the ultimate secret for successful creative output

 Brave and attention or fear and fuss?

If something is made while possessing fear and the action of fuss, it will not work. Fear is hidden amongst things like perfectionism, rushed, anger, excuses, procrastination. Fuss is forgetting what's important, what resources and time but fuss also comes from a place of self doubt, lack of confidence, worry, the fear of being judged, the fear of being wrong or the fear of not reaching your own expectations.

Bravery is knowing it might not work and doing it anyway, knowing others won't understand but still making it for it's purpose. Bravery is knowing all the things fear brings and removing those distractions. Attention is not the same as fussing, it is hyper aware and patient, it waits with confidence or attempts without hesitation, it's a relationship between what it is and what it could be.

Next time take an acclaimed piece of work and ask "did the team make this with fear and fuss or bravery and attention?" You really can feel it's soul beat.

Reach outcasts through compassion, not anger.

 "If a child is rejected by the village, they will burn it down to feel it's warmth".

Why people won’t listen to you

 “I don’t care how much you know, until you show me how much you care”.

You can’t pretend time of attention

 How much time and attention have you put into a subject?

This is how to hire. 

Think About ways to unlock the opportunity for someone to demonstrate their time and attention to a subject. It used to be uni but the system became about how fast you could get it done to get a pass rather than deep thinking and immersion in a subject.

Timing creativity

—- S. With "estimated hours" what is the number that's most highest but is also most acceptable?

I don't like giving numbers just because that's not how creativity and output works. But I also acknowledge I'm a part of a bean counter system so I encourage for just putting a number which is acceptable to the people involved but I don't know what that number is. 

---- L. yeah I know, but it helps to track how many man hours is spent on the edits.

just put in max 8 hours a day, doesn't really matter what days you place it on.

----S. Yeah I know but they're different things. Time only tracks what, it doesn't explain why and doesn't account for "compounding" output which is "the extra time I put into episode 1 establishes processes to save time on subsequent episodes". The final problem is if I say 5 full days because on paper it is, well that's also not true. 5 full days spread equally over 3 weeks has a much better output then 5 days in a row. So it's why I struggle with the system. It's why the end date is what matters to me and the project itself will fall into line of those restrictions.

So it's not a good system. I think the best system is others or you should tell me what you hope it took? How long would you like it to be? If 5 full days is too long, let's shorten it, if we can get away with more let's make it more. But it's not a measure of helping because we fit the creativity to the time we have available not the other way around.

Does that make sense?

What time is acceptable for us to all get a good result? 5 full days? Can we get away with 10 full days?

This is what real happiness looks like

 When you find your purpose, you become fulfilled.

Whatch this scientist

. https://youtu.be/ao2Jfm35XeE

Why you are a good manager who's not a good manager

Managers are really just negotiators. I'm a teacher rather than a negotiator.

A negotiator is fast at getting the point across and making people feel like they understand with very little information

A teacher can unpack the reasons why and why not, the cause and effect and help education people to be more knowledgeable than they were before, but it's much slowly and a needs repetition.

The world values the first option especially with a diverse range of different people you may never deal with again. But the second is much more valuable in the long term with core groups of people.

Much criticism is unfair.

Quantifiable sins are judged harsher than non quantifiable misdemeanours, but the latter is much more devastating, destructive and deadly - these are very rarely resolved as no one can really grasp what actually is the problem.

With a non quantifiable sin, all you can see is a vague feeling of symptoms but can't diagnose the disease.

It’s too long

 Stop measuring in time and measure in meaning

https://youtu.be/K95MIzDth_A

Science is religion to some

 Science without opposing views isn’t science, its religion.

That’s a clumsy written quote but there’s something there. When defenders of “science” get emotional, erratic and parrot info, isn’t that just another religious zealot believing in something so strongly that any threat to that position being wrong results in fights.

A lot of things are said

 

"The loudest voice isn't the most correct"

Me

Think big

 An exercise I often do when asked to speak to boards of directors: Imagine it’s three years from now and your market cap has trebled. What likely happened to get you there? I find that framing gives board members, who spend a lot of their time being skeptical, worrying about downside, license to think big. And typically, some of the ideas this exercise generates are acquisitions that seem crazy at the time but may prove to be crazy genius.

Scott Galloway

Am I your enemy?

If someone is attaching you, ask a simple question... "Am I your enemy?"

I feel a lot of people communicate like someone is the enemy. This question at least makes the reasonable person think.

How do they respond?

They'll either ignore you - which means it's time to leave - there is nothing here worth staying for

They'll say yes - which means it's time to leave, but thank them for their honesty, you both know where you stand.

