any topic. She chose to write about the United States. Her teacher—the book’s protagonist, the wise Phaedrus—suggested she narrow it down to Bozeman, Montana. When the due date arrived, she didn’t have a single word written. “She just couldn’t think of anything to say,” the narrator says. “Not a spark of creativity in her anywhere.” Phaedrus gave her an extension. But this time, Phaedrus said, “Narrow it down to the main street of Bozeman.” Again, when the due date came, she had nothing. “Narrow it down,” Phaedrus said, “to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick.” She went to the hamburger stand across the street from the Opera House. She started writing about the upper left-hand brick and then the brick next to it and the one next to that. “It all started to come and I couldn’t stop,” she told Phaedrus the next day when she handed in a five-thousand-word essay on the front of the Opera House on the Main Street in Bozeman, Montana.

Confine The Puppy Brain

“You’ve got to treat your brain like a dog you just got,” Jerry Seinfeld says. “The mind is infinite in wisdom. The brain is a stupid dog that is easily trained.” The puppy brain is easy to master, he says. “You just have to confine it.” For example, Seinfeld writes every day. There are two keys to his writing sessions. First, he limits his options. “My writing technique is just: You can’t do anything else. You don’t have to write, but you can’t do anything else.” When those are your only options, he said, you write just to keep from being bored. And second, he predetermines the stopping point. When he sits down to write, he knows exactly when he’s going to stop writing. Most people sit down to work with an open-ended block of time. “That’s a ridiculous torture to put on a human being’s head,” Seinfeld said. “It’s like if you hire a trainer to get in shape, and you ask, ‘How long is the session?’ And he says, ‘It’s open-ended.’ Forget it. I’m not doing it.” The puppy brain needs rewards, Seinfeld says. “And the reward is: the alarm goes off, and you’re done.”

Commit To A Frame

The experimental electronic music duo Matmos starts every album with a “a commitment to a frame,” a boundary inside which the sounds can only come. Their album, “Ultimate Care II,” for instance, is made entirely from the sounds of the Whirlpool Ultimate Care II washing machine in their basement. They said they get asked a lot, why make it so much harder on yourselves? Why force these restrictions and limitations on yourselves? “What they don’t see is it’s incredibly freeing to be restricted,” Matmos says. “It makes it much easier. We don’t have to work with anything and everything. We only have to work with things that are bounded by these silly ideas…Sorry, theses ingenious concepts.”

Complete Freedom Is A Nightmare

The psychologist William James said, “There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation.” Ryan Holiday writes in Stillness is the Key, “the greats know that complete freedom is a nightmare.” When you can do everything you don’t do anything. Narrow it down. Confine the puppy brain. Commit to a frame. Restrictions and constraints paradoxically set you free.

The Sweet Spot For Doing Great Work

Speaking to entrepreneurs at the startup incubator Y Combinator, the billionaire Peter Thiel drew a Venn diagram on a whiteboard. In one of the overlapping circles, he wrote, “seems like a bad idea,” and in the other, “is a good idea.” The intersection is the sweet spot for doing great work, Thiel said.

Everyone knows that to do great work you need natural ability and you need to work hard. But there’s a third ingredient that doesn’t get talked about or written about as often: the ability to be comfortable working on what seems like a bad idea. So that’s the theme of this week’s SIX at 6.

Yeah, I’m The Freak

The comedian Hasan Minhaj is the son of Muslim Indian immigrants. His father is an organic chemist and his mother is a physician at Mather Air Force Base. “The choices,” Minhaj says of his parent’s expectations for him, “were doctor, lawyer, engineer, failure.” So, “for my first decade as a comedian,” Minhaj says, “it was real rough between me and my parents.” For his first decade as a comedian, it seemed like a bad idea. For his first decade as a comedian, Minhaj had natural ability and he worked hard. But more than those things, he needed the ability to be comfortable pursuing something that seemed, to everyone around him, like a bad idea. After he became a big-time comedian, Minhaj would talk about what it took to get there: “you have to be cool with being like, ‘I went to the family wedding and everyone made fun of me and cool, I live outside the matrix.’ You have to be able to go to the party and be like, ‘yeah, I’m the freak and that’s fine.’”

