5127
EPISODE 071: 5127
Creativity is less the stuff of brilliant ideas and more the reality that those ideas take work to realize, to take a project from (in the words of Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull) suck to un-suck. Unless you're James Dyson, in which case you're trying to do the opposite. It took Dyson 5,127 iterations to get his cyclone vacuum cleaner to work and there's a lesson in there for all of us. Let's talk about it.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
In 1978 an Englishman by the name of James Dyson was so tired of the way his vacuum cleaner lost its suction and start sounding like a deranged cat the moment it had pulled its first dust from the carpet, that he ditched the conventional vacuum altogether and invented his own. Built around the idea of a cyclone, Dyson's vacuum cleaner was new. It was original. And he wasn't remotely the first person to come up with the idea. There are patents for the ideas on which Dyson's vacuum was built that stretch back as far as 1928. In terms of originality of thought, though Dyson's thinking was all his own, others had arrived at a similar ideas 50 years before he did. And yet they hadn't done anything with it, and then there was Dyson, fighting with his vacuum, alongside millions of other home-owners in the era of wall-to-wall shag carpeting, and he took the idea and ran with it. And he kept running for 15 years, building an astonishing 5,127 prototypes before he made it work.
So what's Sir James Dyson got to do with you and a life of everyday creativity? I'm David duChemin, and this is episode 071 of A Beautiful Anarchy, let's talk about it.
Music / Intro
In the creative world the ideas seem to get all the glory. They are the celebrated stuff of muses, and inspiration, and waking from dreams to capture an epiphany on paper before it fades into forgetfulness. But ideas are legion, and they come, and go. Often the same idea seems to come to more than one person at once and around the same time. Darwin was not the only one working on a theory of evolution, nor was Einstein the first or only one working on a theory of relativity. Our ideas, whether in science or in the arts, come as a response to the needs of the age in which we live, the problems we face, and the so-called Zeitgeist—and very often our creativity is the mechanism for that response. But as much as we value ideas alone, it's not usually the first person who thinks a thought, but the one who makes it work that gets the glory. The glory is not the point. This is not a podcast about notoriety. But it is an ongoing exploration of what it means to live a creative life, and turning ideas into real things is a big part of that.
If you listened to the last episode you'll recall I left you out in Rumi's field, beyond ideas of right and wrong, asking, "does it work?" That's the question Dyson was asking, and continued to ask himself 5127 times, each time making small changes, little iterations that would lead his dual-cyclone vacuum closer and closer to the thing it would eventually become. It wasn't so much one great big idea, but one spark that ignited over five thousand smaller ideas, five thousand answers to the question, "does it work?"—all of them driven as much by failure as by any small signs of success.
There was no "right way" to build a vacuum any more than there is a "right" way to make a painting, write a book, or create a podcast. There's no specifically wrong way, either, but there are ways that work, and ways that do not. What works for me, will not be what works for you, and what works now will not, necessarily, be what works later, for either of us. And often it is the way we, or even our culture, has deemed the "wrong" way to do a thing, that later becomes the way that works best.
This is why our assumptions are so dangerous. Assumptions build on lessons previously learned, and on the strength of having answered the question once before; not just "does it work?" but "how does it work?" and having found an answer to that question once we often assume the matter is settled. We put our curiosity to bed, and over time the question, "does it work?" or even, "what works?" becomes the statement, "this is what works," which is only one small step away from "we've always done it that way," forgetting that we're all moving forward, that you never step into the same river twice, and so how you step into that river needs to be re-considered every time you do. What works changes.
The painting you make now will not answer the same questions that you were asking last year, it will not reflect the same taste or seek to scratch the exact same itch, and neither will the next one. If everything did remain the same, if it were only a matter of figuring out what works for you, once and for all, then that might become the right way of doing things, and everything else, for you, would be the wrong way. But when everything is always in motion, when the painter keeps changing as much as the context in which she paints, then there can be no assumptions, only the question: "Right now, in this moment, does my approach work, and since there is no right or wrong, and we're already asking the question, what other possibilities might work better?"
The moment we settle on answers too quickly, and in Dyson's case that would be any point before prototype 5,127, we unwittingly call a moratorium on all the other possibilities. I suppose that's another version of the question I'm hoping you'll consider asking as a catalyst to your own process: not "is this right or wrong?" but "what are the possibilities?" Maybe it's not an alternative to asking whether or not your approach works, so much as it is the next question. If the answer is "yes, it does work", then is it possible there's another way that is stronger still? Is it possible you've overlooked something? If the answer is "no, it doesn't work" or some version of that, like, "yes, it works, but I don't love it," or "it doesn't feel like me" - which is really just a more complicated way of saying, "no, it doesn't work." - then either way the next obvious question becomes, "what are the possibilities that might work?"
To be constantly asking these kinds of open questions, suspicious of our assumptions about what is right or wrong, and the way that growing into a craft can make us not only confident but sometimes cocky, is to embrace what Shunryu Suzuki calls "beginner's mind." In his book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, he writes, "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few" and so he warns us away from the kind of mindset that, over time, becomes complacent and begins thinking not of possibilities but of "right" and "wrong" approaches. "The mind of the beginner," he says, "is empty, free of the habits of the expert, ready to accept, to doubt, and open to all the possibilities."
