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Today I have a special episode for you. If you missed last month’s AMA/Livestream, I’m delivering it right to your ears. In this AMA, I answered questions about: What’s the best self-publishing platform, and how did I publish 100-Word Writing Habit, non standard-sized, outside of Amazon? Buenos Aires versus Medellín, which is better for mind management? How to pick a creative project when you have too many ideas? What’s surprised me most in the past two years? What task management software do I use for mind management? How to focus on one project when you have multiple curiosities? How to keep from falling down a research rabbit-hole? How many half-formed ideas do I have captured somewhere? There are some parts where I refer to visuals, for the best experience, watch on YouTube. About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email New bonus content on Patreon! I've been adding lots of new content to Patreon. Join the Patreon »       Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/four-sources-of-shiny-object-syndrome/

Shiny object syndrome can be evidence of a problem, or it can be a normal part of the creative process. If you can identify the four sources of shiny object syndrome, you can tell the difference between being lost, or simply exploring. Three first three sources are problems The first three of the four sources of shiny object syndrome hold you back from finishing projects. They are: ambition, perfectionism, and distraction. Ambitious shiny object syndrome is starting projects that far outpace your abilities and resources. Perfectionistic shiny object syndrome is endlessly tweaking a project that could otherwise be called done. Distracted shiny object syndrome is juggling so many projects, you finish none. Before we get to the fourth source, a bit more about these three most dangerous sources. Ambitious shiny object syndrome You probably have a friend with ambitious shiny object syndrome. One day they proclaimed they were writing an epic fantasy novel. A few months later, they had dropped that and had a new plan: a feature film. A few months after that, they were starting a health-tech startup. All the while, you were shaking your head, because your friend clearly didn’t have the experience or resources to take on these projects. They were writing the epic fantasy novel, yet had never written a short story. They were working on the feature film, yet had never made a short film. They were working on the health-tech startup, yet had no experience in technology, the health industry, nor raising funding. Delusional optimism can be an asset. Maybe your friend will get lucky, and one of these projects will click. They’re more likely to get struck by lightning. Instead, you know what’s coming when you ask how the latest project is going. They’ve abandoned that, and are taking on something new. Conveniently, your friend always has a great excuse for why. They find a scapegoat: You can’t get a million dollars for a feature-film without a rich uncle. They claim to have never been serious about it in the first place: Oh, that silly book? I was just dabbling. More likely, they shift the conversation to another subject: Oh my god, did you see the article about the celebrity! If they had made a public prediction about their potential success in the project, you could hold them accountable. Yet they didn’t, so you have to take their word for it. Interestingly, you’ll never hear, That was foolish taking on that – I didn’t know what I was doing! Perfectionistic shiny object syndrome Or maybe you have a friend with perfectionistic shiny object syndrome. They endlessly tweak a project that could otherwise be called done. The “shiny objects” in this case aren’t other projects, but rather details within one project. Your perfectionist friend has one project they’ve been clinging to for years. Their novel has been through eleven revisions. It started as a memoir, but after becoming an urban-fantasy novel, it’s now a thriller. They had a great-looking cover for each of these. But they’ve changed some details about the plot since the latest world-building workshop they traveled to attend, and they want to try a different cover designer. But before they spend money on another cover, they want to decide whether they’re going to publish in places besides Amazon, because that affects the design specs. So they’re taking a cohort-based course so they can ask a successful author what she thinks. There’s nothing you could tell your friend to get them to ship this project. By now, they could be on their third book, having learned lessons from the previous two. Instead, they’ve convinced themself it has to be perfect. Distracted shiny object syndrome Or maybe you have a friend with distracted shiny object syndrome. They’re taking on projects they could conceivably complete, given their skills and resources. They don’t seem to suffer from perfectionism, but you can’t tell, because none of their projects get anywhere near the finish line. Instead, once they make a little progress on one project, they switch to another, then another. Once their screenplay is completed for their short film, they start recording demos for their album. Once they’ve recorded demos for their album, they write their memoir. Once they’ve finished a draft of their memoir, they’re writing a business plan for a non-profit. This “friend” may be you, and it certainly has been me. Shiny object syndrome is difficult to cure, because these sources are often mixed together. You may take on projects that are too ambitious, but also be distracted by the many other projects you’re taking on. The perfectionism that is keeping you from shipping one project, may divert you to one overly-ambitious project, or a mixture of smaller projects. The fourth source is only natural Yet there is a fourth source of shiny object syndrome that doesn’t have to keep you from finishing projects: Natural shiny object syndrome. Natural shiny object syndrome is the diversions and dead-ends that are a natural part of the creative process. When you’re being creative and innovative, by definition, you are going to try some things that don’t work, or need to explore new areas with which you aren’t familiar. [Projects are like halfpipes.] It’s fun and easy to skate into a halfpipe – to start a project. But once you’re trying to skate out of the halfpipe, you’ve run out of momentum. It’s more fun and easy to skate into a new halfpipe – to start a new project, or tweak a new aspect of the existing project. But in the natural course of being creative and innovative, you’ll also start new halfpipes. When Leonardo da Vinci