Creativity

These ideas keep me grounded as the world speeds up

Creativity, Philosophy / /

Follow the trail long enough

Margaret Atwood doesn’t begin with a master plan.

She starts her novels with something small—an image, a voice, a scene—and lets the structure emerge as she writes.

She wrote two sections of her book Surfacing five years before writing the rest. To know everything in advance, she says, would be “too much like paint-by-numbers.”

Still, many writers, especially early on, try to leap ahead—writing too quickly, aiming for clarity too soon. But that’s a trap. “Rushing through writing is like rushing through life,” Louise DeSalvo has said.

Instead of sprinting to the finish, the best work often comes from moving slowly, clue by clue. “How long are we willing to wait to develop our most singular work?” DeSalvo asks. “Or rather, how long are we willing to work? Are we stopping short of when our work begins to sing its true song? . . . If it took Matisse seven years, or Eugenides nine, why do we expect important work from ourselves in, say, a year or even two?”

She recalls how her early drafts felt “constrained and safe.” Her characters were one-dimensional, the settings vague, the story overly linear. But she kept going. “Dissatisfied though I may be, it’s essential to continue working,” she writes, “for it’s only near the end of the process that I develop my singular voice.” She admits that it isn’t until her eleventh draft that she finally knows what she’s doing with a book.

It doesn’t have to be good right away. Just get started. Let the work simmer. Let it surprise you.

Because if we give ourselves time—if we follow the trail long enough—“we, too, might create a singular, authentic, powerful work of art.”

Well, sometimes that’s exactly the right method

Like Atwood, Thomas Edison didn’t start out with a grand plan.

Edison’s creation of the commercially viable lightbulb was the culmination of small discoveries. He followed those discoveries—trusting they would lead somewhere, even if he didn’t yet know where. As David McCullough often stressed, the people we read about in history had no idea how things would turn out. When we read history, we’re not reading people’s past so much as we’re reading what they were presently living.

In 1878, others were experimenting with incandescent light. “But [Edison],” Ryan Holiday writes, “was the only [person] willing to test six thousand different filaments—including one made from the beard hair of one of his men— inching closer each time to the one that would finally work.”

His success had little to do with intellect and everything to do with persistence.

“Nikola Tesla, who spent a frustrating year in Edison’s lab during the invention of the lightbulb, once sneered that if Edison needed to find a needle in a haystack, he would ‘proceed at once’ to simply ‘examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search.’ Well, sometimes that’s exactly the right method…”

While others despaired, Edison worked. He wouldn’t rush. He would trust the process. And he did it all without the hindsight of knowing how things would turn out.

No one will ask how long it took

George Pocock, the builder behind the world’s finest racing shells, was, as Daniel James Brown writes, “all but born with an oar in his hand.” Boatbuilding ran in his blood—both grandfathers were competitive boatbuilders, and his father built racing shells for Eton College. George carried that legacy forward, blending deep knowledge with an unmatched devotion to craftsmanship. At the peak of his career, he was supplying racing shells to nearly every elite crew program in the country—including the University of Washington, whose team shocked the world with their win at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

What set his shells apart was the patience and care he put into them. Pocock refused to rush, remembering his father’s words: “No one will ask you how long it took to build; they will only ask who built it.”

A student in a hurry learns the slowest

This is one of my favorite anecdotes in the phenomenal book Wisdom Takes Work:

“There is a story about a samurai warrior named Banzo, who sought an education in a hurry so that he could impress his father. Told by a great teacher that mastery would take ten years, he was aghast.

‘I can’t wait that long. What if I work extra hard?’

‘OK,’ the master said. ‘Thirty years.’

‘But I will do whatever it takes to make it go faster,’ Banzo pleaded.

‘In that case,’ the master said, ‘it shall take seventy years. A student in a hurry learns the slowest.’”

Deide, then follow the thread

Creativity, Life / /

“Once you make a choice, possibilities you haven’t yet imagined will reveal themselves.”

When D.H. Lawrence set off for Sardinia, his mind was already made up: he would write Sea and Sardinia.

