Copernicus by Stanislaw Szukalski

“The moment he [Galileo] was set at liberty, he looked up to the sky and down to the ground, and, stamping with his foot, in a contemplative mood, said, Eppur si muove, that is, still it moves, meaning the Earth.” ~ Giuseppe Baretti retelling 1757

To create is human, to consume is only tiny part of it.

Somewhere along the way we started being referred to as consumers.

Although this has gone on for awhile it is an aspect of a civilizational cancer and normalization of thoughts, opinions, and perspectives.

You were born to create wonderful things.

You were also born to criticize the status quo.

The cheapest form of criticism of the status quo is to whine or complain. Especially when it comes from a victim mentality.

The most expensive form of criticism is that of the critic who shows a better way.

How to get better

Parable of the Pottery Class: “There was once a ceramics teacher called Brian. One month, Brian decided to split his class into two groups. Group A had to make a pot every day for 30 days (so 30 pots in total) and would be judged on the quantity. Group B had to work on a single pot for the whole 30 days and would be judged on the quality of the pot, so it had to be the most perfect pot.

At the end of the month, Brian judged the quality of the pots. Without exception, every one of the top 10 pots came from Group A, those that made one pot per day. None came from the group that focused on perfecting their single pot.” Within each of us lives an inner critic criticizing something or another. Things are amiss in the world.

Things as not as they should be.

The great act of the creator, be them a startup founder, sculpture, painter, engineer, or otherwise is to create. Show the world a better way.

If it’s truly meaningful you reconfigure yourself towards that goal. Creation is a creative act and all creative acts are acts of critique of the status quo.

Is it better than what was before? Show us.

Create!

“Our doubts are traitors,oft and make us lose the good we might win, by fearing to attempt.” ~ William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

If it is worth creating you need to built it and “say look! I made things better.” Then you need to get properly circulated. If this is startup they call this your distribution pipeline.

If you’re an artist they call this your “reach”. How many people are buying your product? How many people are viewing, buying, or consuming your content?

The Highest Form of disagreement

Paul Graham talks about the hierarchy of disagreement.

The top of the pyramid is refuting the central point. What better way to refute the central point that shows it doesn’t work and get some kickback from that? Whether that be money, recognition, or a strong signal that becomes the new thing.

“What I cannot create, I cannot understand” ~Feynman

To show you truly understand something you must be able to built it.

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe” ~ Carl Sagan

Granted, there are limited to how close you can get to the root of all creation.

Your Ideas and Creations Need Protection

“At each of the meetings, I was struck that there seemed to be two kinds of reviewers: some who would look for flaws in the papers, and then pounce to kill them; and others who started from a place of seeking and promoting good ideas. When the “idea protectors” saw flaws, they pointed them out gently, in the spirit of improving the paper—not eviscerating it. Interestingly, the “paper killers” were not aware that they were serving some other agenda (which was often, in my estimation, to show their colleagues how high their standards were). Both groups thought they were protecting the proceedings, but only one group understood that by looking for something new and surprising, they were offering the most valuable kind of protection. Negative feedback may be fun, but it is far less brave than endorsing something unproven and providing room for it to grow.” ― Ed Catmull, Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration

If premature optimization is the root of all evil in programming as Donald Knuth said, then I believe premature criticism is the root of all evil in creative endeavors.

Pack your organization with idea protectors. Allow people to protect and grow their ugly baby until it is ready for prime time. The best ideas emerge when it is safe to work through the problems and fully articulate the vision and implementation. These things are inevitable.

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche

Instead of starting with the tyranny of how, as Martine Rothblatt founder of SiriusXM and United Therapeutics, start with why.Why is this important? Those that can come up with a deep and intrinsic why can bear any how.

All creative endeavors require risk. Someone who adds a little chaos and risk into the mix is putting progress and growth before control and predictability. If control and predictability matter most to you, you will eventually get to a point where it is clear and predictable that you will fail. Control and predictability eventually and inevitably lead to stagnation and death. Tried and true can be good, but the opposite of “this time is different" comes to be “it is always the same." This is not true. Sometimes things are genuinely different and we need to account for that reality.

A dosage of quality control in medicine and other fields can be useful, but too large a dosage of quality control can be deadly. By removing risk and focusing on control the baby is strangled by a tightened grip before it even has the chance to mature. The cocoon of the baby eventually becomes a butterfly and that butterfly needs to be tested, can it really fly?

After this you’ve created the highest form if criticism possible, a new idea fully flushed out. It is defiant of the status quo and says “I found a better way, I made one."

Things like this are reasons we need vivid, powerful, and bold visions of the future for people to strive for. For without hope, without creativity and innovation, and fully articulate visions we are lost to the future. Only the people who invent and see the future clearly achieve great things.

“To inquire and to create;—these are the grand centres around which all human pursuits revolve, or at least to these objects do they all more or less directly refer.

Freedom exalts power; and, as is always the collateral effect of increasing strength, tends to induce a spirit of liberality. Coercion stifles power, and engenders all selfish desires, and all the mean artifices of weakness. Coercion may prevent many transgressions; but it robs even actions which are legal of a portion of their beauty. Freedom may lead to many transgressions, but it lends even to vices a less ignoble form.

If we glance at the most important revolutions in history, we are at no loss to perceive that the greatest number of these originated in the periodical revolutions of the human mind.