They will give a politician answer - which is not really answering. Ask again and again until they give a clear answer like a journalist. Three reason why we may not leave is closure helps us comes to peace.

But what if they say no (I am not your enemy)? What happens next?

Ask to see how they would approach the situation differently if you were an enemy? And/or how they would approach the situation differently if you were a good friend?

The reasonable person would realise their hostility, the unreasonable person would continue to bulldoze through - which means they lied or at least didn't know themselves enough to tell the truth, you are their enemy in that moment and it's time to leave.

"Holier-than-thou"

https://youtu.be/eZn6xOPbVRQ

The Fact Fuzzy Scale

 

What temperature means something is hot?

I think we can’t reach unadulterated fact because as you drill down, there’s neuances. Maybe fact isn’t right or wrong? But it has a scale where we can all agree on some things.

What temperature number is hot?

The sun is hot. It may not be hot during winter at the end of the day.

So the rules of engagement matter, the angle you’re coming from, so if you don’t agree or establish the parameters then that’s right, it can never be a fact in an agreed upon sense. People change the parameters to make their fictions fact or change the points of an argument to fit their agenda “people provide facts to justify their feelings”.

So what is hot? It should be straight forward if we agree on the parameters. In this case

Hot… when is food hot and when is it not?

This is that fact scale I’m talking about. Freezing point is not hot, that’s a fact and we all agree. Boiling point? That’s hot and that’s a fact, we can all agree. What about 20 degrees? Probably not, most people call that warm. What about body temp? What about 45 degrees? See here is where it gets fuzzy, the fact fuzzy zone because little things skew the results. If I’ve had something cold, body temp (About 37 degrees) seems hot. After having tea or coffee, 45 seems just warm. So we can all agree above 70 degrees is hot and below body temperature is not.

But hang on, isn’t the problem the word? What is hot? There’s no agreed number, it’s a feeling to describe a reality. We don’t seem to have fights about if it’s hot or not so it serves it’s “word purpose”. If there is a number scientist’s agreed is the starting point of hot we the public don’t know, heck we may not even know the temperature of things by number, why would you? So it’s not deliberate ignorance you’ve just never needed to know that you’re hot water system is somewhere between 55 and 70 and I’m taking Celsius, which you also might not know.

Fact is hard. 

The sky is blue. Fact

Except when it’s not, what about night? Cloudy day? Dawn dusk?

Ok it’s naturally blue somewhere? Blue isn’t blue in other languages, Russians split their blues into separate colours like we would for red and green, very different.

Maybe the problem is language itself and our ability to take when we mean from inside our head and put it out there.

Because we’re human and we’re all different, we see and feel the world differently and that shifts with the anchors before that movement and after that moment.

And most people are just people, they’re not going to “get educated” and “do your own research” and “if you weren’t so closed minded, you would see the truth”.

Don’t let Fact be the new religion. “But fact is fact” is it? 

Everyone’s life story in a sentence

 This happens, therefore this happens, but this happens therefore this happens.

Your workplace times you

Realised why I don’t like tracking time - it only tells you what, it doesn’t tell you why. And even after a week or two, you don’t remember why unless you extensively document everything which takes ages and stops you thinking about the job and moves you to analysing and justifying the job.

Slowly then suddenly. Most tasks will been finished like that.

What’s the path to world class?

“Bravery, patience, knowledge, respect - that’s how anything amazing exists.”

Me

When someone says it better than you

 Language is funny. Sometimes you feel what you mean before you can say what you mean. This is why we practice, this is why we need others with patients, this is why we start off sounding stupid or crazy before we find a string of words put into an order for our thoughts to be understood by others.

This is what inspired that thought: Deep down this whole digital marketing numbers thing has always been fishy, I feel like I’ve always been on an island by myself while others tell me I’m crazy. I believe the numbers are lies and if they’re not, they’re reframed to twist the truth. The only phrase I had to sum up my feelings was an old quote “statistics are used like a drunk man uses a lamppost - for support, not illumination.”

But this man has found a way, such a complicated subject matter and slams every point.

https://www.profgalloway.com/carcinogens/

There’s something off about how you’re treated at your workplace

https://seths.blog/2021/10/tasks-or-initiatives/

Stop working hard

 Work effectively

https://youtu.be/ZQ9aP8Bzx2M

Start with what’s wrong

 Let’s figure out what it is we actually disagree about?

If you’re Not fucking up then you’re fucking up.

In the creative world when you make calls based on fears, worries, anxieties, “not fucking up” you’re guaranteed to suck.