developed his painting style, he skated into many halfpipes. To accurately depict light and shade in his paintings, he systematically studied the way light traveled through the atmosphere, and interacted with objects. This led him into other fields, such as optics, fluid dynamics, and geometry. Leonardo da Vinci’s natural shiny object syndrome In fact, one of Leonardo’s most pre-eminent observations in astronomy greatly informed his painting style. He correctly theorized that the light area on the dark side of the moon was created by light reflecting from the sun, off the earth. By understanding how light worked, he was able to make paintings with an unprecedented sense of realism. The “earthshine” caused by light reflecting from the earth is the same phenomenon that causes a lighter area within the shadow on the underside of the chin of the Mona Lisa. That’s caused by light being reflected off her upper chest. Okay, so Leonardo had the other sources, too Leonardo of course was an infamous procrastinator. In addition to the natural shiny object syndrome he experienced, he also had shiny object syndrome from the rest of the four sources. He had ambitious shiny object syndrome, such as when, over the course of decades, he failed twice to cast in bronze the largest-ever horse statue. He had perfectionistic shiny object syndrome, such as the fact that he never delivered the Mona Lisa to his client. He instead carried it around fifteen years, until he died, and well after it could have easily been called done. He had distracted shiny object syndrome, which caused him to run around Italy, trying to please his clients in art, architecture, and engineering. Don’t fight the fourth source You can do something about most sources of shiny object syndrome. If you have ambitious shiny object syndrome, take on smaller projects. You can use the surround and conquer technique. If you have perfectionistic shiny object syndrome, simply ship your project. Recognize the Finisher’s Paradox. Like Maya Angelou said, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” If you have distracted shiny object syndrome, pick a project, and finish it. Build your shipping skills as you work your way up to larger projects. But even if you clear those sources away, you’ll still have to live with natural shiny object syndrome. To connect ideas from disparate fields, you need to wander into them. To find out what works, you have to try some things that won’t. Image: Main path and byways, by Paul Klee About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »       Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/four-sources-of-shiny-object-syndrome/

Writing a tweet is a microcosm of writing a book. If you think deeply and carefully about every word in a tweet, and what the tweet as a whole communicates, you can extend those skills to all your writing. In this article, I’ll break down how to think about every word in a tweet, nearly tripling its performance. Step 1: The first-impression tweet The tweet we’ll work on came to me like most tweets, a thought that popped into my head. It was this: Ironically, strong opinions are the ones that are easily argued against. I could have just tweeted that. But I’ve made a habit of instead writing down my first-impression tweets in a scratch file, and later working on them before publishing. Here’s what my thought process looks like. As a tweet, this phrase is a little wordy, and weak. It starts somewhat nonsensically with an adverb: “Ironically.” What action is being performed ironically? Step 2: Improving word economy There are also some extra words that could be cut out. Do we have to refer to “strong opinions” again, by using the word “ones”? The word “that” is often not necessary, and it doesn’t seem necessary here. If we cut out all those extra words, we end up with: Strong opinions are easily argued against. Step 3: Adding back in meaning That’s shorter, more elegant, and economic. But now it’s weaker. It’s a simple statement of fact, without presenting what’s remarkable about that fact, or how anyone should feel about it. At least when it said, “ironically,” it pointed out the irony that strong opinions are those that are easily argued against. Also, since I’ve removed the second reference to “strong opinions” by removing the word “ones,” the statement no longer pits “strong opinions” against other types of opinions. Before, I was implying the existence of opinions that weren’t strong, and describing what was different about opinions that were. Our shortened statement is also in the passive voice, which makes it weaker. “Strong opinions are easily argued against,” by whom? Who is doing the arguing? It would be more direct to say: It’s easier to argue against strong opinions. But still, this statement doesn’t pit strong opinions against other types of opinions. Fixing that, we could instead say: Of all opinions, strong ones are easiest to argue against. Finally, I think we at least have an improvement over the original, “Ironically, strong opinions are the ones that are easily argued against.” It’s more direct, and pits strong opinions against opinions at-large. It also has the important quality, in tweet format, of delivering the most surprising – or ironic – thing about the statement at the end. There’s a bit of misdirection in this statement. We’ve addressed all opinions, homed in on the strong ones, which primes you to expect them to be lauded in some way. Instead, the statement points out the irony that what makes an opinion “strong” is that it’s easy to argue against. Step 4: Tweaking for the audience But this tweet is still not ready. The most glaring problem is, nowhere in the tweet is the term, “strong opinions,” and, as a tweet, that’s where its potential lies. “Strong opinions” is a term in the parlance of some sections of Twitter. This term became popular after Marc Andreessen appeared on Tim Ferriss’s podcast, where he advocated for, “strong opinions, weakly held.” By trying to be economical with words in our tweet, we’ve broken apart this term. In our latest iteration, “Of all opinions, strong ones are easiest to argue against,” it’s simply referred to as “strong ones.” Depending upon how prevalent the term “strong opinions” is in the minds of our audience members, we could stick with that more subtle hint. Sometimes that’s more effective. In my experience, on Twitter, you have to bash people over the head with what you’re saying to cut through the noise. So we could instead say: Of all opinions, strong opinions are easiest to argue against. We’ve replaced “strong ones” with “strong opinions.” It’s less economical, but includes the term “strong opinions,” pits them