The Endeavour » Creativity

Endless preparation

John — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 15:42:33 +0000

In his book Made by Hand, Mark Frauenfelder quotes Peter Gray on what’s wrong with contemporary education. Gray says that school is about

always preparing for some future time when you will know enough to actually do something, instead of doing things now. And that’s such a tedious approach for anybody to take to life — always preparing.

Related post:

“Just in case” versus “just in time”

Losing patience with wastes of time

John — Fri, 28 May 2010 04:10:44 +0000

Peter Bergman wrote an HBR blog post last week How (any Why) to Stop Multitasking. Bergman tried to stop multitasking for a week as an experiment. His post lists six benefits from his experiment including this observation:

I lost all patience for things I felt were not a good use of my time.

Multitasking can mask the pain of doing something that doesn’t need to be done.

Thanks to Neal Richter for pointing out this article.

Being a dreamer is hard work

John — Mon, 24 May 2010 15:26:25 +0000

From Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse:

I confess that I am a dreamer. Someone once called me just a dreamer. That offended me, the just part; being a real dreamer is hard work. It really gets hard when you start believing your dreams.

Many hands make more work

John — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 10:14:05 +0000

Frederick Brooks is best known as the author of The Mythical Man-Month, a book on software project management first written in 1975 and still popular 35 years later. Brooks has a new collection of essays entitled The Design of Design that was just released this month. In his chapter on collaboration in design, Brooks notes

“Many hands make light work” — Often
But many hands make more work — Always

Collaboration may reduce the amount of work per person, but it will certainly increase the total amount of work to be done. In addition, collaboration is likely to reduce the quality of a design. Earlier in the same chapter Brooks says

Most great works have been made by one mind. The exceptions have been made by two minds.

He gives a long list of designers to support this claim: Homer, Bach, Shakespeare, Gilbert and Sullivan, Michelangelo, Watt, Edison, the Wright Brothers …

The great works Brooks alludes to may have been implemented by teams, but they were not designed by teams.

You can hear Brooks explain why he believes design work doesn’t partition well in his talk “Collaboration and Telecollaboration in Design.” There’s a link to the audio in my blog post on Brooks and conceptual integrity.

A book so good I had to put it down

John — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 13:32:10 +0000

“I couldn’t put it down.” “A real page-turner.” That’s how you might describe a good novel to take on vacation. But for more serious reading, a good book is one you have to put down. Thoreau put it this way:

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence to living on its hint.

Some books take a long time to read, not because they are dull, but because they are exciting. You have to put them down frequently to think about what you’ve read before reading more. It may not be the content of the book per se but the thoughts the book sparks that make you have to put it down.

What are some books you had to put down frequently because they stirred your thinking?

Do something dull

John — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 02:27:45 +0000

Here’s a short video from Tom Peters on starting an exciting business in a dull industry.

Tom Peter’s video reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Richard Feynman:

… nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough …

Multitasking

John — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 15:56:32 +0000

Countless articles tell us that multitasking makes us less efficient — we’re not as good at multitasking as we suppose. But here is a new criticism: multitasking makes us shallow.

If you don’t want to sink, you learn to surf; you have to. You learn how to go fast, but smooth, through a huge amount of stuff — at work, at home, in the store, in the street. Multitasking means learning how to double back and reshuffle at the least hint of resistance, it means missing most of what goes on around you but learning not to regret it because nothing is that much more valuable than anything else, it means learning how to coast through meetings on zero information … You are compensated for the loss of buffers and boundaries built into the old real world of separated times and spaces, by an overall muffling of experience in general …

From Mediated by Thomas de Zengotita.

Doing good work with bad tools

John — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 14:50:42 +0000

Charlie Parker was one of the greatest jazz musicians. But unlike most artists, he had a cavalier attitude toward his equipment. He would pawn his saxophone for drug money and show up for a concert without an instrument. He assumed that he could always borrow a saxophone at the last minute. He even used a plastic saxophone for one concert. Parker could take a cheap piece of plastic and make it sound good.

Good equipment helps. I’ve played cheap saxophones and professional quality saxophones, and I much prefer the latter. But a good sax didn’t make me sound like Charlie Parker, nor did a cheap sax make Charlie Parker sound like me. A poor craftsman blames his tools.

For centuries people have searched for the secret of Stradivarius violins. What did Antonio Stradivari do to create his legendary instruments? Was there something special about the wood he used? Something special about the varnish? A new theory says that there was nothing unusual about the materials he used and that he simply did excellent work.

It’s hard to think of a worse programming environment than DOS batch files. But I worked with someone who was able to do amazing things with batch files.