A Freak Notion

In 1891, a 28-year-old Henry Ford became an engineer with The Edison Company. He worked a day shift then, he writes in My Life and Work, “every night and all of every Saturday I worked on the new motor.” Every night, in his home workshop, Ford was experimenting with gasoline engines and automobiles. Then in 1899, The Edison Company offered him a promotion but with one condition: “that I would give up my gas engine and devote myself to something really useful.” Just about everyone in Ford’s circle thought gas engines seemed like a bad idea. They thought the automobile was a “freak notion” that would never be more than a toy for rich people. “All the wise people,” Ford wrote, “demonstrated conclusively that the engine could not compete with steam. They never thought that it might carve out a career for itself.” And so, he was forced to choose between the promotion and the automobile. “I chose the automobile,” Ford wrote. “I quit my job on August 15, 1899, and went into the automobile business.” And for the next decade, Ford was the freak working on something that seemed like a bad idea. Of the people who thought that going into the automobile business seemed like a bad idea, Ford wrote, “I have noticed a great love for regularity. Men fall into the half-alive habit.” When he later formed the Henry Ford Company, he saw it in his own factories. When he tried to implement ways to produce with less useless motion, the workers pushed back. “What most irked them,” Ford wrote, “was that it interfered with the well-worn grooves in which they had been accustomed to move.” There is a subtle danger in this love for regularity, Ford wrote. “It indicates that the next jolt of the wheel of progress is going to fling you off.”

This Is Kind Of Ridiculous

Just after Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical “In The Heights” had won a Grammy and four Tony Awards, Lin-Manuel was invited to perform at the White House. Implicit in the timing of the White House’s invitation was the expectation that Miranda would perform something from “In The Heights.” But he didn’t. Instead, Miranda debuted a song from a hip hop album he had been working on. “It’s a concept album,” Miranda told the crowd, “about the life of someone I think embodies hip-hop. Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton.” The crowed laughed. Miranda said, “You laugh but it’s true.” Like Ford’s gas engines, people thought music about Alexander Hamilton was a freak notion. The day after that White House performance, Miranda got made fun of during a three-minute rant on The Daily Show. Host Jon Stewart said, “You’re rapping about Alexander Hamilton? This is kind of ridiculous.” Miranda worked on the Alexander Hamilton concept for the next eight years. So, Miranda said, “I had a lot of people look at me like I was crazy for a very long time.” The song he performed at the White House would go on to be the opening number in Hamilton, a musical that earned a record-setting 16 Tony nominations, winning 11. It won the 2016 Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album. It won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It won the 2017 Billboard Music Award for Top Soundtrack. It won the number eight spot on Rolling Stone’s 50 Best Albums of 2015.

The Red Thread

Have you ever seen a white garment with a couple of rogue red threads? The Stoic philosopher Agrippinus liked to say he wanted to be like the read thread. Living during the tyrannical reign of the deranged emperor Nero, it would have been easier to blend in with the majority of people. “But I want to be the red,” Agrippinus said, “that small and brilliant portion which causes the rest to appear comely and beautiful. Why, then, do you say to me, ‘Be like the majority of people?’ And if I do that, how shall I any longer be the red?”

Ideas Are By Definition Irrational

Tim Westergren, founder of the music streaming platform Pandora, has said that an idea is by definition an irrational thought. “It’s a thought that’s never been had before.” Above, I chose examples where it worked out for people who pursued an irrational thought. Of course, it doesn’t always work it. Of course, the people telling you that it seems like a bad idea—sometimes, they’re right. It’s all a crapshoot, Will Ferrell would say. In any case, it’s good to be able to be cool with being the freak. It’s good to be able to be cool with falling out of the well-worn grooves of the half-alive habit. With seeming kind of ridiculous. With people looking at you like you’re a little crazy. With being the red thread. It’s good to be able to be cool with working on what seems like a bad idea.

Run Less Software

The $200 million software company Intercom was built on an engineering philosophy called Run Less Software. In explaining the Run Less Software, Intercom’s Engineering Director uses the following analogy. “Let’s say I’m a soldier in medieval times,” he writes. “In theory, I can choose 1 of 5 swords. It would be incredibly foolish of me to bring all 5 of those swords into battle with me.”

The Run Less Software philosophy is all about doing less, better. And that’s what this week’s newsletter is all about too.

Make A’s In Fewer Things

In 2008, Matthew McConaughey got a call from his film production office. He reached to pick up the phone, but his hand paused midreach when he saw the caller ID. He didn’t want to answer it. He let the call go to voicemail then called his lawyer. “I’m shutting down the production company immediately,” he said. “Shut down j.k. livin Records as well.” It was too much. “I had five things on my proverbial desk to tend to daily: family, foundation, acting, a production company, and a music label,” McConaughey writes in Greenlights. “I felt like I was making B’s in all five. By shutting down the production company and the music label, I eliminated two of my five commitments with plans to make A’s in the other three.” He began to focus entirely on his family, his foundation, and his acting career. “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate,” he writes. “Alright, alright, alright.”

