Here are SIX things I learned, thought were interesting, or found useful.
Get Your Butterflies Flying in Formation
In How Emotions Are Made, Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett tells the story of her 12-year-old daughter testing for her Black Belt. She’s the only girl among a group of hulking adolescent boys she has to spar with. She’s nervous, and the Grandmaster 10th degree Black Belt senses her nervousness and says, “Make your butterflies fly in formation.” You can train your brain to make sense of situations and sensations differently, Dr. Barrett explains. “For instance,” she writes, “if you’re about to take a test and feel worked up, you might categorize your feeling as harmful anxiety (“Oh no, I’m doomed!”) or as helpful anticipation (“I’m energized and ready to go!”).”
What You Know Is Plenty Exotic
NPR’s Connie Goldman once told Robert Pirsig, author of the classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, that Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was one of the more original works she’d ever read. Pirsig responded with a story of how he came to write the way he writes. In graduate school, he studied under the great poet Allen Tate. After a trip to India, Pirsig wrote a story about a servant and a crow titled, “Ram G and the Crow.” “I thought this was a very beautiful story,” Pirsig told Goldman. “I was really impressed with it myself. And I showed it to Tate and he read through the whole thing. And he said, ‘Well, what do you want to write all this exotic stuff for? Write about what you know. If you write about what you know, and you do it carefully and sincerely and make sure it’s really what you know, that will be plenty exotic to everybody else.’ And in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I’ve really tried to do that. And I’ve tried to justify what I’ve done to myself by saying, ‘Well, it may be right, it may be wrong, but it sure is what I know.’ That I suppose is what is responsible for that feeling of directness that you get. I was just trying to get a one-to-one relationship between myself and what’s on paper.”
You Can’t Fill The Universe With A Glass Of Water
John Mayer talks about how the only time he gets writers block is when he tries to write a spatially big song. When he tries to write a huge, glacial, universal song—“that’s when I get writers block,” he said, “because I try to have a song fill the entire galaxy. I’ve never gotten a song that way. But if I write a song about something the size of a cup of water, and I do it right—I notice a week later that it’s got the universe in it. So I’d rather have the universe in a glass of water than try to make a glass of water fill the universe.” He analogizes it to the reason he stays home a lot. “Because everyone’s trying to fill the universe up with one glass of water. And I go, ‘listen, we would have a better time if we picked a microscopically small detail and worked that for an hour and a half or two hours.”
Inventory Must Precede Invention
In How To Think Like Shakespeare, Scott Newstok writes about how you have to stock up knowledge of the great work that has come before if you want to produce something gret yourself. He quotes from King Lear: “Nothing can be made out of nothing.” Then he explains that rhetoricians used to teach the first step in constructing an argument: inventio—“making an inventory of your mind’s stock of knowledge—your treasury of thoughts, your database of reading, which you can accumulate only through slow, deliberate study. You cannot transform tradition (a creative ideal) without first knowing it (a conserving ideal). Making an inventory must precede making an invention…A well-stocked mind is what prepares you for flashes of insight: [As the inventor Gordon Gould said,] it is necessary to have all the materials of an invention in your head; The best geologist is he who has seen the most rocks.”
In Praise Of Being Maladjusted
Austin Kleon talks about how creativity could be defined as a kind of catch-all word for, I want something else. I want something other than the way things currently are. I want things to operate differently than they currently operate. “If you think about it,” he said, “that is the root of creative work. It’s looking around and being maladjusted…Maladjustment is the root of all this stuff. If you look around and everything’s great, there’s no reason to be creative about anything…There has to be an itch. There has to be the feeling that something isn’t currently here that needs to be here.”
It’s All Material
In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius uses this metaphor: a fire uses everything thrown at it as fuel to burn brighter. Humans can too. It’s like Jerry Seinfeld says: “I’m never not working on material. Every second of my existence, I am thinking, ‘What can I do with that?’”