against opinions at-large, and delivers the counterintuitive element at the end, like the punchline of a joke. Step 5: What are we trying to say? This is probably as economically as we can write this, meeting that criteria. But it’s still not ready. Now it’s not clear from this observation how the author wants us to feel about strong opinions. It’s, ironically, not a strong opinion. Is the upshot that you shouldn’t hold strong opinions? Is it that when you hold strong opinions, you have to be comfortable with the fact they are easy to argue against? What makes an opinion “strong,” anyway? Is it the force with with which you express the opinion? If so, the statement, “strong opinions, weakly held” would mean you express the opinion with force, but are quick to change it if presented with contrary evidence. Or maybe it means that you should take decisive action on your opinions, and if that action presents you with contrary evidence, you should change your opinion and act accordingly? Now we’re starting to get to what I, as an author, really think – which is like an excavation to discover, Where did this idea come from in the first place? My personal opinion is that to hold a strong opinion, you have to be faking. There are few things any of us are qualified to have opinions about. Having a strong opinion is a very “hedgehog” way of being, and hedgehogs are scientifically proven to be wrong. Yet if you express your honest opinion – which is to be more like a “fox” than a hedgehog – you’re essentially expressing no opinion at all. Instead, you’re exploring thoughts around a potential opinion. Given the mechanics of media today, few who see what you have to say when expressing your fox-like opinion will interact with it. And because few will interact with it, fewer will see it. So in a way, to be fox-like in media is doing oneself a disservice. Your message doesn’t get seen, and since nobody can disagree with your non-opinion, you learn less. It’s beneficial to masquerade as a hedgehog on social media, but be a fox in your private intellectual life. What’s our angle? It’s at this point in revising a tweet, where I often step back and write plainly the sub-text of what I’m trying to say. One angle is, In your pursuit of learning, you have to pretend to have strong opinions, because strong opinions are the easiest to argue against – which helps you collect information. Another angle is that When you express a strong opinion, be ready to be disagreed with, because strong opinions are by definition the easiest to argue against. So now I have two potential angles: “You should pretend to have an opinion.” “When you express your opinion, be ready for criticism.” Since this is a tweet, the sub-text of the tweet is very important. Because of the social mechanics of Twitter, people will not like or retweet something that makes them look bad. The “You should pretend to have an opinion” angle is weak, because to retweet something that espouses being inauthentic is to admit to being inauthentic, and that’s socially repugnant – even if our angle has merit. Also important, it’s not socially-repugnant enough to get people to argue, which would be another way of driving engagement. The “When you express your opinion, be ready for criticism,” angle is somewhat stronger. It would be a small flex to like or retweet this, because it would show that you’re a person resilient enough to expose yourself to criticism, a quality which has social clout in some circles. Moving forward with that best angle, in the clearest way possible, we could say: When you share strong opinions, you will be criticized. Because strong opinions by definition are the easiest opinions to disagree with. Besides the fact it’s much longer, there’s something weak about this tweet. I think it’s that it makes strong opinions not look good. Why have them if they’re so easy to disagree with? As someone with a fox cognitive style, to me it doesn’t feel right. So ultimately it seems, I believe a third angle: “Strong opinions aren’t good.” If we put that simply, we’re back to “Of all opinions, strong opinions are the easiest to argue against.” That still doesn’t express clearly how I feel about strong opinions. It’s just a statement of fact. Step 6: Applying rhetoric Maybe we can make this more economical, while also expressing more clearly my feelings about strong opinions, if we use a rhetorical form. Rhetorical forms are time-tested structures in language that add meaning beyond the simple content of the words. “Antithesis” is a good rhetorical form for tweets. Mark Forsyth in The Elements of Eloquence describes antithesis as “X is Y, and not X is not Y.” We won’t use that exact formula, which would essentially be “Strong opinions are easy to argue against, and weak opinions are hard to argue against.” Instead, let’s pit the word “strong” against its antithesis, “weak” – which is part of why the phrase “strong opinions, weakly held” is so memetic. As it happens, the idea of a “weak argument” is a commonly-used metaphor, so we can add extra power to our phrase by tapping into that existing idiom. With those elements in mind, we end up with: Strong opinions are weak arguments. That’s about as good as we can do. We’ve reduced the phrase from eleven words to only five. It’s now clearer what I think of strong opinions, and it presents the irony I wanted to point out in the first place. Was all this work worth it? So, how did this tweet do? I published it, making sure to record a prediction that I was 70% sure it would get fewer than 1,500 impressions (in 48 hours). It actually got 1,081. One month later, I published the unedited tweet I presented at the beginning of this article. I was 70% sure it would get fewer than 1,000 impressions. It got 384. The data suggest that through all that excruciating detail – more than 1,500 words about writing only five – I nearly tripled the performance of this tweet. The tweet still didn’t go viral, which isn’t the point of thinking of language in this level of detail. The real point of this exercise is that if you make a habit of thinking carefully abou

Here's a bonus preview of a new podcast I've brewed just for Patreon supporters. It's Coffee w/ Kadavy. In this episode, #4, I talk about: I talk with special guest ChatGPT about why we will (or won't) see another AI winter An inventory of things I believe (at least more than 50%) A cool thing that makes reading paper books way more comfortable! A (controversial?) history book about an amazing clash of civilizations For more episodes of Coffee w/ Kadavy, join the Patreon! There are three more episodes waiting for you, and a sneak audiobook preview of a chapter from my next book.