Hugh MacLeod calls it “hiding behind pillars” when you think you must have the best tools before you can work. He summarizes hiding behind pillars this way:

The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props. Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece on the back of a deli menu would not surprise me. Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece with a silver Cartier fountain pen on an antique writing table in an airy SoHo loft would SERIOUSLY surprise me.

Less isn’t more. Just enough is more.

John — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 12:24:43 +0000

From Ten Things I Have Learned by Milton Glaser:

Being a child of modernism I have heard this mantra all my life. Less is more. One morning upon awakening I realised that it was total nonsense … If you look at a Persian rug, you cannot say that less is more because you realise that every part of that rug, every change of colour, every shift in form is absolutely essential for its aesthetic success. You cannot prove to me that a solid blue rug is in any way superior. … However, I have an alternative to the proposition that I believe is more appropriate. ‘Just enough is more.’

Creativity and faith

John — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 03:34:35 +0000

From Eugene Peterson:

Creativity is difficult. When you are being creative, you’re living by faith. You don’t know what’s next because the created, by definition, is what’s never been before. So you’re living at the edge of something in which you’re not very confident. You might fail: in fact, you almost certainly will fail a good part of the time. All the creative persons I know throw away most of the stuff they do.

Thomas Edison’s fire

John — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 04:36:29 +0000

When Thomas Edison was sixty-seven years old, his factory was destroyed in a fire. This was his response the next morning:

There’s value in disaster. All our mistakes are burned up. Thank God, we can start anew.

Too much time on their hands?

John — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 14:20:21 +0000

Dan Wineman shared a profound insight on Twitter:

You say “looks like somebody has too much time on their hands” but all I hear is “I’m sad because I don’t know what creativity feels like.”

In place of “creativity” Wineman might have as easily said “persistence.” I found Wineman’s quote in a post by Dan Meyer responding to criticism of his research projects.

I’ve said that someone has too much time on their hands, but not since I read Meyer’s post. I see now that the phrase is often a sour grapes response to creativity. I don’t want to do that anymore.

When we see that someone has spent a thousand hours on a project that we think was a frivolous, it’s easy to say “what a waste of time.” We think how much good could have been done with that same amount of effort. But what was the realistic alternative? If that same person had spent a thousand hours in front of their television instead, no one would ever know and no one would ever criticize them. Instead, they created something.

Tree house photo from Succeed Blog. Full size photo.

A sort of opposite of Parkinson’s Law

John — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:57:52 +0000

Parkinson’s Law says that work expands to the time allowed. I’ve seen that play out over and over. However, I’ve also seen a sort of opposite of Parkinson’s Law. Sometimes work gets done faster when you have more time for it.

Sometimes when I’ve planned a large block of uninterrupted, say going into the office when hardly anyone else is there, I get through my to do list in the first hour of the day. Knowing that I have plenty of time, I think more clearly and end up not needing the extra time. When that happens, I sometimes think “If I’d known this would just take 30 minutes to solve, I would have done it sooner.” But it’s not that simple. Just because it took 30 minutes on a good day doesn’t mean that it could have been done during just any 30-minute time slot earlier.

In his book Symmetry and the Monster, Mark Ronan shares a story along these lines. Ronan tells how John Conway worked on a famous mathematical problem. Conway and his wife agreed that he would carve out Saturdays from noon to midnight and Wednesdays from 6 PM to midnight for working on this challenge. He started one Saturday and cracked the problem that evening. Perhaps Conway would have been able to solve his problem by working on it an hour at a time here and there. But it seems reasonable that having a large block of time, and knowing that other large blocks were scheduled, helped Conway think more clearly.

My guess is that Parkinson’s law applies best to projects involving several people and to one-person projects that are not well defined. But for well-defined projects, especially projects requiring creative problem solving, having more time might lead to not needing so much time.

Poverty versus squalor

John — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 11:18:07 +0000

In his interview on EconTalk, Paul Graham made a distinction between poverty and squalor. He says that most poor people live like rich people, but with cheap imitations. A rich person might have something made of gold and a poor person might have the same thing except made of plastic. But the creative poor, such as the proverbial starving artist, live differently. They live in poverty but not in squalor. They achieve a pleasant lifestyle by not trying to imitate the rich.

For example, the wealthy have large beautiful houses. The poor have small and usually not-so-beautiful houses. The rich have new expensive cars and the poor have old cheap cars. But the starving artist might not have a house or a car. He or she might live in a converted warehouse with a few nice furnishings and ride a bicycle.