You might be an expert painter or writer or designer, but when you sit in front of a new work, even with all that accumulated expertise, you are a novice at making that piece. Unless, of course, it's so similar to the last one you made that you're just repeating yourself and avoiding the risk and uncertainty of moving into new territory. It's probably helpful to remember that there is a difference between writing 10 different books and just writing one book ten times. If the former is what you're after, rather than the latter, beginner's mind will serve you better.
That does not mean that there is no room for mastery. Mastery of tools and materials allows us to find answers to questions like, "does it work?" or "what are the possibilities?" by accessing much greater resources. Growing mastery makes those possibilities more numerous, allows us to see new combinations, and makes us more fluent with those possibilities, so it's probably important we don't mistake Suzuki's warning about the dangers of an expertise mindset as a dismissal of the value of mastery. Growing mastery together with a beginner's mind, allows us to both ask the questions and find more meaningful answers to them. Mastery creates more possibilities, but a beginner's mind is what allows us to see them.
It has been said that creativity is not a talent but a work ethic. It's not about having ideas so much as working those ideas into reality as we seek not what is right, or correct, but what works, and it's hard to argue that point. In fact, that's the point I set out to make in this episode. It's not the idea alone that is important, so much as the perseverance it takes to bring that idea into the real world, and to explore the possibilities well past the obvious. It's one thing to file a patent, it's entirely another to make the idea work. To see it through its many needed iterations to completion. Thinking of a great idea for a song is a good first step, but making the song work takes many more.
But is creativity only a work ethic? I think it's bigger than that. I think it's about character, of which perseverance is only one aspect. But other aspects of creative character include curiosity, and the kind of humility we need to hold our expertise and previous assumptions gently, and being willing to find them insufficient for the new thing we're doing. And it takes courage, too, because at some point we get to iteration 5128 and we're no longer moving the needle and we've just got to release the thing into the world and see what happens, and when you care enough about something that you'd even get to this point, there's a real risk that in the bigger world we find out it doesn't work the way we thought, and it's back to the drawing board, and you need courage for that.
You're not alone if the thought of that seems daunting, and I wonder if this is why it's so tempting to fall into the trap of thinking of creative work in terms of what is "right" or "wrong." There's an easy but perverse kind of freedom in that kind of thinking; we get absolved of the responsibility to keep at it. After all, if you do something the "right" way and it doesn't work, who's to blame you? Doing it the way you "should," even when it's your own voices that are defining that, frees you from having to make more speculative choices. But chasing possibilities means it falls to you and me to choose the one that works. It means prototypes and crappy first drafts and the kind of honesty that would prompt Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull to say "early on all our movies suck. That's a blunt assessment, I know, but...I chose that phrasing because saying it in a softer way fails to convey how bad the first versions of our films really are. Pixar films are not good at first, and our job is to make them go from suck to non-suck."
There is so much real freedom in looking at the creative process this way, of starting ugly and embracing the journey of going from suck to non-suck, though if you think about it, James Dyson was trying to do the opposite.
Asking ourselves what is the right way to do our new work, or trying to avoid the wrong way, is presumptuous at best. It's an act of judgement made with incomplete information and the weight of obligation, and often shame when we get it wrong. It is the stuff of failures. But asking, "what works?" and "what possibilities exist here?" these are answered in experimentation and testing and many iterations. Is it right? Is it wrong? These have yes or no answers that don't lead us anywhere interesting, least of all to the places we find when we embrace the mindset most needed at the beginning of anything, which is the beginner's mind.
Ideas are everywhere. Even some really great ideas. But don't let them seduce you, and don't get discouraged when the ideas don't immediately work. Most ideas come into the world rough around the edges. What is rare is that rough idea falling into the waiting hands of someone patient and perseverant enough to polish it not just once, but five thousand times; not judging it, not making assumptions about what it's supposed to be, nor put off when it doesn't work on the first try.
I'll leave you for now with one last idea. When I was a kid I bought a rock tumbler at a garage sale. The idea was that you'd put rocks you wanted to polish into this motorized tumbler, add a bunch of grit, and then turn it on. For days it would tumble around, the rocks bashing into each other and the grit, knocking off progressively smaller and smaller rough edges until days later you'd open the tumbler and polished stones would emerge. There was no one big single moment in which those stones went from a state of not-polished to smooth-as-glass, but rather 5000 little acts of micro-polishing. If you just put things in for an hour and then looked, you'd see no change. Turn it back on, take a look in another hour, still nothing. It was the accumulation of days of bashing around, with the grit and the friction, that polished the rocks.
Real-world creativity is like that. It's not about brilliant ideas easily achieved but rather it's about rougher ideas made brilliant with an open mind and a willingness to do the work, to find what works, to give it time, and to let it tumble.
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Thank you so much for joining me. What a privilege it is to make this for you and to be part of your creative life. If this podcast makes a difference for you, the best way you can say thank you is to share it with others. And if this podcast is new to you, you'll find it takes a short break every 4 weeks when I send out a new issue of On The Make, which is like a written episode of this podcast, sent to your inbox every fourth Sunday morning. If you're not already getting it but you'd like to, just go to StartUglyBook.com, scroll to the bottom, and let me know where to send it. Once a month I'll draw the name of one listener to whom I'll send a signed copy of A Beautiful Anarchy, the book that started all this, as a thanks for listening. Our times together each week are a little too one sided to be a real conversation, but if you ever want to change that, you can get me anytime at talkback@aBeautifulAnarchy.com. Thank you again for being here. We'll talk soon. In the mean time, go make something beautiful.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0