Photograph: Barcelona January 2023
This week, inspiration for a topic to write about has been slow. When I started this newsletter, I thought that finding topics to write about would become easier with time. So far, that’s not the case.
I had several ideas throughout the week, all of which I mentally discarded as not worthy of sharing. As the week went by and I find myself with a persistently blank page, I started writing without judgment on whether the words are worth sharing. The first paragraph of this post is how it started, and then I thought I could briefly share some of the ideas I ruled out. Why not?
Flower power
First, I thought I could take some photos at home and write about that. I didn’t go out to take photos this week so that was the alternative. The old flowers in the living room seemed to be a reasonable subject. Is there anything that’s been painted more?
Amazing, right?
The bent fork
When that idea got discarded, I thought: okay so I can’t think of anything to share from my own life, maybe I should write fiction. I can write a short story about feeling out of place and then finding purpose unexpectedly.
I put the plan to action: I started writing a few paragraphs about a fork that was “born” bent and somehow made it past quality control. It was a hard life for the fork in the drawer with other fully functional forks. A fork unable to fork. Devastating. I decided it was too ridiculous before finding a trigger event that would turn the fork’s life around. But who knows, maybe someone would have deeply identified with the fork…
In search of creativity
As I was looking for more inspiration, I saw a documentary about Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd. I thought that I might find advice on creativity. Syd co-founded the band in 1965 and was the frontman and main songwriter in the early days of Pink Floyd. 3 years later, he was ousted from the group for being unreliable on stage. He would wander around aimlessly on stage or play the same note over and over again. He continued writing music as a solo artist for a few years before retiring from public life.
Syd is considered a creative genius and a powerful driving force behind Pink Floyd. As I watched the documentary, I was looking for things to do that can increase my own creativity (other than taking large amounts of LSD that is).
I thought about the replicability of massive success and remembered a warning from the book The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel.
Studying a specific person can be dangerous because we tend to study extreme examples— the billionaires, the CEOs, or the massive failures that dominate the news— and extreme examples are often the least applicable to other situations, given their complexity. The more extreme the outcome, the less likely you can apply its lessons to your own life, because the more likely the outcome was influenced by extreme ends of luck or risk.
Instead, the author suggests finding replicable patterns rather than case studies of individuals. And the search continues…
Look around you
Flipping through the book The Creative Act: A Way of Being by legendary music producer Rick Rubin, I found the following advice:
When looking for a solution to a creative problem, pay close attention to what’s happening around you.
Suddenly, it’s clearer. It’s not a creativity problem at all. It feels strange, as it should, to share insignificant content when a massacre is happening in Palestine. When a nightmare and humanitarian crisis is being streamed to the world in real time.
It’s like standing in line at Chanel when there are 70,000 people protesting across the street.
Barcelona October 2023