The point of his discussion of poverty was to make an analogy for small software companies. It makes no sense for a tiny start-up to try to be a scaled-down version of Microsoft. They need to have an entirely different strategy. They can be poor without living in squalor.

I don’t know what I think of Graham’s assertion that the poor live cheap imitations of the lifestyles of the rich. There’s probably some truth to it, though I’m not sure how much. And I’m not sure how much truth there is in the romantic image of the bohemian starving artist. But I agree that it makes no sense for a small company to be a miniature version of a huge corporation.

Subtle variations on familiar themes

John — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:12:37 +0000

I was skimming through George Leonard’s little book Mastery the other night and ran across this quote:

… the essence of boredom is to be found in the obsessive search for novelty. Satisfaction lies in … the discovery of endless riches and subtle variations on familiar themes.

This is a theme I’ve written about several times before. For example, see the post Six quotes on digging deep. I often think about one of the quotes in that post. Richard Feynman said that

… nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough …

In the post God is in the details I talk about how that applies to statistics. Rote application of statistics is mind-numbingly dull, but statistics can be quite interesting when you dig down to the foundations.

When I was in new faculty orientation years ago I remember a chemistry professor exhorting us to volunteer to teach freshman courses. Most people want to teach the more advanced courses, but he said that some of his best inspiration came from teaching the most foundational courses.

Focusing on basics is hard work and few people want to do it. George Leonard describes this as America’s “anti-mastery” culture. Seth Godin uses the image of a starving woodpecker in his book The Dip.

A woodpecker can tap twenty times on a thousand trees and get nowhere, but stay busy. Or he can tap twenty thousand times on one tree and get dinner.

Sometimes I feel like the woodpecker tapping on a thousand trees, staying busy but getting nowhere. But then I also think about a line from W. C. Fields:

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.

Weekend miscellany

John — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 13:42:20 +0000

Here are a few eclectic links for the weekend.

How globes are made. You might enjoy watching this with your children.

Jason Fried presentation on the 37 Signals approach to small business. My favorite line: “Tomorrow doesn’t happen unless you get today right.” You do not want to watch this one with your children.

A lot of people don’t know what a web browser is.

Scientific American podcast interview with Atul Gawande, author of Complications and Better. Among other things, Gawande explains how process improvements, not new science, have caused a dramatic decrease in battlefield fatalities.

Software projects and power laws. The probability distributions for delays have thick tails.

A quick comparison of US and Canadian law.

Two math blog carnivals came out this week: Carnival of Mathematics and
Math Teachers at Play. Anyone know when or where the next Carnival of Mathematics will be?

How Michelangelo worked

John — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 01:25:18 +0000

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The following quote from Irving Stone describes how Michelangelo worked on his Pietà.

He carved in a fury from first light to dark, then threw himself across his bed, without supper and fully clothed, like a dead man. He awoke around midnight, refreshed, his mind seething with sculptural ideas, craving to get at the marble.

Create offline, analyze online

John — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 13:50:56 +0000

Sitting at a computer changes the way you think. You need to know when to walk away from the computer and when to come back.

I think mind mapping software is a bad idea. Mind maps are supposed to capture free associations. But the very act of sitting down at a computer puts you in an analytical frame of mind. In other words, mind mapping is a right-brain activity, but sitting at a computer encourages left-brain thinking. Mind mapping software might be a good way to digitize a map after you’ve created it on paper, but I don’t think it’s a good way to create a map.

When I need to sort out projects and priorities, I do it on paper. After that I may type up the results. I like to capture ideas on paper or on my voice recorder but then store them online.

When I do math, I scribble on paper, then type up my results in LaTeX. Scribbling helps me generate ideas; LaTeX helps me find errors. I’ve found that fairly short cycles of scribbling and typing work best for me, a few cycles a day.

In the past, we did a lot of things on paper because we had no choice. Today we do a lot of things on computers today just because we can. It’s going to take a while to sift through the new options and decide which ones are worthwhile and which are not.

Recommended books

Daniel Pink’s book A Whole New Mind has a good discussion of left-brain versus right-brain thinking. As he points out, the specialization between the left and right hemispheres of the brain is more complicated than once thought. However, the terms “left-brain” and “right-brain” are still useful metaphors even if they’re not precise neuroscience.

Also, to read more on how computers influence our thinking, see Andy Hunt’s book Pragmatic Thinking and Learning.

Simplicity in old age

John — Wed, 20 May 2009 20:11:13 +0000

Quote from Julian Barnes:

There is something infinitely touching when an artist, in old age, takes on simplicity. The artist is saying: display and bravura are tricks for the young, and yes, showing off is part of ambition; but now that we are old, let us have the confidence to speak simply.