Made me go wow

 I’ve been thinking…

https://youtu.be/V7yTb-k1ju4

Life is hard because…

Do your demons take up a big chunk of your energy? Directly or indirectly?

Is it you who changes the world?

 When your identity is Revolution, you’ll never find peace.

Facts are not enough

 In modern times, it’s not enough to be right, it also has to “seem right”  and you have to help people “feel right”.

The ending to the best stories!

 But I got brave and here we are!

Me

Got something you want to do?

 

Desire vs Commitment

Most desire, few commit.

How much does a mistake cost?

 By Seth 

Errors are preventable. 

But preventing errors requires an investment. Before committing to an error-free production environment, it’s worth calculating the cost.

A typo on this blog is relatively inexpensive. (Thanks to loyal reader Seth Barnes for graciously emailing me when one slips through). 

On the other hand, a mistake in calculating the route of a high-speed rail line might cost a billion dollars… And we probably don’t want any errors on the pacemaker assembly line.

If you’ve decided that errors are too expensive for your project, then build a system that doesn’t depend on heroics to avoid errors. Sure, that costs more than just trying harder, but if trying harder was going to reduce errors, it would have worked already. 

The pilot who painstakingly works through the pre-flight checklist might not be a swashbuckling Maverick type, but they are much less likely to be the victim of a careless error. The reason that planes don’t crash is because there are countless layers of redundancy and systems to be sure that they don’t.

Spend the time and spend the money and the errors can be avoided. Or accept that errors are part of wayfinding, and realize that your problem is caused by a systemic situation, not a lack of effort.

Past friends

 I’m finding some people I still care a lot about even a decade later, and yet they seem to have moved on to the point all sentiments don’t mean anything… are they just busy in that moment? Then forget with good  intentions, then shame for not replying so they don’t at all? Or is occam's razor in play?

I miss my old friends but I guess that’s just how it goes.

Thinking back, I’m really glad you were in my life for a season, you were one of those friends which brought me joy and meaning during times where I was still young and finding my identity in this crazy world! you’re a part of my nostalgia and I miss you greatly.

Sometimes it’s nice to hear how you matter to people do I wanted to share that on your birthday

Tread you’re own path!

occam's razor example

You want better things?

 Genuine innovation is not something that can be endlessly harvested on demand.

Everyone thinks I don’t work fast enough

“Set an effortless pace: slow is smooth, smooth is fast.” - Greg McKeown

How to prevent burnout

“Do not do more today than you can completely recover from by tomorrow.”

How can you tell if someone really knows what they’re talking about?

 Ask them what they “don’t know” about the subject. If they are as enthusiastic as they were telling you what they do know, you’ve got someone who can see enough to know what they can’t see yet.

You want something better than authenticity

Authentic is the wrong word and sending us down the wrong path.

What we want from others and our entertainers are; giving full attention to the moment. Nothing else matters. The person or entertainer may not feel like doing it before hand but deciding to show up and put on a show is much better than authentically showing their true feelings any day.

Change changes everything in unexpected ways

 When you ask someone to change, be careful. Usually you’re asking them to be more or do more. If they did succeed in changing to what you wanted, what then? More change? What happens when that succeeds? You and that person are now drifting away because in part you’re asking them to change so you don’t have to, you’re asking them to do more so you don’t have to do more. The divide gets larger. If this person really is doing all this changing and you’re not, aren’t you weirdly less now? Aren’t you falling behind? Aren’t you the stagnant one not capable of change? All the reasons you gave to that person in the first place to justify change, you are now yourself. 

Ok so maybe you think they were far behind your standards and now they’re about level. They’ll still have resentment or even contempt because they have movement, they are “better” or “more” than they were Yesterday, where are you at? The same. You can’t win unless it’s a journey together, you can’t get what you want unless you share the burden, different things perhaps but equal energy, equal struggle, equal hope and equal ownership. It doesn’t have to be equal in real terms it just has to be an attempt.

Stop asking people to change unless you ask in the same breath, “does this outcome interest you? what can i do for you? What can i trade with you? What can i do to help you? 

What’s your future life look like?

 The secret of your future is hidden in your daily routine.

How do you know if someone knows what they’re talking about?

 The ultimate test if someone knows what they’re talking about.

How much time have the spent on that specific subject or at least thinking about it and what do they know they don’t know.

Mastery is about knowing what you don’t know.

Dick you

 If something takes longer than 30 seconds to start a process, you probably won’t start the process.

Fuck you Apple for putting frictions in place for things you don’t want us to do ie stuff that doesn’t benefit you.