Every message is shaped by the mechanics of media. Whether it’s a tweet, a TikTok video, a news article, or a movie, the characteristics of the medium determine how it’s made, how it’s consumed, and whether it spreads. If you understand the mechanics of media, you can more effectively communicate in a wide variety of mediums, and protect yourself from being manipulated by media. The message is the mechanics of media As media theorist Marshall McLuhan said, “The medium is the message.” In Understanding Media, he wrote: The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium...results from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs.... In other words, it’s not the content of the medium we should be worried about, but the way the characteristics of that medium determine its content – the mechanics of media. The five characteristics of media I propose that there are five characteristics present in any medium, which determine these mechanics. These characteristics affect the creation, consumption, and distribution of media. (In other words, what message is delivered, how that message is received, and whether or not that message spreads.) Those five characteristics are: Incentive Sensory Physical Social Psychological The mechanics of media are so complex, these characteristics naturally interact with one another. I’ll give a brief introduction of each, then show how these characteristics work in the popular mediums of podcasts, Twitter, and TikTok. 1. Incentive The Incentive characteristics of a medium are sources of motivation, whether money or otherwise, that shape the creation, consumption, and distribution of messages in that medium. The creator of a piece of media is motivated by various incentives, such as money and relationships. Whether or not someone is able to consume a piece of media depends upon whether its affordable or otherwise accessible. Whether or not a piece of media spreads depends upon whether incentives are aligned for the distribution platform to allow it to spread. So, a journalist may be motivated to write a story that gets page views, because that’s how they’re paid. That’s how they’re paid, because the newspaper doesn’t have paying subscribers and thus relies upon ad revenue. The stories with click-bait headlines spread and get more page views because they increase engagement for the social media platform they’re shared on, which increases the social media platform’s ad revenue. 2. Sensory The Sensory characteristics of a medium are the ways in which the medium engages senses such as sight, hearing, and touch. Marshall McLuhan wrote about how so-called “sense ratios” were engaged by a medium. Sensory characteristics primarily affect the consumption of the medium, but those effects overlap with creation and distribution. Written content, for example, can be absorbed at a reader’s own pace. As Neil Postman pointed out in Amusing Ourselves to Death, the written word is especially well-suited to careful review and comparison, which makes it easier to convey the truth. Audio content can be replayed to be reviewed, but it’s more work than simply moving your eyes back over the content. 3. Physical The Physical characteristics of a medium are the ways in which the medium engages the body. The subtitle of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media is Extensions of Man. As a medium extends our abilities, it also removes or “amputates” abilities. When you listen to a podcast, your entire body is free to do other things. You may be cooking, showering, or fighting your way to the exit of a crowded subway car. So, audio with dense content may not be absorbed as well as if the same content were printed in a paper book – which can still be read on a subway car, but not likely while walking. Podcasts became distributed more widely as they became easier to download on smartphones, which people physically carry around. 4. Social The Social characteristics of a medium are the ways in which the medium facilitates interactions amongst people. In the age of social media, these interactions affect creation, consumption, and distribution, in concert. Algorithms that drive distribution on platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok are designed to distribute a piece of content based upon its engagement. Much of that engagement is social. If you comment on, like, or share a piece of content, that social interaction leads to further distribution. Additionally, the level of privacy involved in consuming or sharing content has social consequences. You may be reluctant to even “like” certain content, for fear of who might see. But you might share the same content with a close friend through a text message – so-called “dark social” – or even a dinner conversation. 5. Psychological The psychological characteristics of a medium are the ways in which a medium interacts with human psychology. Cognitive biases affect the way people interpret a piece of media, and media platforms are designed to exploit these biases. For example, variable rewards make social media platforms habit-forming for both consumers and creators. You never know when you’ll find something incredibly valuable during a social media session, and as a creator, you’re always checking to see if you’ve gotten more comments and views. To go back to our example of a journalist paid by the page view, incentives may motivate them or the newspaper at which they work to cover more natural disasters, shark attacks, and terrorist attacks, which grab people’s attention as a result of the availability heuristic. Here’s a sampling of how these five characteristics shape various mediums. Podcasts 1. Incentive There are two main ways podcast creators make money: either have a lot of listeners and sell sponsorship, or have few listeners, but make money on some kind of “back-end” business. It’s very hard to get new listeners for a podcast, for reasons that will be clear when we analyze the other mechanics, so this motivates many podcast hosts to do “swaps,” wherein hosts interview one another on each other’s podcasts. 2. Sensory Many listeners listen to podcasts alone, through headphones. Audio can’t be rewound as easily as someone can re-read, so the content should present simple ideas with simple language, and storytelling can keep the listener engaged. 3. Physical Listening to a podcast doesn’t engage much of your physical body, so listeners may be doing nearly anything while listening. They could be driving, showering, or doing household chores. With AirPods, they could even be hitting golf balls. Listeners may be in distracting situations, so again, the mechanics of the podcast medium lend themselves to simple ideas presented through simple language, and strong storytelling. 