He began the moment he arrived. No second-guessing, no circling around the question of whether Sardinia was the “right” subject. He simply wrote—what he saw, where he wandered, who he met. As Louise DeSalvo points out, there was no hesitation between decision and action. “It was never ‘Is writing a book about Sardinia the right thing to do?’ Instead, it was, ‘I’ll go to Sardinia and write about it.’”

This stunned DeSalvo. How much of her own energy had been wasted in indecision? She decided to practice deciding—and urged her students to do the same. “I’ve seen students waste precious writing time because they can’t decide to write about, say, their mother or their father; they want to wait until the subject seems right. I tell them, ‘Just choose. Once you make a choice, possibilities you haven’t yet imagined will reveal themselves.’”

Follow the thread

Elizabeth Gilbert was searching for a big idea for her next book.

She was waiting for inspiration to strike—goosebumps, butterflies, that unmistakable creative spark. But nothing came.

She asked herself, Is there anything you’re even a little bit interested in?

Well… maybe gardening. But only because she had just moved and was toying with the idea of planting a backyard garden—something that had never interested her before. “I didn’t desperately want a garden, understand. . . . I just thought a garden would be nice.”

The urge to plant a garden was small. “It barely had a pulse. But I didn’t ignore it. Instead, I followed that small clue of curiosity and I planted some things.”

Little by little, her curiosity grew. She traced the origin of her irises and learned they were native to Syria. Interesting. And she realized it wasn’t the gardening itself that pulled her in, but the stories behind the plants.

The more she followed this thread, the more doors opened. The right books appeared. The right people showed up. “For instance,” she writes, “the expert whose advice I needed to seek about the history of mosses lived—it turned out—only a few minutes from my grandfather’s house in rural upstate New York.” And tucked away in an old book she’d inherited from her great-grandfather was exactly what she needed: “a vivid historic character, worthy of embellishing into a novel.”

And just like that, a faint spark grew into a path she had to follow—one that carried her around the world.

“Three years of research and travel and investigation later, I finally sat down to begin writing The Signature of All Things—a novel about a fictional family of nineteenth-century botanical explorers.” It was a novel she never saw coming. “It had started with nearly nothing. I did not leap into that book with my hair on fire; I inched toward it, clue by clue. But by the time I looked up from my scavenger hunt and began to write, I was completely consumed with passion about nineteenth-century botanical exploration.”

Sometimes you just gotta start…

In When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead, Jerry Weintraub, Frank Sinatra’s manager, recalls how Frank would sink into deep lows and stay there.

One morning, Jerry got a call from Frank. He was down. He’d spent the night brooding on the roof, worn out by the grind. “The same thing, every day and night, going down to that same theater and singing the same songs to the same crowds, ‘Fly Me to the Moon,’ ‘Chicago,’ I just don’t care.”

Jerry flew to Vegas that very day. When they met on the rooftop, Frank opened up—drink in one hand, cigarette in the other—saying maybe he just needed a rest.

“It’s not a rest you need,” Jerry said. “It’s a new hill to climb.”

Jerry understood Frank’s nature. He thrived when he had something to push against—an impossible task, a critic to silence. “You’re bored,” Jerry told him. “You need a challenge.”

“All right,” Frank replied. “What do you have in mind?”

Jerry told him he had a great idea—but he’d need a few days to work it out.

“No, no, what is it?” Frank pressed. “You’ve got to tell me.”

“Look, I really do have a great idea, but I need a few days.”

“Of course,” Jerry writes, “I did not have a great idea. I had no idea at all, but I knew that Frank needed a great idea less than he needed the prospect of a great idea, the promise of an event that would lift him out of his funk.”

Frank wouldn’t let him off the hook. “Tell me, Jerry. You’ve got to tell me.”

“So,” as Jerry tells it, “I started talking, improvising…

‘We’re going to do Madison Square Garden,’ I said.

‘Yeah, so what? We’ve done Madison Square Garden before. What’s so great about that?’

‘Now wait, Frank, hold on, let me tell you how we’re going to do it…’

I kicked my voice up a notch, going into full ringmaster mode.

‘…We’re going to do it live, Frank! Live!’

