How To Avoid Stopping Evolution
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Europe was the center of the art world, setting the standards for techniques, styles, and ideas that aspiring painters around the world copied. This wasn’t a function of the admiration that can drive an artist to emulate their heroes, but of the outsized influence that prestigious awards and prizes had on an artist’s ability to earn a living. And so, aspiring artists gravitated—consciously or not, eagerly or reluctantly—towards established tastes and conventions, believing it was the best way to win over committees and critics. In the early 1900s, the painter and art teacher Robert Henri grew frustrated with this culture of mimicry. Appealing to self-interest, in various lectures, letters, and essays, Henri encouraged artists to think a little more deeply about the nature of the professional success and recognition they desired. “It is the inevitable consequence of growth,” he wrote, “the output of a progress in development.” The greatest artists , writers, musicians, athletes, inventors, and entrepreneurs throughout history each did something that hadn’t been done before, using what made them different to advance their field. In contrast, pursuing success by replicating what came before, Henri wrote, “is to stop evolution, to hold yourself back to the plane of another person’s judgment.” As his message spread, it inspired a group of artists to break away from the standards of the time. Free from the plane of other people’s judgment, they gravitated toward a uniquely realistic style that led to the realism and modernism movements in American art. Some ways to avoid stopping evolution or break free when feeling held back—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
Do Less, Better
Shortly after Steve Jobs returned as the CEO of Apple in 1997, he met with Jony Ive, Apple’s Senior VP of industrial design. At the time, Apple was on the verge of extinction, struggling with a bloated product line of 40 different products. As Jobs’ toured Ive’s design studio, at one point he said, “Fuck, you’ve not been very effective, have you?” It was clear to Jobs that Ive was full of potential, but it was being held back by the company’s scattered priorities and lack of focus. Jobs walked up to a whiteboard and drew a 2 x 2 grid. On top, he wrote “Consumer” and “Professional.” Down the side, “Portable” and “Desktop.” By narrowing the focus, he said, they could concentrate on creating a smaller range of high-quality, innovative products. The philosopher Marcus Aurelius pointed out that focusing on fewer things “brings a double satisfaction.” You get the satisfaction of having fewer things to do, as well as the satisfaction of doing those fewer things at a higher level. You get “to do less, better.” In the Jobs era of “doing less, better,” Ive was very effective. He went on to design iconic products like the iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and AirPods. This focused approach transformed a dying company into one of the most valuable and influential in the world.
Don’t Worry About Where You Fit In
Maggie Rogers grew up making music in a rural part of Maryland, where she wrote her own songs and played the banjo. Her music was deeply influenced by the folk traditions she loved. At eighteen, she moved to New York to study at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. There, Maggie learned the formal techniques of production and engineering, which made her question the way she had always made music on her own. Feeling a pressure to replicate the polished sound of mainstream music, Maggie was hit with a period of severe writer’s block. Making music had always been her way of understanding and expressing herself, and without it, she felt disconnected from herself. Over the next two and a half years, she tried to make music using the traditional techniques she was learning in class, but the more she tried to fit into the mold of polished, mainstream pop, the more frustrated and creatively blocked she became. She went on a month-long hiking trip in Alaska, where she immersed in nature and tried to reconnect with herself. On her hikes, Maggie began to record the sounds around her—birds whistling, leaves rustling, gravel crunching, and water flowing—capturing the natural sounds that brought her a sense of calm. Not long after, on a trip to Berlin, a friend introduced her to house music, and dancing to it gave Maggie the same primal, meditative feeling she found while walking in Alaska. When she returned to New York for her final semester, to graduate, she had to complete a thesis project. As she thought about the project, Maggie reflected on the elements that she’d been drawn to throughout her life—the intimate storytelling of folk music, the sounds of nature, and the primal, meditative, and rhythmic qualities of both walking and dancing. Eventually, she said, “I was like, ‘Okay, all of these elements are pointing me to the fact that maybe I can just make music that sounds