I Know What We Do In Here
A comedian once told Jerry Seinfeld that he’d been struggling to write new material. Seinfeld asked him where he typically does his writing. At home, the comedian said. “Get yourself an office,” Seinfeld said. It doesn’t have to be fancy, he added, “just somewhere that you have to drive your car to. And when you walk into that office, your brain is going to go, ‘I know what we do in here.’ And it will do it.” In psychology, this is known as environmental priming—the brain learns to associate certain locations with certain behaviors and kinds of thinking. And in this SIX at 6, this the theme.
A Really, Really Enjoyable Way To Work
In 2008, Quentin Tarantino restructured his creative process. “Before,” he said, “I was an amateur, mad little writer.” He would go to a bar, “order some shit, drink a lot of coffee, and be there for hours with all my shit laid out all night long.” “It all changed,” he said when he started working on Inglourious Basterds. “I started writing during the daytime,” he explained. “I started writing around 10-10:30, something like that, and then around 5 or 6, I stop for the day.” Now, he says, comes the most important part of his process: “What I do is I go into my pool and just kind of float around in the water.” Because he does it every day, when Tarantino gets into his pool, his brain is environmentally primed to go, “I know what we do in here.” “And then a lot of shit will come to me,” Tarantino continues. “Literally, a lot of ideas will just come to me. Then I get out and make little notes on those ideas I came up with while…[he pauses, trying to think of the word]…meditating—it actually is meditating. And then that’s the next day’s work.” “That has become exclusively the way I do it. And it truly brings a lot of joy to my life. It’s a really, really enjoyable way to work that makes me really happy.”
James Cameron’s Three Desks
On the same day in 1983, James Cameron was hired to write the scripts for Aliens and Rambo II. He also had recently sold an idea of his own: The Terminator. This meant that in a 3-month period, Cameron had to write 3 scripts. To do so, Cameron bought two desks. In addition to the desk in his office, he set up a writing station in his bedroom and another in his living room. At the desk in his office, he worked on The Terminator. At the desk in his living room, he worked on Aliens. And at the desk in his bedroom, he worked on Rambo. “That way,” Cameron explained, “when I moved from one desk to another, all the notes and papers and everything were right where they were supposed to be. If I didn’t know what to do next on Rambo, I’d go work on Alien for a while.” That way when Cameron moved from his Terminator desk to his Aliens desk or his Rambo desk, his brain was environmentally primed to go, “I know what we do here.”
A Room’s Dynamics Are Critical
For 13 years, in the West One conference room at Pixar, there was a long and skinny table. “Though it was beautiful,” Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull writes in Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration, “I grew to hate this table.” It was an unseen force that “impeded our work,” Catmull explains. They held regular meetings about Pixar movies around this table. The director and producer of the movie in progress sat near the center. They were immediately surrounded by Pixar’s most experienced creative talent. And then about fifteen or twenty other employees sat on the outskirts of the table. “When it comes to creativity,” Catmull writes, “job titles and hierarchy are meaningless. That’s what I believe. But unwittingly, we were allowing this table to send a different message. The closer you were seated to the middle of the table, it implied, the more important—the more central—you must be.” And if you were farther away from the middle, you were environmentally primed to be “less likely to speak up—your distance from the heart of the conversation made participating feel intrusive.” It wasn’t until they happened to have a meeting in a small room with a square table that Catmull became aware of the hidden costs of the long table. Sitting around the square table, Catmull writes, “the interplay was better, the exchange of ideas more free-flowing, the eye contact automatic. Every person there, no matter their job title, felt free to speak up.” Right after that first square-table meeting, Catmull went to Pixar’s facilities department and asked them to get rid of the long table in West One. It was replaced with a square table, which still serves as a physical reminder to Catmull “that a room’s dynamics are critical.”
The Only Criterion
“A lot of habitually creative people have preparation rituals linked to the setting in which they choose to start their day,” the great dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp writes in The Creative Habit. “By putting themselves into that environment,” their brain goes, “I know what we do here.” The conditions vary from person to person, Tharp points out. The composer Igor Stravinsky always started his day by sitting at his piano and playing some Bach. Tharp knows a chef who starts his day in his garden—“Spending the first minutes of the day among his plants is his ideal creative environment for thinking about new flavor combinations and dishes.” Tharp has a writer friend who can only write outside, so moved to Southern California. There is no one ideal environment, Tharp writes. “The only criterion is this…Find a working environment [that] makes you want to be there.”
The Character of Your Life
In The Timeless Way of Building, the architect and design theorist Christopher Alexander writes about how the elements in an environment encourage certain “patterns of events.” The table in the West One encouraged a pattern of hierarchical collaboration, Cameron’s different desks encouraged different patterns of thinking, and Tarantino’s pool encouraged a pattern of coming up with ideas for the next day’s work. “By and large,” Alexander writes, “the overall character of our lives is given by those patterns of events, those events which keep recurring over and over again.” So the elements in your environment are encouraging the overall character of your life. “It depends entirely on the specific nature of these patterns of events from which your environment is made.”