4. Social A podcast host makes an intimate connection with a listener because they’re often talking right into the listener’s ear, often while they’re alone. In this way, the host becomes like the internal monologue of the listener. This is part of why there are so many podcasts despite it being so hard to attract new listeners. This intimate connection can attract new customers and clients for high-ticket items, and advertisers are willing to pay a lot per listener, especially when the host reads the ads. It’s hard to attract new listeners to podcasts, because podcasts don’t lend themselves well to social consumption and distribution. Podcast listeners are usually physically occupied when listening, and unlikely to engage through likes, shares, and comments. These features aren’t available in most podcast-listening apps, since podcasts are distributed through decentralized feeds that can be captured by one of many such apps. Podcast content can be several hours long, with the information presented in the disorganized form of a conversation. Even when pieces of a podcast are presented as clips on social media, there are a few formidable barriers to such clips attracting listeners: Editing long-form content to be interesting in short-form is difficult, audio content has trouble competing with other content on social media feeds, and social media is often consumed in contexts in which it’s not convenient to download and listen to a podcast. 5. Psychological Podcast producers take advantage of the ways in which audio content can affect the psychology of the listener. Narrative podcasts use music and storytelling to manipulate listeners’ emotions and build suspense and engagement. Compelling podcast interviewees know how to talk passionately and persuasively in a way that will excite listeners. Still other podcast hosts deliberately speak in an unpolished way, to make their shows feel more like listening to a friend. Twitter 1. Incentive On Twitter, journalists can build followings, which can help them get more page views, which can help them either get paid more, or not rely on their employers at all. Entrepreneurs can grow their businesses. Writers, such as myself, can test out ideas. People, generally, can be entertained, or feel as if they’re heard. Twitter is still primarily an ad-supported platform, so more engagement with the platform means more ad revenue. While I presented above an example of a social media platform presenting articles with click-bait headlines, the incentive characteristics of Twitter also work against this. If you were to click on a link, you would leave Twitter, where you could no longer be served ads. So tweets that are just links get less distribution. 2. Sensory Twitter is primarily text, which is supposed to be the form of media most-capable of communicating the truth. Yet anyone who has used Twitter has noticed there is a lot of sensational content, with lots of arguing and fighting amongst tribes. How can this be? Since Twitter is mostly a collection of snippets of text, which can be easily skimmed, it puts people in a “hunting” mode. Unlike reading a book, where the sensory experience locks you into the progression of ideas presented by the author, on the Twitter timeline, the sensory experience is like scanning the landscape for the gazelle in the grass, or the tiger in the bush

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Making, recording, and evaluating predictions is a simple way to improve your thinking and decision-making. But the way to properly make and record predictions isn’t obvious. In this article, I’ll share some predictions I’ve made, what I’ve learned, and how you can improve your thinking by making predictions. Making predictions has grown my business Five years ago, I had been running my business for ten years, and it wasn’t going great. Then, I started publishing monthly income reports, and along the way, making predictions. My income has nearly doubled, and I attribute much of that success to my habit of making predictions. I began by predicting how much money I’d make in a product launch, and grew to predicting how much traffic articles I had written would gain, and how many copies books I’d written would sell. I now routinely make predictions for things as seemingly mundane as whether I’ll enjoy a conference, whether I’ll still be publishing on TikTok a year from now, or whether an avocado is ripe. On the surface, making predictions seems like a pointless game. This is, indeed, true of making predictions the wrong way. But making predictions the right way helps you deal with uncertainty you otherwise have no hope of handling. Predictions help you bet your life, better Each of us has limited resources, such as time, money, and mental energy. We’re constantly making decisions about how to use these resources, and when we make those decisions, we are expecting outcomes. If we go on this date, will we find the love of our life, or wish we’d stayed in? If we write this book, will we achieve fame and fortune, or feel as if we’ve wasted years of our life? If we spend an hour on social media, will we make valuable connections, or spiral into self-hatred over our lack of discipline? As Annie Duke, author of Thinking in Bets wrote: In most of our decisions, we are not betting against another person. Rather, we are betting against all the future versions of ourselves that we are not choosing. —Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets Each decision we make is a bet. We bet a resource, and expect something in return. Most of us don’t recognize or express the expectations of our bets. But we should. Some bets are clearer than others If you bet a dollar on a coin flip and only win $1.50 for guessing correctly, you’d easily recognize that as an unfair bet: There’s a 50% chance of guessing correctly, so you clearly should receive two dollars. But the more variable the odds, and the more vague your wager and winnings, the more difficult it becomes to think clearly. What’s the value of finding the love of your life? What other benefits can you get writing a book besides fame and fortune? What are the chances that during this hour of social media you’ll make a life-changing discovery? Making objective decisions taking into account all these variables becomes so complicated you might as well throw up your hands, surrender to randomness, and do what feels right in the moment. And that’s what most of us do. Case in point: The multi-billion-dollar gambling industry, propped up by people doing what feels right in the moment – their decision-making shrouded by the smokescreen of ever more complex and variable bets. The key to making predictions in a way that helps you evaluate your decisions is to avoid what Annie Duke calls “resulting.” If you wager a dollar on a coin flip, with a chance to win $10, and lose, the result of your decision was bad, but your decision was good. The odds were clearly in your favor. Mathematically, you were sure you’d win that bet one of two times. If you had won, you were going to win ten times your money. Now how do you apply this thinking to more complex and vague situations, such as a product launch, your Saturday night plans, or whether or not your new hobby is a passing obsession? The key is to make a prediction, the right way. How to make predictions the right way There are two components to making predictions the right way. Turn it into a coin flip. Identify the odds. 1. Turn the outcome into a “coin flip” First, turn the prediction into a coin flip. I don’t mean in terms of odds, but in terms of result. When you flip a coin, it comes up heads or tails. When you