like me, and I don’t have to worry about where I fit in.’” Instead of focusing on traditional techniques, she experimented with a more informal and personal approach to production. One day, she recorded herself patting on her jeans, a pair of Levi’s 501s, and snapping her fingers. Then, as she was adding in some ambient sounds from her bank of natural noises, some lyrics started to come to mind, “and I picked up the pen, and all the lyrics came out. And that’s exactly what happened. It was this creative outpouring after all of the years of writer’s block.” This creative outpouring led to her song, “Alaska,” and on the day Maggie presented it in class, Pharrell Williams was in attendance to listen and critique the students’ work. As Alaska played in its entirety, Pharrell was visibly blown away. When the song finished, he said, “Wow. I have zero, zero, zero notes for that…And I’ll tell you why. Because you’re doing your own thing. It’s singular. And that is such a special quality, and all of us possess that ability…But most of the time, people say, ‘I’m going to make this or that kind of music,’ so it ends up sounding like something we’ve heard before or felt before. But I’ve never heard anyone like you before, and I’ve never heard anything that sounds like that, so that is the kind of thing that’s like a drug for me.” The video of Pharrell listening to Maggie’s distinct, unpolished song went viral, and Alaska became a hit, with over 257 million streams on Spotify alone. Within a year of graduating from college, she was performing it to sold-out crowds around the world.
Enter A World of Tiny, Tiny Little Pieces
At a time when he was “completely bereft of ideas [and] quite lost, actually,” Brian Eno—who coined the term “ambient music” and has produced albums by artists like David Bowie, U2, and Talking Heads—was approached to compose what would become The Microsoft Sound, the brief sound that plays when Windows 95 boots up. They gave him a long list of adjectives—we want a piece of music that’s inspiring, universal, futuristic, optimistic, emotional, sentimental, and so on—and then at the bottom it said, “and it must be 3 1/4 seconds long.” Immersed in the unique challenge of condensing a complete, impactful idea into just a few seconds, Eno was forced out of the familiar patterns he typically relied on when working on his own music. The constraints of the task required him to step away from his usual creative habits and experiment with new, unconventional approaches. Exposed to fresh techniques and perspectives, Eno ultimately got unstuck. “In fact, I made 84 pieces,” Eno said. “I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I’d finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.”
Don’t Get Forced Into A Pattern That Militates Against Progression
At the age of 14, Rodney Mullen won his first freestyle world skateboard championship. He won 34 of his next 35 contests. On what is still the most successful competitive run in the history of the sport, Rodney quit competing in contests. “Winning a contest felt good the first time,” he said. “After that, you are protecting. There is no gratification in winning, there is only upholding something so that you don’t lose it. And it is staggering. It usurps the joy of it. It’s like the Kafka short story: you build something, but you can’t live in the house because you sit around guarding it. I looked at contests like that. It militated against progression. It forced me into a pattern of consistency—do this, best-in-show, again and again and again and again.” After he quit competing in freestyle, Rodney shifted into street skating, a skateboarding discipline which focuses on flat-ground tricks and maneuvers using features like stairs, handrails, ledges, curbs, benches, and other architectural elements found in urban environments. Freed from the pressures of protecting and guarding, Rodney went on to enjoy a period of prolific creativity, inventing many of the tricks now fundamental to modern skateboarding: the flat-ground Ollie, kick-flip, heel-flip, and on and on. As a result leading the sport’s evolution, Rodney is today known as the “Godfather of modern street skating.”
Variance Equals Strength
There’s a key idea in evolutionary biology, known as Fisher’s Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection. “It’s the idea that variance equals strength,” Morgan Housel writes, “because the more diverse a population is, the more chances it has to come up with new traits that can be selected for. No one can know what traits will be useful; that’s not how evolution works. But if you create a lot of traits, the useful one—whatever it is—will be in there somewhere.” In nature, art, sports, business, and our day-to-day routines—variance equals strength. Vary from the norms, slash the product line, embrace constraints, explore fresh perspectives, break out of familiar patterns—do what you haven’t done, try what hasn’t been tried, make what hasn’t been made, sound like something we’ve never heard or felt before.