The Gaps Are The Point
In college, Christopher Nolan was the president of the university’s Film Society. So while a student, he made and worked on so many short and feature films that “I felt very much as if I had accumulated this whole Brie wheel of knowledge.” Then he graduated, and out in the real world, Nolan said, “I realized it was actually a Swiss cheese.” He realized that there were actually a lot of gaps in his knowledge, “and that those gaps are the point. The gaps in your knowledge [are] the important part because you get out there and you fill those gaps [and] some of those gaps will be filled with the most precious thing of all: New thoughts. New ideas.” New thoughts and ideas that were a result of someone seeking to fill a gap—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6.
Make What’s Missing
Before Lin-Manuel Miranda created award-winning musicals, he was a substitute teacher in New York City. From an early age, Miranda’s dream was to star in Broadway musicals. In college, he studied the musical theater canon, looking for potential acting roles. “For Latinos, in the musical theater canon, it’s slim pickings,” he explained. “We have West Side Story, Zoot Suit, and we have a couple of parts in A Chorus Line—that’s it.” Instead of seeing that gap in the canon as unfair, an obstacle, a good reason to not pursue a career in musical theater—Lin-Manuel saw it as an opportunity, a gap to be filled. “I decided to make what I saw was missing,” he said. “I didn’t realize it at the time, but that’s the best advice you could give anyone: make what’s missing.” So, he continues, “I wrote a musical full of scenes where people are rapping outside of bodegas [and] doing the stuff that me and my Latino friends used to do.” He set his musical in a majority-Latino neighborhood (Washington Heights) near where he grew up, he filled it a majority-Latino cast, and he titled it, In The Heights. He wrote it over the course of 5 years—mostly on nights and weekends—while “I was a ‘whichever teacher is sick’ substitute teacher.” And on March 9, 2008, In The Heights premiered on Broadway at the Richard Rodgers Theatre. That same year, it won a Grammy (Best Musical Show Album) and four Tony Awards, including Best Musical. As a result of making what was missing, Lin-Manuel said, “I went from broke substitute teacher to [award-winning] Broadway composer.”
You Do Not Know What’s Going On Out There, Man.
For a long time, the James Beard Award-winning chef Wylie Dufresne didn’t know where the gaps in his industry were. Growing up, wherever he went, he carried a notebook, and once, he wrote down an idea: chocolate cake with a liquid center. He thought it was a completely original idea. He thought, if he could figure out how to make a chocolate cake with a liquid center, he would have made something that was missing. Then a couple of years later, Dufresne got a job working under the legendary chef, Jean-Georges Vongerichten. Jean-Georges, Dufresne learned, invented the molten chocolate cake many years earlier. Dufresne said, “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, you are not smart. You do not know what’s going on out there, man. You had an idea that someone else had years ago.’” Unlike the cake with a liquid center, Dufresne said, “I realized I had this knowledge that was kind of hollow and empty.” He realized he needed “to become a better student of [my] craft.” He needed to get there and fill the gaps in his knowledge.
The Law of the Land
In 1991, Pixar struck a deal with Disney to make the first computer-animated movie. At the time, Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull explained, “We didn’t have any storytellers among us.” Catmull and most of his employees were computer scientists. To fill this gap, the team attended STORY—a 3-day storytelling seminar taught by screenwriter and story consultant Robert Mckee. They left the seminar, one Pixar employee said, “as true believers [in] McKee’s doctrine that…character emerges most realistically and compellingly from the choices that the protagonist makes in reaction to his problems…This became the law of the land at Pixar.” Essentially, McKee teaches that the beating heart of a good story is a character who wants something and has to overcome a series of problems to get it. Guided by this principle, the Pixar team wrote a story about a toy named Woody who wants to keep his position as a boy named Andy’s favorite toy. “Woody’s world is rocked,” Catmull writes in summing up the plot, “when a shiny new rival, a space ranger named Buzz Lightyear, arrives on the scene and becomes the apple of Andy’s eye.” That problem would become the beating heart of the first ever computer-animated feature film, Toy Story, which released in 1995 and was a critical and commercial sensation.
Own Your Style
Prior to writing The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel had been writing online for over a decade. In that time, he developed his unique style: in 800-1000 words, he would tell an interesting story (which usually had seemingly nothing to do with money or finance) to illustrate a lesson about money or finance. Then when Morgan began thinking about writing a book, his initial plan was to write 10 chapters, each the length of a typical book chapter (~4000-5000 words)—a length he had no experience with. Sometimes when we seek to fill a gap in our knowledge or experience, we find that we can’t or that we shouldn’t. To hit that ~4000-5000 word count, Morgan said, he rambled, he added fluff, he included additional examples that made the same point as earlier examples. And a third of the way through writing The Psychology of Money, he said, “I just didn’t like where it was going.” So he threw it all out and started over. Instead of conforming to the style of most books, he said, “I just owned the style of writing that I have.” Instead of 10 long chapters, The Psychology of Money is 20 short chapters. (One chapter is so short that when Morgan submitted it to his publisher, they emailed him and asked if he had sent the wrong file. “No,” he said, “that’s all I have to say on the topic.”) He owned his style and, incidentally, made something that must have been missing because, to date, The Psychology of Money has sold over four million copies worldwide.
The Fallow Periods
The legendary designer Paula Scher said, “I still [a little over 5 decades into her career] make things that are pretty awful. It’s part of the process. You have periods of tremendous productivity and other periods where you’re fallow. The fallow periods are really important because that’s where you’re figuring something it out. You have to work through it in order to discover something new. You need those sorts of periods in order to grow.” Those sorts periods, those gaps in productivity, in knowledge, in experience are the point—they’re where you might find the most precious thing of all: New thoughts. New ideas.