The incapacity for freedom can only arise from a want of moral and intellectual power; to elevate this power is the only way to counteract this want; but to do this presupposes the exercise of that power, and this exercise presupposes the freedom which awakens spontaneous activity. Only it is clear we cannot call it giving freedom, when fetters are unloosed which are not felt as such by him who wears them. But of no man on earth—however neglected by nature, and however degraded by circumstances—is this true of all the bonds which oppress and enthral him. Let us undo them one by one, as the feeling of freedom awakens in men’s hearts, and we shall hasten progress at every step. There may still be great difficulties in being able to recognize the symptoms of this awakening. But these do not lie in the theory so much as in its execution, which, it is evident, never admits of special rules, but in this case, as in every other, is the work of genius alone.” ~ Wilhelm von Humboldt

The Eternal Stands Alone

“Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness.” ~ Yousuf Karsh

Classics are classic for a reason.

Give me 5 books from the greatest thinkers in history over a million from the babbling masses of men.

A work of genius may take a lifetime to be validated or beyond, most toil in obscurity first.

Intuition as Guide

Pictured above: Srinivasa Ramanujan, Mathematical Genius and Mystic.

“The years when I pursued the inner images, were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything, was then.” ~ Carl Jung, 1957, In conversation with Aniela Jaffe about the Red Book “The years when I pursued the inner images, were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything, was then.” ~ Carl Jung, 1957, In conversation with Aniela Jaffe about the Red Book Try to separate the signal from the noise.

Use your intuition, one of the most profound moments in life come from the supra-rational.

The supra-rational is a transcendent type of understand going beyond the rational.

“An equation means nothing to me unless it expresses a thought of God.” ~ Srinivasa Ramanujan, Mathematical Genius and Mystic

Trust the process

Antoine de Saint-Exupery — “A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.” See the new world you want to build and build a cathedral.

You must commit to the process.

I cannot emphasize enough how choosing the right thing to work on is less important than realizing your greatest creations with dwarf your others.

Grit matters in part, and it probably matters as much in startups given the data.

Sometimes just showing up over and over again in the arena of life is the final decider.

Art and Investing by Ian Cassel, strangely similar pursuits

The summary of this lecture is that these art collectors did not collect art for money but because they intrinsically loved what they did. The couple could have been incredibly wealthy for their ability to sniff out talented up and coming artists but they donated everything. Intrinsic motivation may make you wealthy, but a deep why will make more happen and it is the key to a larger door.

That door is the the key to deep meaning.

I tell this story because, although my finance articles and entrepeneural articles seem like it’s about money.

Everything for me is a spiritual practice.

All things are nothing to me. The process, the Tao, or whatever you like is what this is about.

The process is a test of spiritual practice.

Eventually A Chorus May Join

“United with his fellow-men by the strongest of all ties, the tie of a common doom, the free man finds that a new vision is with him always, shedding over every daily task the light of love. The life of Man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instil faith in hours of despair. Let us not weigh in grudging scales their merits and demerits, but let us think only of their need–of the sorrows, the difficulties, perhaps the blindnesses, that make the misery of their lives; let us remember that they are fellow-sufferers in the same darkness, actors in the same tragedy as ourselves. And so, when their day is over, when their good and their evil have become eternal by the immortality of the past, be it ours to feel that, where they suffered, where they failed, no deed of ours was the cause; but wherever a spark of the divine fire kindled in their hearts, we were ready with encouragement, with sympathy, with brave words in which high courage glowed.”

“Brief and powerless is Man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned to-day to lose his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power.”

~ Bertrand Russell

Show those willing that you’ve found a new way.

Be generous with your work.

Be patient.

Cheap Criticism will Continue

I criticize by creating, not by finding fault.” ~ Michelangelo

“The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise.” ~ Henry Thoreau

Any fool can condemn, criticize, and complain. It takes someone of great integrity and ingenuity to show a better way. Not just paint a picture, I mean go into the arena of life and fight for what they want to change.

These are the people that count. The cheap, talentless, and useless critic is less than noise.

They’re a pathetic.

These sorts of critics get to sound smart, but optimists get to win in the long run.

The world is built by optimists and people who fight and create.

Complaining is easy.

Going it alone is hard.

The Score Takes Care of Itself

“You are only entitled to the action, never to its fruits. Do not let the fruits of action be your motive, but do not attach yourself to nonaction.” ~ Krishna; Chapter 2, verse 47. Bhagavad Gita

If you follow the right process, find the right team to execute, or choose the right subject area, the score will take care of itself.

This is the title of a book by Bill Walsh.

A rare combination needed is both extreme action on what you can control and extreme detachment of whether the specific desired outcome is achieved. You’ve got to think like a scientist in some ways, and an artist in others. These two worlds used to be very intertwined but we separated them for a variety of reasons, mostly bad reasons that have squelched polymaths and promoted specialization. Arguably past the point, specialization was beneficial. It has become isolating.

If the authority says something wrong and you can create something better. Do it. Creators create, valuable critics are always creators.

Additional Resources

Let’s talk about the less cool part here, the actual execution.

Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters by Richard P Rumelt

Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration ~ Ed Catmull, Amy Wallace

Constable, G. (2014). Talking to humans.

Osterwalder, A., & Pigneur, Y. (2010). Business model generation: A handbook for visionaries, game changers, and challengers. John Wiley & Sons.

Osterwalder, A., Pigneur, Y., Bernarda, G., & Smith, A. (2014). Value proposition design: How to create products and services customers want. John Wiley & Sons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_Art_(book)

Seth Godin writes a lot about this and I’ll pick a few:

1. The Practice
2. The Dip