In six months you will have discarded most of what you claim is important now. So shut up. More listening, more learning. Less conclusions and less interrupting.
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Spending time in an office in Hollywood has helped me figured out why people make so many awful decisions. No one shuts up. Ever. They’re always on the phone. Always bullshitting. Always setting up side-meetings and lunches and drinks and dinners. No one ever takes time to think. They’re too fucking busy.
From what I’ve seen business is as much a creative art as writing or drawing. It takes concentration and inspiration. School was the same way for me. Almost ever paper I wrote for class was finished in my head before I sat down at the computer. Even if I wasn’t that far along, I’d at least wrestled with the big idea over and over. It’s not really something you can teach – you’re either the kind of person who uses their mind for thinking or you walk around empty-headed and consumed trivial nothings.
The former requires silence. It means doing things that jog your inspiration like reading or running or relaxing. An office facilitates almost none of those things. I like listening to the same song on repeat, often 20 or 30 times in a row. It sort of allows me to separate the right and left brain – the music keeps one occupied while the other comes up with ideas. Mostly though, it’s about creating a space that you can step in and be creative
Frank Lucas called this “backtracking.” He’d lock himself in a room, pull the blinds and tune everybody out. He’d look forward and inward and outward and just think. That’s where he came up with the Cadaver Connection – importing heroin directly from South East Asia for a tenth of the cost in imitation coffins that they’d sneak on US Army jets. John Boyd called it his “draw down” period and it’s where all his big ideas came from – EM Theory, Destruction and Creation. Both of them relied on introspection to create innovation.
From meditative isolation comes clarity. In the office though, I get so fucking frustrated that I have to leave – I just can’t deal with all the waste. But I do leave and jam in little pockets where I can take the time to think. No one is ever going to ‘give’ you that space, no one will ever drive you there and drop you off and hope you come back with something great. You have to demand it, steal it, fight for it.
If you stop even for a second – which I have before – it’s really fucking hard to get back.
There is a line in Meditations where Marcus says we can’t quench understanding unless we put the insights that compose it. In other words, it’s a two way street.
The big shift in media is that technology has blurred the line between creator and customer. With the basic software that comes on a mac I can take something that was previously only consumable and make it into something else that can, in turn, be consumed again. That’s the notion of a “prosumer.”
So how can anyone expect to get anywhere on the internet without participating? You cannot quench understanding unless you put out the insights that compose it. Prosumption is incredibly easy. Wikipedia, del.icio.us, messageboards, StumbleUpon are all in desperate need of contributions. And more than that, they’ll help you do the things you do already. In one capacity or another, I get paid to use all of them.
More than that, as a species that learns by doing, you can’t possibly develop to the fullest through absorption alone.
There is this classic Tyler Cowen line for figuring out how attractive you are. He said you take the average rating of all your partners, shave a little off and you’ll have yours.
Brian Clark used this logic earlier in the week. Copyblogger, for him, was a success not because it made money but because people take his phone calls.
So how do you figure out how important you are? Take the average importance of the names in your email inbox and phone log, shave a little off and that’s your answer.
Show me a man who isn’t a slave; one who is a slave to sex, another to money, another to ambition; all are slaves to hope or fear. I could show you a man who has been a Consul who is a slave to his ‘little old woman’, a millionaire who is the slave of a little girl in domestic service. And there is no state of slavery more disgraceful than one which is self-imposed. Seneca Letters from a Stoic
I disagree with Seneca, I don’t think that self-imposed slavery is the worst thing ever. What’s worse is not knowing what you’ve submitted to – not realizing that you’re chained to transactions or other people’s egos or fashion or whatever.
I’m disappointed in my enslavement to self-doubt, resentment towards those that I dislike, at the power that the favor and approval of certain people hold over me – that I haven’t let a call go to voicemail in months. I’m proud that when I set deadlines, commitments or quotas that I am utterly compelled to fulfill them. That whole “daimon“ thing isn’t a horrible master.
Seneca ignores the distinction between ignorance and submitting to something bigger than yourself. The honest and practical reality: Figure out what you’re beholden to and decide consciously if you’re at peace with it. If you are, then by all means continue. If you’re not, you should at least end the delusion of your own agency.