‘Yeah, so what? We’re live every night. That’s show business.’

‘Yes, but we’re never live like this,’ I said, ‘on every television in America and all across the world.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah…’

And now that I had gotten the thread I was gone.

‘And let’s do it in the center of the Garden,’ I told him, ‘on the floor, in a boxing ring.’

‘A boxing ring? What are you talking about?’

‘I’ll tell you what I’m talking about. You’re the heavyweight champion of the world, Frank. You hold every belt in the world of entertainment. The number-one singer in the world. No challengers, no one even close. So let’s do it in a ring, and make it like a heavyweight title fight, and invite all the people who go to heavyweight title fights, because they’re your fans. And let’s get Howard Cosell to be the announcer. Yeah, wow, I can hear it!’

‘Hear what, Jerry? What can you hear?’

‘I can hear Howard Cosell. He’s ringside, his hand over his ear, announcing it as you come down the aisle, climb through the ropes and into the ring: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, live from Madison Square Garden. Jerry Weintraub presents Sinatra, The Main Event.’

‘And here’s the best part,’ I told Frank. ‘No rehearsals.’

‘No rehearsals.’

‘No rehearsals. You just get there on the night of the show and sing your songs, and do your thing, as fresh and spontaneous as can be—like a heavyweight title fight. Frank Sinatra Live!’”

“The Main Event” became one of the era’s most iconic concerts—Sinatra, in a boxing ring, at the heart of his city, telling his life story in song. And it all started on the rooftop of Caesars—with Sinatra lost in a fog of despair, and Jerry “talking and talking.”

“Maybe this is an old Bronx thing,” Jerry reflects. “You just have to open your mouth and start talking. I can’t tell you how many jams I’ve gotten out of by talking, seeing where the words would take me. ‘What are we going to do about it? Well, I’ll tell you what we’re going to do about it…’ And I open my mouth and see what happens.” He made decisions and followed where they led.

The courage to let people watch you fail

Creativity, Life, Philosophy / /

The courage to let people watch you fail

In the 1850s, before she became a pioneer in education, religion, and women’s rights, Rebecca Mitchell’s life was turned upside down. Her husband died, leaving her with two small children to raise. Under Illinois law, a widow couldn’t inherit her husband’s property—it all went to the government. Everything she owned, right down to the clothes on her back, was no longer hers. If she wanted it back, she’d have to buy it.

Rebecca had dreams of becoming a minister, but women weren’t allowed to… well, do much of anything. Her second marriage ended in separation, and by 1882, with her two sons grown and a sense of opportunity pulling her west, she and her teenage daughter boarded a train for Idaho. When they arrived, the only shelter they could find was a shed—just warm enough to keep them from freezing. And yet, in that tiny shed, Rebecca started a school, eventually squeezing in 40 students.

Determined to expand, she set her sights on a larger building that could serve as both a school and a church. For two years, she worked tirelessly to raise the funds. When the chapel was finally built, it housed the school and the school district she had helped establish.

But Rebecca’s ambitions didn’t stop there. She continued founding schools in neighboring communities, and by 1891—now in her fifties—she turned her attention to the government.

After fighting for and winning women’s suffrage in Idaho, she took an even bolder step: she applied to be chaplain of the Idaho legislature, something no woman had ever done. The men were baffled. They said they had never heard of such a thing.

“Why not do the unheard-of thing?” Rebecca asked.

And that’s the question, Sharon McMahon writes: Why not do the unheard-of thing?

“Humans aren’t so much afraid of failure as they are of having people watch them fail,” McMahon continues. “The shame doesn’t come from not scaling the summit, it’s from the people who judge you for not having succeeded.”

Rebecca knew that judgment well. She had been criticized for her failed marriage, for starting a school, for daring to believe a woman could be a chaplain, and for refusing to retire. When she didn’t get the chaplain position, the judgment only intensified. But she didn’t stop. A year later, in 1897, at the age of 64, she got the job. Letters of congratulations poured in from across the country.

After she died in 1908, The Idaho Republic paid tribute to her legacy, calling her “ever ready to proffer the hand of aid and the voice of sympathy to the needy and distressed.” She had lived a life of self-sacrifice, courage, and unstoppable determination in pursuing justice.

