Podcasts, videos, and iPad art
(We’ve been recording but those might stay in the vault for a little bit longer. One of them was an in-person episode with Wally which needs a little more signposting and massaging.)
This week’s episode has some things about “The Creative Curve” by Allen Gannett.
Check out the full notes for “Visual Intelligence” by Amy E. Herman
Tool: Prioritization questions
You’re looking at a murder scene. What do you focus on?
Okay it’s a still image from a murder scene in a movie you’re watching for your intro cinematography class. Now what do you focus on?
Okay you’re actually in the room of a murder scene. Except it’s an escape room. Now you’re trying to find some wacky puzzle elements.
In “Visual Intelligence”, Amy E. Herman writes about a three-question prioritization system:
Different prioritization systems will work better for different people. The one I’ve found to be the most helpful to the widest range of people I teach is the three-prong approach outlined in the CIA training manual The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis by Richard J. Heuer. To help organize data and find the most important elements of any situation, you ask three questions: What do I know? What don’t I know? If I could get more information, what do I need to know?
Let’s run those scenarios through these questions.
An actual murder scene
A murder scene in a movie
A murder scene in an escape room
I’ll try using these questions to improve in prioritization and decision making. If you like those “spot the difference” puzzles in magazines and you also like preventing international tragedies (or just want to come up with better ideas at work), you’ll love “Visual Intelligence”.
Check out the full notes for “The Real Doctor Will See You Shortly” by Matt McCarthy
What’s the last hard decision you made?
Could someone have died?
Reading through Matt McCarthy’s “The Real Doctor Will See You Shortly” reminded me just how unimportant a lot of the things I do day to day are.
Choosing a video thumbnail and writing a description doesn’t seem that important.
On one hand, it can be discouraging thinking you aren’t impacting people much compared to a doctor saving lives. On the other hand, it can be freeing knowing that you don’t need to make literal life and death decisions night in and night out.
This book made me think of how there are a lot of similarities between jobs in seemingly completely unrelated fields. McCarthy describes presentations about patients that you have to give.
“Your presentations are weak,” he said. “Pick it up.” A wave of relief. “I’ve sensed that.” “Here’s the key,” he said, glancing at his pager. “You’ve only got a few minutes before we lose interest. Every word has to count.”
That’s something to keep in mind whether you’re presenting about a patient to other doctors, you’re a designer pitching a solution to the rest of your team, or giving a talk at a conference. You have a limited amount of time. Your audience has an even more limited amount of interest. Make it count.
“Your presentation has to be problem-based,” he went on. “Why is the person in the unit and what are the barriers to leaving?”
I’m browsing my highlights from this book in a spreadsheet right now. Without context of knowing what book these came from, some of these could just be from books about copywriting that I read too many of. (And don’t apply enough of.)
It’s classic storytelling. If you’re writing a sales letter, you present the problem someone reading might have. You explain the details of that problem and then explain the benefits.
If you’re presenting a patient’s story, you explain who the person (beginning), you explain the problem that’s landed them in the hospital (middle hook), and hopefully you work toward a solution (ending payoff).
But, of course, not everything in a job connects to other jobs. What’s your fluid? During a medical internship, you eventually find out.
A day earlier, I’d spent hours lancing every one of his abscesses with a small scalpel and even more time scooping up the pus with gauze. In college, even in medical school, the sight and smell of those abscesses would’ve made me nauseated, but not anymore. I had been told that every doctor eventually discovers which bodily fluid he or she finds most disturbing, and this realization helps guide the choice of a subspecialty. I didn’t mind blood, spit, piss, or pus. I did mind diarrhea, which meant I wasn’t destined to become a gastroenterologist.
There were moments while reading when I thought, “Wow it’d be great to have this kind of direct impact on people.” Then there were moments where I thought, “Wow it’s great I get to stay at this desk.”
Throughout the book, McCarthy talks about his humanity. In particular, hoping that he doesn’t lose it. He never wants to be someone that’s able to just move on to the next thing after seeing something insane happen in the hospital.
The page-turning moments in the book often involve descriptions of medical procedures, but captured from his perspective. You get a sense of his confusion and apprehension and then see it turn as he gains his composure and the studying and drilling kicks in.
I’ve worked in software and seen how the most effective people are the best communicators. You need rep after rep to build the soft skills. This book often reminded me that communication is probably the biggest career multiplier in other fields as well.