Funnel Your Energy

Mr. Beast, who has the fifth most YouTube subscribers in the world, mentors other YouTubers. A month after he started helping a YouTuber, Mr. Beast shared before and after monthly stats. Before Mr. Beast’s help, the YouTuber got 4.6M views and made a little over $24,000. With Mr. Beast’s help, the YouTuber got 45.7M views and made over $400,000. Mr. Beast was asked: what kind of advice does he give these YouTubers he helps? He said he helps them better funnel their energy into making better videos. “Because YouTube is trying to serve people the best content,” he said. “They don’t want to serve you 100 lame videos. They want to serve you 1 good one. So it’s all about helping them make their videos really good.” To do that, “I help them build out a little team,” he said. “Because, think about it: if you’re doing five jobs, you can only put 20% of your time into each. But if you hire an editor who can put 100% of their time into editing—even if the editor is 20% worse than you at editing, the editor will still do a way better job because that’s where all their time is going. That editor is able to obsess over it—you can’t spend 10 hours editing a video, but they can.”

The Moment The Bulls Became A Championship Team

Throughout Michael Jordan’s first five seasons with the Chicago Bulls, the Bulls had a run of back to back to back losing seasons, fired three head coaches, and were swept in the first round of the playoffs twice. Then, in Jordan’s sixth season, after a 21-point loss to the Detroit Pistons, the Bulls were sitting in ninth place in the conference, completely out of playoff contention. The day after the loss to the Pistons, Bulls’ head coach Phil Jackson, as the Chicago Tribune reported, “named center Bill Cartwright a co-captain along with Michael Jordan, who had held the job by himself.” The Bulls won twelve of their next thirteen games. Then after an 11-game winning streak then a 9-game winning streak, they finished first place in their conference with a franchise-best 61-21 record. After sweeping the Knicks in the first round of the playoffs and knocking off the 76ers in just five games in the second round, the Bulls swept the Pistons in the Conference Finals. They lost game 1 against the Lakers then won the next four to win the 1991 NBA Finals. As Sam Walker, author of The Captain Class: A New Theory of Leadership, said, “If you looked at the numbers, just purely the numbers and asked, what’s the moment the Bulls became a championship team? You would point to the day Cartwright was named co-captain. It was that day. It’s clear as a bell. That’s when Jordan became good—when he was allowed to be the star and someone else was taking care of the duties of management.” “Bill,” Jordan wrote of that ’90 season, “made all the difference.”

A Fellow With Mere Brains

In 1986, Richard Hamming gave a talk on how to do high quality work for a long time. The talk was informed by his experience working with Nobel Prize winners, interviewing the great minds of his time, and studying the greats of all time. “Most of you in this room,” Hamming said, “probably have more than enough brains to do first class work. But great work is something else than mere brains.” Hamming tells the story of a fellow with mere brains. “He took me into his office and showed me his method of getting letters done and how he took care of his correspondence,” Hamming says. “He was bragging about how marvelous it was and how he could get so much work done without the secretary’s interference.” Hamming told him, you are being a fool: let the support staff support you. If you do less, Hamming told him, you will go much further. “And, he never went any further,” Hamming writes. “You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There’s no question about this.”

If You Send Reinforcements Everywhere, You Will Everywhere Be Weak

In The Art of War, Sun Tzu says, “for should the enemy strengthen his van, he will weaken his rear; should he strengthen his rear, he will weaken his van; should he strengthen his left, he will weaken his right; should he strengthen his right, he will weaken his left. If he sends reinforcements everywhere, he will everywhere be weak.” Everywhere means nowhere. Concentrate your forces. Pick 1 Sword. Make A’s in fewer things. Funnel your energy. Do less, better.

Chemical Precipitation

Chemical precipitation is the process of a solution transforming into a solid. It takes a lot of solution to get a little precipitate.

A process in one field sometimes shows up in other fields. This week, I want to look at some of those other fields where the precipitation process shows up.

