My weekly newsletter is a mashup of a small number of other newsletters I read and enjoy. Billy Oppenheimer’s Six at Six showed me how to make each email thematic, and Ryan Holiday’s Daily Stoic emails (which I’ve read nearly every day since 2016) taught me how to connect Stoicism to different topics. Two other newsletters that have given me ideas are Tim Ferris’s 5-Bullet Friday (where I got the idea to include a quotes section), and Austin Kleon’s newsletter of 10 things worth sharing (where I got the idea for a monthly Top 10 list).
This week’s blog is about innovating by imitating and going deeper.
Extend the line
Bob Dylan is regarded as one of the greatest songwriters of all time. At 81 years old, with a career spanning more than 6 decades, he’s still writing, recording, and performing. He’s become an object of study: where does his creativity come from?
“These songs don’t come out of thin air,” he said. They are the result of years spent listening to traditional music, and singing the same songs over and over. He elaborated:
“If you sang ‘John Henry’ as many times as me—‘John Henry was a steel-driving man / Died with a hammer in his hand / John Henry said a man ain’t nothin’ but a man / Before I let that steam drill drive me down / I’ll die with that hammer in my hand.’ If you had sung that song as many times as I did, you’d have written, ‘How many roads must a man walk down?’ too. All these songs are connected. I just opened up a different door in a different kind of way. . . . I thought I was just extending the line.”
(Similar to The Adjacent Possible)
Build on Top of Something
A few weeks ago, I wrote about how Hal Mumme revolutionized American football with his Air Raid offense. Of course, this offense was not conceived in a flash of inspiration: it was the product of more than a decade’s worth of imitating the best passing offenses in the country. Early in his career, instead of starting from scratch, he realized he could build on top of existing concepts. He mastered the formations and plays that other coaches used, making adjustments and experimenting as he went. He subtracted the extraneous, shrinking phonebook-sized playbooks down to just a few plays. He chose depth over variety. He meshed plays together. He added his own theories and ideas, extending the line to compose the Air Raid offense and change the way football is played. “If we’re free from the burden of trying to be completely original,” Austin Kleon said, “we can stop trying to make something out of nothing, and we can embrace influence instead of running away from it.”
Find Wisdom Everywhere
One of my favorite things about Stoicism is that it has no immutable laws. The Stoics encouraged new ideas to be built on top of existing ones. They gladly welcomed any worthy idea, regardless of the source. “I’ll never be ashamed,” Seneca said, “to quote a bad writer with a good saying.” In fact, Seneca used quotes from Epicurus, the founder of a rival school. Marcus Aurelius would quote various philosophers throughout Meditations, rephrasing and reworking lines to push the ideas deeper into his psyche.
Sing the best songs, practice the best plays, contemplate the best ideas. Over and over and over. Then make them your own.