In product design, the goal is often to take something technically complicated and explain it to a lay audience. You choose just how simple to make it. The same happens in medicine.
Medicine is complicated and it is a skill to simplify things in a way that doesn’t oversimplify, to accurately convey in plainspoken language what is actually happening inside another person’s body. I made a conscious effort to do it, so it was irritating to see others doctors use medical jargon with families. Just talk like a normal person, I wanted to say. Pretend you’re not a doctor. But for some, that simply wasn’t possible.
I bought “The Real Doctor Will See You Shortly” after seeing it in a BookBub email. Last year I decided I’d be deliberate about choosing to read outside of my usual interests. I did that for a few months but strayed back to the usual self-development and business books.
It was a great reminder of why I wanted to read outside of my comfort zone in the first place. It’s made me more appreciative of what doctors do day to day. There’s too much to know, too many difficult decisions to get them right every time, and many different ways to simplify things:
The truth is that complex decisions are often made using simple mnemonics. Linguistic shorthand wasn’t encouraged at Harvard—information needed to be mastered before it could be abbreviated—but Ashley had just simplified a series of baffling medical school lectures on dialysis into a mouthful of vowels.
Go check it out if you’ve ever wanted some sense of what it might be like going through a medical internship. Or if you just enjoy stories where the student slowly becomes the teacher. You’ll probably find a lot of interesting connections between something you do and something a doctor does.
For a few moments you get a glimpse at how it really is just another job. Then a few pages later you’ll read a description of cracked ribs and a heart exposed to open air and realize that it really isn’t just another job at all.
You look up at the graduation caps raining down on you.
You’re done with high school. Remember that feeling? What are you going to do with the summer before you start college?
I started reading John McPhee’s Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process. I bought it a few months ago but didn’t read it. Tim Ferriss mentioned it in his episode with Jason Fried so I started reading it.
I have a list of ideas for different things I want to make. Lots of people do.
McPhee has a list of things he’s actually made.
So how do you pick an idea to work on? McPhee suggests it might be a good idea to consider your younger self.
For nonfiction projects, ideas are everywhere. They just go by in a ceaseless stream. Since you may take a month, or ten months, or several years to turn one idea into a piece of writing, what governs the choice? I once made a list of all the pieces I had written in maybe twenty or thirty years, and then put a check mark beside each one whose subject related to things I had been interested in before I went to college. I checked off more than ninety per cent.
The excerpt is about writing, but that look at your younger self is good to do to compare to your current day to day activities. What did you like doing your senior year in high school? What did you do the summer after graduating? That span provides good hints for (1) what you’re good at (2) what you really enjoy for leisure.
You go through a very serious college application process. Then you get in somewhere. A year later you’re wearing a gown at a very regal graduation ceremony. It’s enough to fool you into thinking that leaving high school means you’re entering the real world as an adult.
Anyway, it’s a good enough illusion that the summer before college takes on a different shape than previous summers. How’d you spend your time?
Before going to college, a shocking amount of my free time probably went toward Counter-Strike. I was blogging regularly and tweaking my site here and there. I had enough of an interest in photography that my older brother bought the first Canon Rebel Digital SLR for me for graduation.
I still make things online (lets call it blogging), I have a job tweaking other sites here and there. I still take photos.
I should probably play more video games.
Anyway, take some time to think about what you did with free time when you had fewer responsibilities. If those interests just sort of drifted away, think about why. You might decide to work those back into your life.
And speaking of process, check out this video where Jason talks through his process as he writes an article. (And check out the rest of Basecamp’s YouTube channel Getting Real if you want to check out the nuts and bolts of web development and how a product team actually works.)
We’ve talked about practice before:
It’s one of our favorite topics but we should probably stop talking about it and start being about it.
(Can’t seem to get the IGTV embed to work but I uploaded this episode to YouTube so that seems to be working.)
What did you do today?
I’m trying to share every day but I need to build the habit again. In June, I was sharing a drawing every day in Karen Abend’s Find Your Flow community. I had some momentum going, built up a routine for making something and then sharing it. I posted something every day for a month, I patted myself on the back, decided I’d take a few days off from sharing since I’d be traveling for a week, and then…
Well. Then not much.
