Herein, a napkin sketch on producing creative work, ideas on finding the spark(s) that consistently lead us to assemble new things, and the hand-wavy stuff in-between.
Production is connecting the dots
Extensively, manically, collect ideas (i.e., dots). Collect ideas, put ‘em in order. This is the tricky-but-fun part!
Boom, that’s something new! Like this essay. Collect, connect, write, post, again and again.
Austin Kleon, It’s not inside you trying to get out, it’s outside you trying to get in:
I never feel like I have a book in me. I always feel like there’s a book around me. It’s like I’m a planet and there’s all this space junk orbiting me, and all the junk starts smashing together and forming book chapters. My job is to grab that stuff around me and shape it into something.
Production is making social connections
So you’ve got a routine of journals and notes and active reading and such. You’re turning those into blog posts and thinking with the network, right?
In particular, using networked writing (hypertext, social media) as an attractor for ideas and likeminded folks. Repeatedly engaging with those folks until a new, boring status quo/local maximum is reached. Iterate and seek ever higher peaks.
Tom Critchlow, Small b blogging:
Small b blogging is learning to write and think with the network. Small b blogging is writing content designed for small deliberate audiences and showing it to them. Small b blogging is deliberately chasing interesting ideas over pageviews and scale. An attempt at genuine connection vs the gloss and polish and mass market of most “content marketing”.
Henrik Karlsson, A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox:
The reason I’m spelling out this dynamic is twofold. First, you can get out of this mess if you want to. You do that by writing online (or publishing cool pieces of software, or videos, or whatever makes you tickle—as long as you work in public). Second, if you want to get out of the mess the key lies exactly in understanding that you are not the only person who has no one to talk to about the things you get obsessed by.
Production is a second-order outcome from consuming/reading
Consider two sorts of people: “Really Into Notes” or simply “An Enjoyer of Reading”. Either way, making things and ideas comes from connecting an idea from what you read, enthusiasm for making, and the discipline to turn that enthusiasm into action. How and what you turn that action into is left as an exercise or implementation detail up to the reader.
Andreas Fragner, Writing Summaries Is More Important Than Reading More Books, if you’re a third kind, “Extremely Okay With Marking Up Your Objects”:
One thing I’ve learned over time is to read fewer books but to take the time to write summaries for the good ones. The ROI of spending 2h writing a synopsis is much higher than spending those 2h powering through the next book on your list. Reading is not about page count or speed [1]. What matters is how it changes your thinking and what you take away from it. Optimize for comprehension, not volume."
Production is doing the thing you can’t not do, a vocation
Maybe it’s writing, but it’s cool if it’s not. Putting all these ideas together yields something new in the world, literal creativity. That calling, no matter the ambition or profitability or fruitfulness, is different for all of us. But we can all work the skills that support that creation.
Jared Henderson, AI won’t replace you, unless you let it:
Similarly, there are men and women for whom being an artist if their vocation. It is what they most suited to do. I believe that determining and pursuing your vocation – even if your vocation is not your job – is crucial for a good human life, because it puts work in its proper place. Work ceases to be toil when you are pursuing your vocation.
Tools for thought are nothing without producing ideas and publishing them.