make a prediction about a result, that result must either happen or not. For a prediction to be useful, it has to be falsifiable. This is not easy to do, which is why few of us make predictions the right way, if at all. If you think it’s going to rain, in what area will it rain, by what time? Does a single raindrop count? If you think you’ll still be doing bird photography in six months, how many bird photos will you have taken, within the previous month? If you think you’ll enjoy going to the party, how many good memories will you be able to recall a week later? You can define a successful result in whatever measurable way you want. The important thing is that to make a prediction, you need to turn the result into a coin flip. Not in terms of odds, but in terms of how you define the result. Some actual predictions I’ve turned into coin flips: My Black Friday promotion will earn $3,000–$6,000. My blog post on Zettelkasten will average worse than a ranking of 10 for the keyword “zettelkasten”, the first three months after publish, according to Google Console. I will sell 5,000–15,000 copies of Mind Management, Not Time Management within the first year. With each of these predictions, I was wagering resources. It took, time, money, and energy to run a promotion, write a blog post, and write a book. But what did I expect from those investments? I could have done any of these without making a prediction. Besides the long-term benefits of making these predictions – which I’ll get to in a bit – turning these predictions into coin flips had immediate benefits. Turning predictions into coin flips helps answer these questions: Is this worth doing? By defining a successful result, you’re forced to ask yourself if it’s worth the investment, based upon your expectations. How will I achieve this? In the process of defining a successful result, you start thinking about why you expect to achieve that result. Do you have prior experiences or past data to draw upon? You’ll never search as hard for these as when you’re making a prediction. Can I do better? Defining a successful result has a symbiotic relationship with the effort you put forth trying to achieve the result. Making the prediction motivates you to try to make that prediction correct, which sometimes motivates you to predict and try to achieve an even better result. When you flip a coin, you of course aren’t sure whether it will come up heads or tails, and when you make a prediction, you aren’t sure whether you’ll achieve that result. And that is how it should be. 2. Identify the odds The second way to make a prediction the right way is to identify the odds of achieving that result. You’ve turned the prediction into a coin flip, but it’s not necessarily a coin flip with 50/50 odds. It may be more like a die roll, with 1:6 odds, or a roll of four or lower, with 2:3 odds. If you’ve turned your predicted result into a coin flip by adjusting a range, you can adjust that range according to your expected odds. In this way, if you want to literally turn your prediction into a coin flip, you can pick a range you feel you have 50/50 odds of achieving. For example, I believed I had 50/50 odds of making $3,000–$6,000 on my Black Friday promotion, and of selling 5,000–15,000 copies of my book in the first year. I specifically chose those ranges based upon what I expected to have 50/50 odds of achieving. If your prediction doesn’t involve a range, such as whether or not you will regret going to a party, then you simply have to identify your expected odds of that result. For all odds, I think it’s easiest to choose a percentage of confidence, such as 50% for 50/50 odds, or 66% for 2:3 odds. For example, I was 70% sure I wouldn’t regret attending a conference in Vegas last year. Each of these predictions is for one event. But the result will either be achieved, or not. Therefore, what you felt 70% sure would happen will in retrospect look as if it had 0 or 100% odds of happening. So what is the point of choosing odds for your prediction? There are three benefits of choosing odds: It helps you gain clarity on each decision. It helps you distinguish risky from not-risky decisions. It helps you rate and improve your decision-making, over time. Choosing odds helps you gain clarity First, choosing odds of achieving a result helps you gain clarity on a decision. Let’s say you buy your first guitar. Surely you’re picturing yourself being a pretty good guitar player someday. But how do you define that, how sure are you you’ll become a good guitar player, and how soon? A year later, when your guitar is collecting dust in your closet, you might feel pretty bad about yourself. But suppose that when you bought your guitar you had predicted that you were 50% sure, one year later, you would have practiced guitar at least fifteen minutes in the previous month? Based upon that prediction, it turns out you weren’t so sure to begin with that you’d become a good guitar player. Choosing odds helps you distinguish sure bets from wildcards Which brings us to the second benefit of choosing odds, which is that it helps you distinguish risky decisions from not-risky decisions. You took a chance buying a guitar, and it didn’t work out. That’s easier to live with if you know you were taking a chance. Some of life and business’s greatest benefits come from taking chances. But you only have so many resources to gamble with. Professional poker players know they need a certain “bank roll” to stay in the game and keep making bets. If they have a lot of bank roll, they might play a riskier bet than if they have little. They’re able to do that because they know the odds. In business, especially creative business, your “sure bets” keep you in business, while “wildcards” can change your business. As you decide how to invest your resources, and evaluate whether you’ve achieved successful results, you’ll make better dec

In the midst of the Great Depression, cereal manufacturer Kellogg’s switched to a shorter, six-hour day. This continued a trend that seemed inevitable: people would work less and less. But economic policies, management strategies, and cultural attitudes changed. The story of the rise and fall of Kellogg’s six-hour day is a microcosm of these changes, as well as of our attitudes about the roles of money, leisure, work, and women and men. In the book, Kellogg’s 6-Hour Day, historian Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt shares his findings in studying Kellogg’s shorter workday. His main sources of information were 434 interviews conducted by the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor, 124 interviews he himself conducted of workers, and 241 responses to a survey he had sent. What follows is a summary of the story, and Hunnicutt’s findings. Kellogg’s switched to a 6-hour day to create jobs During the Great Depression, American businesses took on a policy of “work sharing.” The idea was that fewer would be unemployed if everyone shared jobs – more workers, working fewer hours. So, on December 1, 1930, W. K. Kellogg changed most departments in Kellogg’s Battle Creek, Michigan plant from three eight-hour shifts to four six-hour shifts. A shorter workday had seemed inevitable