I stopped sharing. I was still making something here and there. I thought I’d try to make an IGTV episode every day and have made one every 3 or 4 days. Not bad, but it’s not daily.
I want to share my answer to this question every day:
What did you learn today?
Why does daily matter?
Well, in the spirit of sharing what I learned, I’ll share some quotes and thoughts about creating things daily.
In “Better Than Before”, Gretchen Rubin writes about building good habits and stopping bad habits. She shares a couple quotes about doing something daily:
Andy Warhol said, “Either once only, or every day. If you do something once it’s exciting, and if you do it every day it’s exciting. But if you do it, say, twice or just almost every day, it’s not good any more.” Gertrude Stein made a related point: “Anything one does every day is important and imposing.”
She says that she decided on blogging daily because it removes the choice. No need to decide if you’ll post today if you know it’s every day. If you choose to post 3 days a week and don’t pick out and stick to a regular schedule, then you have to decide if today is the day or remember that you already posted three times this week or remember that you had planned to skip today because you had something time-bound to write about tomorrow or or or…
(Check out my post with extended thoughts about “Better Than Before”.)
The video I embedded here is an IGTV episode featuring my first Cinema 4D creation where I flawlessly re-created T-Rex’s appearance in Jurassic Park.
If you browse the #c4d tag on Instagram or read about Cinema 4D for, I don’t know, maybe 30 minutes, you’ll run into something made by Beeple (Mike Winkelmann). For the past 11 years, he’s made an image every single day. For the first couple years, they were drawings. The rest have been in C4D.
They’re called everydays and that term specifically seems to be tied to the 3D or motion graphics community. The first time I remember hearing about daily projects it was daily photos and usually called something like project 365. Of course with jokes about how it ends up being more like project 10 days.
Anyway, Beeple’s really done his version of project 365 and expanded it to 3650 and beyond. In an interview with Vice, he answers whether or not he really hasn’t missed a day in all that time:
“I really haven’t. I define a day as by midnight, and there are definitely days where I go really down to the wire. Last night I cut it pretty close. The thing is, you don’t always have an hour, but you always have five minutes, and you can make something creative in five minutes.”
Listening to different Beeple interviews and browsing his archive has been inspiring in a few ways.
Beeple really makes it seem like you could get as good as him if you show up day in and day out. Whether you actually could is sort of beside the point.
If you put in the work for ten years and you aren’t any better, you’ve proven that muses and talent must exist. In 2029, feel free to express your outrage to the gods that didn’t bless you.
Turning some of my attention toward reading about 3D and motion graphics has reminded me of the value of finding inspiration in different places. Daily creation works, even if your body is what you’re sculpting.
Pavel Tsatsouline popularized kettlebells in America. One of the most popular kettlebell programs is his regimen called Simple & Sinister.
Summary: kettlebell swings and kettlebell get-ups, every day
Why daily? Shouldn’t you rest? Here’s what Pavel says in Simple & Sinister:
It may seem strange to recommend training without days off when the goal is storing energy, but moderate daily training will keep the muscles’ fuel tanks topped off, while making tissues resistant to microtrauma and almost soreness-proof. It is the ticket to being always ready.
So, yes, training at 110% every day will eventually break you. But you’re not going at 110%. Over the long haul, moderate and consistent will be healthier than intense and inconsistent.
That can apply in creative work also. You could try and write for 8 hours straight one day a week. Will those last four tired hours be as good as the first four hours? It’d be like trying to work out for 8 hours and expecting it to be the same as working out for an hour for 8 days.
What if something comes up and you can’t write and now you’re going 2 weeks between writing? Not great.
Aim for consistency.
Seth Godin is consistent. He’s written a blog post every day since what seems like the beginning of the internet.
He wrote about his secret in his post “This is post 7000”:
The secret to writing a daily blog is to write every day. And to queue it up and blog it. There is no other secret.
Now I know the secret. Only about 6800 posts away but I’ll get there.
(Actually I like his other secret: write in the editor.)
And here’s what Seth has to say about the daily discipline:
I haven’t missed a day in many, many years–the discipline of sharing something daily is priceless. Sometimes there are typos. I hope that they’re rare and I try to fix them.
I want to build that sharing habit.
Of course, I’ll share more about this as I go along.
(Otherwise, check out my other C4D creation on IGTV about Getting Things Done: For Teens.)