HT: Signal vs. Noise

Don’t standardize education, personalize it

John — Sun, 17 May 2009 22:03:11 +0000

I just finished reading Ken Robinson’s book The Element. The title comes from the idiom of someone being in his or her “element.” The book is filled with stories of people who have discovered and followed their passions.

Here are a couple quotes from the book regarding standardized education.

The fact is that given the challenges we face, education doesn’t need to be reformed — it needs to be transformed. The key to this transformation is not to standardize education but to personalize it, to build achievement on discovering the individual talents of each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions.

Learning happens in the minds and souls of individuals — not in the databases of multiple-choice tests. I doubt there are many children who leap out of bed in the morning wondering what they can do to raise the reading score for their state. Learning is a personal process …

Here is a talk Ken Robinson gave at TED in 2006 that led to his writing The Element. The video is entertaining as well as thought-provoking.

The Medici Effect

John — Sun, 17 May 2009 00:09:04 +0000

I was reading a chapter from The Element this evening that reminded me of The Medici Effect.

ACM Ubiquity had an interview with Frans Johansson, author of The Medici Effect, around the time the book came out. The title comes from the idea that it takes more than just genius to create a Leonardo da Vinci. It also takes the community of a Renaissance Florence, made possible by patrons like the Medici family.

I thought it was a great premise for a book and bought the book shortly after reading the interview. Unfortunately, the book didn’t live up to my expectations. I recommend the interview, but I’m not as enthusiastic in my recommendation of the book.

High productivity, low productivity

John — Wed, 06 May 2009 19:45:45 +0000

Greg Wilson pointed out an article on productivity by Jason Cohen that makes a lot of sense. Here’s a story that Jason tells to set up his point.

You get in your car at home and head out towards your mother’s house 60 miles away. … You hit traffic during the first half of the trip, so after 30 miles you’ve averaged only 30 miles per hour. Now the traffic opens up and you can go as fast as you want. The question is: How fast do you have to go during the second half of the trip such that you’ve averaged 60 mph over the entire trip?

The key is that you cannot go fast enough to make up for lost time. Your average will be less than 60 mph no matter how fast you go for the second half of the trip. His conclusion: “It’s amazing how periods of low velocity wash away gains of high velocity.” The title of his post is about how to double your productivity, but about one third of the article is devoted to explaining why even larger gains are not possible, i.e. his observation that unproductive periods limit potential productivity gains. As he explains, “the thing to do is eliminate the low-velocity stuff.”

The best way to be more productive may be to concentrate on “what” more than “how.” Concentrate on what to do, and more importantly, what not to do. There may be more to gain by adding to the “not to do” list than by being better at what’s on the “to do” list.

Success in 8 words

John — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 13:32:17 +0000

Richard St. John gave a three-minute presentation at TED on the secrets of success, summarizing his interviews of 500 successful people. His outline:

Passion
Work
Good
Focus
Push
Serve
Ideas
Persist

Redbelt problem solving
Don’t try to be God, try to be Shakespeare
An albatross and be a good thing

Living within chosen limits

John — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 14:42:29 +0000

The latest EconTalk podcast is an interview with Brink Lindsey, author of The Age of Abundance. Lindsey said that in the 1980’s and 90’s we learned how to live with the freedoms gained in the 1960’s and 70’s. Many negative social indicators soared in the 60’s and 70’s: crime, divorce, drug use, abortion, etc. But during the 80’s and 90’s many of these indicators reversed direction, and Lindsey believes it is because many people have learned to replace legal and societal limits with chosen limits.

I don’t know whether I agree with Lindsey’s sweeping sociological analysis, but I do see some truth to it. I like his phrase “living within chosen limits.” I see a movement toward living within chosen limits on technology. The most obvious example may be Twitter. About 8,000,000 people at this point see some value in limiting their correspondence to 140 character messages. Some other ways I hear of people placing voluntary limits on their technology:

Unplugging from the Internet to work
Using terminal-style text editors to minimize distraction
Using browser-based applications with limited functionality to avoid installing software
Setting a five-sentence limit on email messages
Paper organizers, e.g. the Hipster PDA

I imagine the people who adopt these limitations will moderate their approach over time. Instead of unplugging from the Internet, they’ll make better use of it and become more disciplined. They may decide that some modern word processor features are worthwhile but still chose something more streamlined than Microsoft Word.

It may take a generation or more to learn how to take advantage of the new possibilities. We’re in a period of excess now, analogous to the culture of the 1960’s. It will be interesting to see what the analogy of the 80’s and 90’s will be.