This continued a decades-long trend of shorter working hours. Labor activist William Heighton had written in 1827 that the workday should be reduced from twelve hours to ten, eight, and so on, “until the development and progress of science have reduced human labour to its lowest terms.” John Stuart Mill had written in 1848 about his vision for a “Stationary State”: After necessities were met, people would seek progress in mental, moral, and social realms. John Maynard Keynes would predict in the same year Kellogg’s switched to six hours, 1930, that we’d have a fifteen-hour work week by 2030. George Bernard Shaw and Julian Juxley had predicted a maximum two-hour workday by the end of the 1900s. Other businesses shortened their workdays, too Other businesses followed Kellogg’s’ lead. A survey by the Industrial Conference Board in 1931 estimated 50% of American businesses had shortened hours to save jobs. President Herbert Hoover was considering making a 6-hour day a national policy. In the 1932 presidential campaign, both major parties were advocating shorter hours. The 6-hour day was the hot business topic Not only did the six-hour day help create jobs, it seemed for a while like it was a better business policy. Forbes called it “the topic of discussion in the business world.” Business Week concluded it was profitable. The New York Times called it “a complete success.” Factory and Industrial Management magazine called the six-hour day, the “biggest piece of industrial news since Ford announced his five-dollar-a-day policy.” At Kellogg’s, 15% more shredded wheat cases were being packed per hour. Profits had doubled in 1931, versus three years prior. After five years with the six-hour day, overhead costs had been reduced 25%, labor costs 10%, with 41% fewer accidents. W. K. Kellogg said, “We can afford to pay as much for six hours as we formerly paid for eight.” (That should be taken with a grain of salt. W. K. Kellogg took pride in crafting a public image as a “welfare capitalist,” as evinced by the full-page newspaper ads he took out, boasting how Kellogg’s had done its part. In reality, nearly half of workers later surveyed recalled that their wages were reduced.) Kellogg’s returned to an 8-hour day for WWII In 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order to direct the maximum amount of manpower toward supporting the country’s fight in WWII. Kellogg’s responded in kind by temporarily returning to eight-hour shifts. A rift formed between Kellogg’s management and the labor union This was actually an opportunity the company had been looking for. Kellogg’s management and that at other companies were beginning to resent the six-hour day, and workers were becoming divided over whether they wanted a shorter workday, or more pay. In 1936, the National Council of Grain Producers had started a union chapter in Kellogg’s Battle Creek headquarters. W. K. Kellogg had been proud to pay what he considered the best hourly wages in town. During the first meeting with union officers, he wept, and kept saying, “If only they had come to me, I would have given them what they wanted.” The union got an inch, and wanted a mile After this point, the relationship between Kellogg’s workers and management became adversarial. W. K. had left in 1937, after the union came in, and at that point the union leaders had been pushing to not only have a six-hour day, in which they could earn a bonus based upon productivity, but they had also wanted time-and-a-half pay for working more than six hours in a day. Hunnicutt wrote, “More than any other union demand, this position would come to haunt Kellogg workers.” Demanding overtime pay on a six-hour day helped turn management against the shorter workday, and create a rift between workers who wanted higher wages, and workers who wanted shorter hours. In the larger relationship between management and labor, the American Federation of Labor introduced a bill in congress, prohibiting goods produced by workers working more than thirty hours a week from being traded across state lines. Hunnicutt cites this as having shifted the business world’s stance on shorter hours from support to opposition. Shorter hours became exploitation, longer hours a reward In 1938, Kellogg’s management deepened the divide between six-hour and eight-hour workers by proposing they be allowed to schedule 40-hour weeks during periods of heavy production. Overtime became available instead of a productivity bonus. Senior workers had priority access to overtime, and so they lost interest in the productivity bonus. So in the early 1940s, before the war, worker opinions were shifting to view shorter hours not as a benefit, but as instead an exploitation of workers – making them bear the brunt of fighting unemployment. And Kellogg’s was actively campaigning against shorter days, asking workers to consider how much more they would make working eight hours. Human Relations Management saw work as life’s center Meanwhile, the business world was shifting from a Scientific Management philosophy to a Human Relations Management philosophy. Scientific Management practitioners were obsessed with efficiency, but Human Relations Management practitioners were more interested in imbuing work with joy and meaning – making work its own reward. The Human Relations Management school envisioned that as work brought satisfaction, engineers and scientists would lead society into an orderly world, where desires met obligations, consumption met production, and work and leisure merged. According to Humans Relations Management, time away from work and consumption was a relic of an illogical past. Instead of work becoming obsolete, giving way to more freedom, work would become the center of life, and help us ascend Maslow’s hierarchy. Fewer workers wanted to return to 6 hours After the war, many departments returned to six-hour shifts, but six-hour workers slowly lost their beloved shorter shifts over the following decades. Central to this struggle was how workers viewed leisure. Kellogg’s workers had previously voted to essentially “buy” shorter working hours, being paid less overall, in exchange for more leisure time. Employees used their time to improve their homes, go hunting, grow and can food in their gardens, and spend time volunteering in their communities. But slowly, workers became less interested in having time away from work. Leisure was outsourced to mass media One explanation from a worker Hunnicutt interviewed was, people were now outsourcing all things they used to spend time on. One place they were outsourcing to was mass media. Sports had been such serious business amongst Kellogg’s employees, they had hired “semi-pro” softball or basketball players to play on the teams. But why watch the company team play, when you can watch pros on television? One former six-hour worker bemoaned that even conversation had been outsourced – to radio, or television talk-show hosts. Shorter hours became seen as weak and feminine The question, Six hours or eight? became a gender issue. Early on, both men and women were interested in six-hour shifts. Three-fourths of men voted for six-hour shifts in 1937, but half of men were working eight