SIGMA

This is one of the greatest displays of the creative process I've seen. It perfectly demonstrates something known as the "Creativity Faucet." When you go to the studio, John Mayer was asked, what do you do to generate ideas? “Well, I don’t always do it,” he admitted, “because it requires a stupid bravery all the time.” He strums a couple chords without singing. A nice melody begins to form—“you can sit here all day [doing this] and go, ‘Okay, maybe that’s something.'” “But if you don’t go,” and then he improvises vocals, “Sunlights beating on the corner of the walls / and I’m a Mr. know-it-all / heaven calls / get yourself right / get yourself right,” he stops playing, raises his finger to his mouth, and explains, “if you’re not ouija boarding immediately, you’re wasting time.” “You just stare at the corner of the wall,” he says, before he improvises some more, “Stare at the corner of the wall / try to get it going on / but I can’t sometimes / you just keep going 'til you get something / maybe I’m a little bit shy / maybe someday I’ll tell you why,” he stops singing, “you gotta keep forcing it, forcing it, forcing it.” “It doesn’t matter [what comes out of your mouth]...You gotta get fearless, fearless, fearless, fearless…It’s hard to do.” Takeaway 1: In the clip, we see John Mayer's ability to generate vocals steadily increase. It's a perfect display of what Julian Shapiro—who (among other things) is incredible at deconstructing how things like creativity work—calls the “Creativity Faucet.” Essentially, creativity works like “a backed-up pipe of water,” Shapiro writes. “The first mile is packed with wastewater. This wastewater must be emptied before the clear water arrives.” At the beginning of a creative session, almost always, bad ideas come out of the faucet first. The John Mayers of the world have the discipline and “a stupid bravery,” as Mayer said, to get through the backed-up pipe of bad ideas, to empty the wastewater, to “just keep going 'til you get something,” as he sang. Takeaway 2: To let out bad ideas, to empty the waste water, Mayer said, you have to “get fearless, fearless, fearless.” In another interview, Mayer was asked how he defines writer’s block. “Writer’s block,” he said, “is when the two people inside of you—the writer and the reader—when the reader doesn’t love the writer. Writer’s block is not a failure to write. It is a failure to catch the feedback loop of enjoying what you’re seeing and wanting to contribute more to it.” A creative block is not a failure to create. It is a failure to accept that you must empty a lot of bad ideas before good ideas can flow. It is a failure to get fearless, fearless, fearless, fearless. - - - “You gotta keep forcing it, forcing it, forcing it...You gotta get fearless, fearless, fearless, fearless.” — John Mayer Follow @bpoppenheimer for more content like this!

In 1964, on a folk tour around England, Bob Dylan considered quitting. He said, “I play these concerts, and I ask myself: ‘Would you come see me tonight?’ and I have to truthfully say: ‘No, I wouldn’t come...'" Burnt out and ready to quit playing music, Dylan asked himself, What kind of concert he would want to see. "Rock," he realized. "I’d rather see me do rock.” A little over a year later, in June 1965, Dylan recorded his first rock song, "Like A Rolling Stone." And a month after that, at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, he famously plugged in an electric guitar and performed "Like A Rolling Stone" for the first time. The folk enthusiasts in the crowd booed and yelled things like, “Get rid of the electric guitar,” and, “We want the old Dylan!” Dylan shrugged off the boos. Because he loved the music he was playing. "Now," Dylan said shortly after Newport, "when I ask myself, would I wanna come hear this tonight? I gotta say, I would. I dig it. You know? I really dig it. I don't think about quitting any more." Takeaway 1: Close to burning out and quitting, Dylan reoriented around his personal musical tastes and preferences. Tim Ferriss talks about orienting your creative output around your personal tastes and preferences—not the audience’s—as a strategy for creative longevity. Because making things you yourself like is “energy additive," he says. And if you get energy from what you are doing, you are more likely to do it over a long period of time. And if you do it over a long period of time, well, that’s better than being a burnt-out musician who once had some enthusiastic folk fans back in the early 1960s. Dylan initially built an audience with his folk music. He knew he was going to get booed and screamed at for taking his music in a new direction. But he also knew that denying one’s own creative tastes and preferences in favor of the audience’s is energy-depleting. And that “doing something that is even slightly energy-depleting,” Ferriss continues, “over time, that is going to compound in a way that is very problematic.” Takeaway 2: The initial reaction to Dylan’s new rock sound was split. Not everyone was booing. It was said that he “electrified one half of the audience, and electrocuted the other half.” It’s one of Rick Rubin's great maxims: “The best art divides the audience.” He says, “If you put out a record, and half the people who hear it absolutely love it, and half the people who hear absolutely hate it, you’ve done well. You're pushing boundaries.” - - - “In the end, you are the only one who has to love it. This work is for you.” — Rick Rubin Follow @bpoppenheimer for more content like this!