Fill Up To Pour Out
Johnny Cash is estimated to have written and co-written more than 1,000 songs during his lifetime. He was one of the most prolific artists of all time. In an interview in 1993, Cash talked about his process and how he’d increase the probability of being able to write a song: “Songwriting is a very strange thing, as far as I’m concerned,” Cash said. “It’s not something where I can say, ‘Next Tuesday morning, I’m gonna sit down and write a song.’ I can’t do that. No way. But if I say, ‘Next Tuesday morning, I’m gonna go to the country and take a walk in the woods,’ then the probability is that next Tuesday night, I can write a song. You know, creative people have to be fed from the divine source. I do. I have to get fed. I have to get filled up in order to pour out. I really have to.” Filling up in order to pour out—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6.
You’d Have Written That Too
During a “thank you” speech at a 2015 gala held to honor his creative achievements, Bob Dylan blew up the myth that, as he said people like to say, “there was no precedent for what I was doing.” “I’m glad for my songs to be honored like this,” Dylan 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 filled him up. Before he poured out songs of his own, he said that for years all he did was sing songs like the Traditional folk song, “John Henry.” He said, “If you sang ‘John Henry’ as many times as me—‘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.” You just fill up and then pour out.
What You Create Is A Function Of The Library In Your Head
In 1985, Nike held a 24-hour shoe design contest. Nike was struggling. Their stock dropped 50%. They had to lay off people. Adidas, Converse, and Reebok were all selling more shoes. So in a panicked attempt to find creative talent, Nike held a shoe design contest. The winner was a corporate architect named Tinker Hatfield. “Two days after the competition,” he said, “I wasn’t even asked—I was told that I was now a footwear designer for Nike.” As he got to work on his first official shoe design, he thought about a building he had studied in architecture school: The Centre Pompidou in Paris. The Centre Pompidou is an inside-out building, meaning that the structural, mechanical, and circulation systems are all exposed. “That building,” Tinker said, “was describing what it was to the people of Paris. And I thought, ‘Well why not do that with a shoe? Let’s cut a hole in the side and show what’s in the shoe.’” So Tinker designed an inside-out shoe: The Air Max 1. The Air Max 1 was a massive success, and it steered Nike’s design direction from then on. “To this day,” Tinker says, “Phil Knight says I saved Nike.” Had he not studied that building in Paris, he couldn’t have created the Air Max. Creativity, Tinker likes to say, is a function of the “library in your head.” “When you sit down to create something…what you create is a culmination of everything you’ve seen and done previous to that point.” What you pour out is a culmination of everything you’ve filled up on previous to that point.
Our Job Is Just To Notice
A couple years before he started and went on to become one of the great stand-up comedians of all time, when he was 19, George Carlin was a DJ at a radio station in Shreveport, Louisiana. At the radio station, “I had a boss,” Carlin said, “and my boss told me to write down every idea I get even if I can’t use it at the time…and have a system for filing it away—because a good idea is of no use to you unless you can find it.” Carlin began capturing things—phrases he liked, “voguish words that come into style and remain there,” observations that made him laugh, etc.—on scraps of paper, which he filed in boxes categorized by themes and subjects like “On Humor,” “Oddball Facts,” “The Way We Talk, and “TV-Style Bits.” When he was well into his comedy career, Carlin would disappoint an admirer—who wanted to believe that there was something magical or mysterious about Carlin’s creative process and his (seemingly) ability to come up with novel jokes and ideas— by talking about his capturing and filing system before explaining that a lot of creativity “is discovery. A lot of things are lying around waiting to be discovered and our job is to just notice them and bring them to life.”
I Was So Full of Running
Of course, this doesn’t just apply to creative output. Leading up to the day he planned to attempt to break the four-minute mile barrier, Roger Bannister said, “I had done nothing for five days. I hadn’t trained. I just rested. And so I felt very full of running.” In the first lap, Bannister signaled to his pacers—Chris Brasher and Chris Chataway—faster, faster! “In fact,” Bannister said, “they were going at exactly the right pace. It was just that I was so full of running, I didn’t feel I was running fast.” In fact, he was running faster than any human had ever run at that distance, breaking the barrier with a time of 3 minutes and 59.4 seconds.
Strummer’s Law
During a live Q&A, the neuroscientist Andrew Huberman was asked, What is the best way to foster creativity and inspiration in your life? “The best way to foster creativity and inspiration,” Huberman replied, “is what is actually called Strummer’s Law.” Strummer’s Law is named after the Clash’s Joe Strummer, who said, “No input, no output.” No fill up, no pour out.