Related posts from Kevin Kelly:

Neo-Amish Drop Outs
Amish Hackers

Related posts here:

Strategy for dealing with information overload
Selective use of technology
Getting to the bottom of things

Searching for John Francis

John — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 11:13:12 +0000

There was an odd story in NA Digest a couple days ago, John Francis of QR found. When I saw that someone was found, I assumed he had lost as in lost at sea, like Jim Gray. But that wasn’t the case.

John Francis developed the QR algorithm, an algorithm for finding the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of a matrix. Some experts regard the QR algorithm as one of the 10 most important numerical algorithms of the 20th century. He developed the algorithm in 1959 but then left the numerical analysis community three years later. The NA Digest article doesn’t say whether Francis became a recluse or simply moved on to a job outside mathematics. No one in numerical analysis knew anything about him until a couple folks tracked him down recently. He is doing well. He remembers his earlier work clearly but was unaware of the impact it had had.

Related post: Simple legacy (how people often underestimate the importance of their most useful work)

When discoveries stay discovered

John — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 01:35:17 +0000

In what sense did Christopher Columbus discover America? Obviously he wasn’t the first human to step foot on the New World. Columbus wasn’t even the first European. Norwegian explorer Leif Erikson seems to have arrived 500 years before Columbus. But as Stephen Mills famously stated,

There have been other people before Columbus, but when Columbus discovered the New World, it stayed discovered.

The same principle could be used to resolve debates about priorities in mathematical discoveries.There is some debate over whether John Tukey or Carl Gauss discovered the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). But there is no doubt that after Tukey discovered it, the FFT stayed discovered. The algorithm is now used in digital signal processing applications everywhere.

Gauss and Tukey were both brilliant mathematicians. Tukey, however, also had an aptitude for creating memorable names. For example, you may have heard “software,” a term he coined.

Redbelt problem solving

John — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 18:46:58 +0000

In the movie Redbelt, Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Mike Terry, a Jiu Jitsu instructor who will fight but will not compete. He will fight in a real fight if necessary, but he won’t fight in a ring because competitions have arbitrary rules. He is a skilled fighter because he is creative, and competitions take away that creativity. At one point in the movie, someone Terry if he teaches people to win. He says no, he teaches people to prevail. In his mind, you can’t “win” a fight. A fight is a problem to be solved.

Mike Terry’s distinction between fights and contests makes me think of the distinction between practical and academic problem solving. Practical problem solving does not have arbitrary constraints whereas academic problems often do: you can use this technique but not that one, you can use this reference but not that one, etc. These academic limitations serve a purpose in their context, but sometimes we can imagine these constraints are still on us after we leave the classroom.

Sometimes we’ll struggle mightily to solve a problem analytically that could be easily be solved numerically (or vice versa). Or we’ll imagine that a problem must be solved using a particular programming language even though it could be done more easily using a different language. It feels like “cheating” to go for the easier solution. But if you’re not in an academic setting, you can’t “cheat.” (Of course I’m not talking about violating ethical standards to solve a problem, only dismissing artificial restrictions. Where there is no law, there is no sin.)

There may be good reasons for pursuing the more difficult solution. For example, entertainment value. Sometimes we want to see whether we can do something the hard way. There’s nothing wrong with that, as long as we acknowledge that’s what we’re doing. But sometimes we do things the hard way for no good reason other than not having examined our self-imposed limitations. Maybe we’re trying to win rather than solve the problem.

I’m not saying entertainment value is the only reason to go down a more difficult road. Maybe you suspect there will be additional benefits if the more difficult approach succeeds. Again, that’s fine if this is a conscious decision and not a lack of creativity.

Miscellaneous Endeavour news

John — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 01:26:59 +0000

I’ve added a plug-in that I’ve found handy on other sites. Now when you post a comment on a post, you have the option of being notified by email of future comments on that post.

Updated list of books mentioned here with links to the posts where each was mentioned

Updated contact info

Tool for turning off web page clutter

John — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 01:52:59 +0000

“Readability” is a bookmarklet from Arc90 for turning off all the clutter that surrounds the main text on a web page. I just installed it and played with it a little while. Looks promising.

Don’t try to be God, try to be Shakespeare

John — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 19:11:49 +0000

Here’s a quote from Twyla Tharp’s book The Creative Habit.

Honey, it’s all been done before. Nothing’s really original. Not Homer or Shakespeare and certainly not you. Get over yourself.

Trying to be completely original is paralyzing, and not even possible. Only God creates ex nihilo. Everyone else starts with something. Don’t try to be God. Try to be Homer or Shakespeare.

Related post: Three quotes on originality