More than a century later, in 2022, Idaho unveiled a bronze statue commemorating women’s suffrage. The Spirit of Idaho Women stands tall, a graceful figure with a hand stretched out. “Behind her,” writes McMahon, “stand twelve sets of shoes, those of the generations of women who came before, each decade of suffragists treading the path to enfranchisement. In her hand, she extends a shoe to the women of the future, inviting them to continue in the work that was begun by those with the courage to let people watch them fail.”

Don’t ask, tell

In the 1980s, Leonard Mlodinow was beginning his career as a physicist at Caltech. He was given the freedom to research whatever he liked. At first, this sounded great—complete freedom. But it soon became clear he had a problem: he didn’t know what to work on. He became increasingly anxious. String theory was popular; should he study that? What about that other theory gaining traction? That would be good to research, right?

Desperate to figure it out, he sought out Nobel Prize winner and fellow physicist Richard Feynman and asked him for guidance. After some probing, Feynman finally said to Mlodinow, “Look, selecting a research problem isn’t like climbing a mountain. You don’t do it just because it is there. If you really believed in string theory, you wouldn’t come here asking me. You’d come here telling me.”

If you let others decide what’s “acceptable,” you’ll never get to the good stuff. And that, Elizabeth Gilbert warns, is the real tragedy. “Your life is short and rare and amazing and miraculous, and you want to do really interesting things and make really interesting things while you’re still here.”

So go for it. Do the unheard-of thing, the thing that lights you up.

Tell people what you’re going to do—and have the courage to let them watch you fail.

Pause, tighten, start, relax

Creativity, Life, Philosophy / /

Wind the clock

Developing an experienced fighter pilot can take ten years and cost $50 million. Pilots must make life-or-death decisions with incomplete information and limited time—all while traveling faster than the speed of sound.

Veteran U.S. Air Force fighter pilot Hasard Lee says their most important training focuses on decision-making. In The Art of Clear Thinking, he says, “Though we have talented pilots, the mantra that we bet our lives on is that a good pilot uses superior judgment to avoid situations that require the use of superior skill.”

Tucked into the right-hand corner of the cockpit in each F-16 fighter jet is a relic from the past: an analog clock. While almost every other part of the jet has been upgraded since the 1970s, the wind-up clock remains. But it’s not used to tell time. It’s used to slow it down.

Seasoned instructors will tell the pilot, “Before you make a decision, wind the clock.” Although it doesn’t seem like much, it allows a pilot to pause and focus, preventing them from rushing into action.

“Winding the clock occupied the pilot’s attention for just a few seconds and physically prevented them from touching anything else,” Lee writes. “It forced their brain to spend time assessing the situation before they acted, allowing them to make far better decisions.”

Tighten the window

Louise DeSalvo says there’s an inverse correlation between the amount of time she has and the amount of writing she gets done. Too much time, and she becomes unfocused or needlessly worried over each word. “I wrote more, and published more books, when my kids were small and when I was teaching more classes than I do now,” she writes. “And the hardest writing times for me were always summers and sabbaticals.”

Like the old saying—if you want something done, give it to a busy person—she prefers to write on days she has a lot to do. It tightens her window of time, sharpening her focus.

“Knowing that I must write during my allotted time or I won’t get to write at all urges me to get right to work, draft a few pages. If all I have to do is write, writing becomes too fraught for me.”

Start the clock

Ryan Holiday has a phrase he often uses with his team: “Start the clock.” If a vendor says something will take six weeks, he wants to start the clock immediately. He doesn’t want to add days or weeks by being slow to respond or indecisive. We can’t control how fast others move, but we can control how quickly we get the ball rolling.

“The project will take six months? Start the clock,” he writes. “You’re going to need a reply from someone else? Start the clock (send the email). Getting the two quotes from vendors will take a while? Start the clock (request it). It’s going to take 40 years for your retirement accounts to compound with enough interest to retire? Start the clock (by making the deposits). It’s going to take 10,000 hours to master something? Start the clock (by doing the work and the study).”