Getting Precipitate Out Of An Enormous Amount Of Solution

The lawyer and grammarian Bryan Garner once asked David Foster Wallace about his writing process. Garner asked specifically about Wallace’s famous long essays—how you go about researching and organizing your thoughts? “I take a hundred times more notes than I need,” Wallace said. “My first draft usually approximates somebody in the midst of an epileptic seizure.” Wallace said it would usually take three or four drafts to start to get a real grasp of what he was writing about. “It’s not very economical in terms of time,” he said. “It is just doing it over and over and over again and throwing stuff away and then going back and trying it over again.” Wallace sums it up, “my process appears to be getting precipitate out of an enormous amount of solution.”

Two Hundred Years Worth of Man-Hours

In mid-1933, Walt Disney began thinking about creating the first ever full-length animated feature film. “We had a business meeting today for no good reason,” one employee wrote in May of that year. “However, it was interesting because Walt told us his idea of developing the story, ‘Snow White,’ and honestly, the way that boy can tell a story is nobody’s business…If it should turn out one tenth as good as the way he tells it, it should be a wow.” That’s the way Walt Disney Productions then operated—Walt had a vision, he’d try to communicate what was in his head to the hundreds of animators and artists working for him, and then they worked as long as it took to create exactly what Walt saw in his head. For Snow White, that took years. One animator worked for nearly a year and a half on a single scene…that was cut in the final edit. But from an enormous amount of solution, Walt Disney Productions got precipitate. Snow White premiered in 1937. At the end the audience erupted into a “thunderous ovation,” as one attendee said. Another said, “I could not help but feel that I was in the midst of motion picture history.” The critical reviewers were equally impressed. “It’s a classic,” one wrote. Another called Snow White “an authentic masterpiece.” And another put it “among the genuine artist achievements of this country.” When asked to what he attributes the movie’s success, Walt said it was a sheer technical achievement by his team. “No one person can take credit for the success of a motion picture,” he’d say. “It’s strictly a team effort.” The some six hundred employees drew, inked, and painted the quarter-million drawings that made up the one hour and twenty-three minute movie. In all, one biographer observes, the artists and animators put “two hundred years’ worth of man-hours” into Snow White.

How To Make 10 Good Songs

Rick Rubin is the producer behind many of the greatest albums since the early ‘80s. He’s worked Johnny Cash, Eminem, Adele, Kendrick Lamar, Beastie Boys, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Lizzo, Tom Petty, and on and on and on. Though his discography is pages long, when he’s working on an album, Rubin is in no rush. “I tend to believe overall in the quality of content over everything else,” Rubin said. “So we spend a great deal of time working on material long before we ever think about going into a recording studio.” Typically, an artist writes a batch of ten to twelve songs before playing them for Rubin. “When they play the songs for me, invariably the last two songs they’ve written are the best.” So Rubin tells them: you have two songs, go write more. Some artists get frustrated by this. Rubin tells them, “if you write 30 songs, there’s a better chance that the 10 on your album will be better than if you just write 10.” If you have an enormous amount of solution, there’s a better chance of getting some precipitate. Because of this lengthy pre-production process, Rubin said, “I often make records faster than a lot of other people. It usually has to do with how prepared we are in advance…It’s the pre-production time that really makes the difference. Sometimes that’s a couple of weeks, sometimes it’s a few months, sometimes it’s a year of getting ready to go into the studio and cut the whole album in a week.”

Distill Coffee Into Espresso

The comedy talk show Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj ran for forty episodes across six seasons. It won an Emmy, a Peabody Award, and two Webby Awards. When he’s asked about the initial idea for the show’s success, Minhaj says the same thing. “My ethos is like this,” he says, “people’s lives are hard. People are busy. And a lot of the stuff happening in the world is very esoteric and complicated. I see my job like this: my job is to distill coffee into espresso. For people who only have twenty minutes—they’re on the train heading home, they’ve got to get home to their kids, they’re going through some life shit—alright, here’s this complicated issue in twenty minutes. That’s what I think my job is: to take complicated things and make it simple so people can walk away after twenty minutes with a clear take and perspective.”

Get The Shit Water Out Of You

The singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran says creativity is like a dirty tap or faucet. “When you switch a dirty tap on,” Sheeran said, “it’s going to flow shit water out for a substantial amount of time. And then, clean water is going to start flowing.” When he was starting out, Sheeran said, “my songs were terrible. They were awful. But I got it out of me and the more and more you write…then you start flowing clean water and songs start getting better and better and better.” It takes a lot of man-hours to make an authentic masterpiece. It takes writing a lot of songs to get a few good ones. It takes a lot of coffee beans to get a strong shot of espresso. It takes a substantial amount of shit solution to get a little clean precipitate.