Let it be enough

While it’s important to know how to get the right things done, it’s more important to know your limits.

We’ll never feel like we’ve “finished.” We’ll never feel like we’ve done enough. And guess what? That’s a great thing—it’s how it’s supposed to be.

On a trip to Portugal, professor and author Kate Bowler visited the Batalha Monastery. Inside a giant octagonal chapel, an older man said it was perfect—the layers of beautiful, imperfect ornamentation.

“He gestured up,” Kate writes, “and where the ceiling should have been, there was only open sky. Seven kings had overseen the rise of this monument and had buried their dynasty in its walls. Yet none lived to finish it.”

“It was never finished, dear,” the old man smiled. “Isn’t it wonderful? Don’t you see? It’s us! I can’t imagine a more perfect expression of this life. I came all the way to see it. We’re never done, dear. Even when we’re done, we’re never done.”

Kate reflects:

“All of our masterpieces, ridiculous. All of our striving, unnecessary. All of our work, unfinished, unfinishable. We do too much, never enough and are done before we’ve even started. It’s better this way.”

This or that?

Creativity, Life / /

The hit or the serenity?

In Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Years, Anne Lamott writes about a time she was fixated on a married man—someone she adored and who adored her back. She confessed to a friend, a recovering addict and alcoholic, that she was constantly tempted to call him. Every time they spoke, she wanted to shower him with affection, caught up in the rush of how “luscious and powerful” he was. Her friend listened and kindly replied, “Yeah, yeah, I get it, I’ve done it. But I think each step of the way you gotta ask yourself, Do I want the hit or do I want the serenity?”

“It seemed one of the most profound things I’d ever heard,” Anne reflects. It’s a question that has helped her hundreds of times since—whether with food, men, or anything else that threatens to hijack her peace.

Laundry or writing?

When Louise DeSalvo started writing, she was working full-time, raising two toddlers, caring for her elderly parents, and running a household. Still, she aimed to write two hours a day when she could. If she couldn’t, she would at least write something. “I tried to write every day, no matter what,” she said. “I wrote when my children were napping, or later, when they attended school. Many parents squander that precious time on household tasks. Instead, I did laundry, shopped, and cooked when my children were around.”

Choosing to do one thing means choosing not to do something else. If you want time to write, you have to give something up. “All too often, aspiring writers choose to give up writing. My mentor said it’s important to say, ‘I’m choosing to do the laundry instead of writing,’ instead of saying, ‘I don’t have time to write.’”

Try saying it throughout the day: I’m choosing to read the news instead of a book. I’m choosing to reply to emails instead of starting the project. I’m choosing to look at beautiful houses on Zillow instead of cleaning my own. And on and on.

Special or happy?

A highly respected financier in her mid-fifties—once a star on Wall Street—began to worry her skills were slipping. She wasn’t as sharp as she used to be, and younger colleagues were questioning her judgment. Panicked, she reached out to social scientist Arthur Brooks.

As they spoke, Brooks learned she was deeply unhappy. She “lived to work” and was constantly exhausted. Her marriage was falling apart, and her relationships with her adult children were strained. Now, she feared she was losing her edge in the one thing she had left: her career.

To Brooks, the answer seemed obvious. Why hadn’t she taken time to revive her marriage, reconnect with her kids, or cut back on work? “I knew that her grueling work effort had made her successful in the first place,” he said, “but when you figure out something has secondary consequences that are making you miserable, you find a way to fix it, right? You might love bread, but if you become gluten intolerant, you stop eating it because it makes you sick.” Why hadn’t she been working on the obvious problems?

She thought about it for a moment, then looked at him and said flatly, “Maybe I would prefer to be special rather than happy.”

Brooks was stunned. Her answer lingered in his mind. It reminded him of something. But what? Then it hit him.

Her reasoning—that she preferred being special over being happy—was not unlike the response given by a recovering drug addict when asked why he had continued to get high even though he was fully aware it was making him miserable. “I cared more about being high than being happy,” the addict had said.

The financier, Brooks realized, was an addict, too. A work addict. She cared more about being special than happy. She was choosing her ego over herself, the hit over serenity.

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