hours by 1947. The six-hour departments began to be referred to as “girls’ departments,” doing “women’s work.” Management also assigned sick and disabled employees to the six-hour departments. Men who chose to work six-hours were labeled “sissies,” “lazy,” or “weird.” Men saw work, not leisure, as a source of control and identity Hunnicutt’s interpretation was that men were increasingly seeing work as a place for control and identity – that many hadn’t known what to do with themselves after their shorter shifts. They didn’t like spending more time at home and being assigned chores by their wives, or hearing what they considered gossip. As a result, men placed more importance on working longer hours – or at least appearing to. Hunnicutt said men he interviewed commonly claimed to have gotten second jobs while they were working six hours. How often is “commonly”?, he doesn’t say, but he points out only 35% ever did get second jobs. Men felt they “had to” work long hours This attitude, which we might today call “toxic masculinity,” extended into attitudes about leisure. When asked why they preferred longer hours, men spoke of necessity, and used dramatic language, saying they had to “keep the wolf from the door,” “feed the family,” and “put bread on the table.” When Hunnicutt pointed out to men who had been working in the 1950s that workers in the Great Depression had been willing to take pay cuts to have more free time, he says they got defensive, lectured him on “the facts of life economically,” called six-hours “nonsense” or a “pipe dream,” or dismissed the question as silly. While Hunnicutt’s conclusions here are plausible, it seemed like he rea

Desire paths are trails left on the ground, by anything that frequently travels along a route. There are subcultures fascinated by desire paths as symbols of collective wisdom, disregard for authority, or mere evidence of existence. Desire paths are also celebrated as a design technique. Desire paths in their pure form are about what you can see, but the characteristics of desire paths – which you can’t always see – can help you optimize your life and gain clarity in your creative projects. Desire path examples Desire paths are also known by a number of other names: cattle trails, cow paths, elephant paths, just to name a few. In forests or grassy meadows, it seems pretentious to call them desire paths – they’re just paths. Desire paths that question authority Desire paths are most interesting when they show up in places where a man-made path has already been put in place. A sidewalk turns a corner at a ninety-degree angle, but as people cut the corner, a desire path develops at forty-five degrees. An overgrown hedge encroaches on a sidewalk. To avoid squeezing between the hedge and a tree, people walk off the sidewalk and around the tree, and a desire path develops. A landscape architect tries to get fancy by building a curved path, but people instead take a straight path, and a desire path cuts through the grass. These desire paths that eschew the suggestions of man-made paths are like visual jokes that show a disregard for authority. Desire paths that acknowledge existence But some desire paths acknowledge the existence of a single being. A dog leaves a desire path where he’s cut across the yard a thousand times. A woman leaves a desire path where all summer she’s walked off the end of a dock, into the shallow water, to the shore of a lake. When a single being who has left a desire path passes away, the desire path remains as a reminder of their existence. The thought of nature reclaiming the desire path – for example, the grass growing back – is a sad reminder of how long they’ve been gone, and a reminder one day we’ll be gone, too. But the being doesn’t even have to be a living one. Delivery robots have left desire paths, their tire tracks marking the sidewalk with GPS precision. Desire paths as a design technique The most striking thing about desire paths is they can be used as a design technique. As I said, desire paths are like visual jokes that show a disregard for authority. They poke fun at civilization’s feeble attempts to plan, make decisions for others, or control people. Sometimes “authority” surrenders to the crowd and lets desire paths do the decision-making for them. University campuses are often full of desire paths. With so many students migrating from one of many buildings to one of many other buildings, there’s no way to predict what routes exactly will be the most efficient. So some schools, such as Ohio State University, held off on creating paved paths. Once the desire paths showed up, they then paved on top of them. The result is a latticework of criss-crossing paths, of varying widths, that no single human would have designed. Desire paths aren’t always good But sometimes “authority” has a good reason for building a path that seems inefficient. On the leading subculture of desire-path enthusiasts – Reddit’s desire paths community – parks planners have explained that nature trails often have switchbacks going back and forth across steep inclines, because such a design prevents soil erosion. When people cut across these switchbacks, hiking directly up the hill, they hasten erosion. Additionally, desire paths express the desires of the majority. Sometimes the path expressed by desire paths don’t work for people in the minority. That curved path that looks like the result of a landscape architect gone wild might soften the incline for people in wheelchairs – and how does that work out when path installation is delayed until desire paths form? Ultimately, people are going to tend toward their desires to get to their destinations quickly. Whatever practical reasons “authority” has for designing a path, the wisdom carried by desire paths can’t be ignored. The power of invisible desire paths Desire paths, in their pure form, are about what you can see. It seems the use of desire paths in design projects originated with analyzing data you can’t see. A 1942 transit study in Detroit charted origins and destinations of commuter trips, to determine where best to build roads. If you break the phenomenon of desire paths down to its essential components, you can find desire paths you can’t see, and harness their power to optimize your life and achieve clarity in creative projects. When used as a design technique, a desire path essentially does four things: A good-enough solution Collects data Exposes a pattern in the data Which leads to an ideal solution The unmodified ground is a good-enough solution people can use. Through the usage patterns of that good-enough solution, data builds up. Each footprint is a piece of data. The footprints don’t overlap, all in the same place. Instead, a pattern emerges, in the form of a path. That pattern is then used to determine an ideal solution. In the case of a college campus, that ideal solution is usually a paved sidewalk where the desire path once was. 1. Start with a prototype When a desire path forms, the untreated ground is essentially a prototype. So to create an invisible desire path, build or find a prototype. Find a low-cost, low-commitment way to give yourself a good-enough solution. For example, if you’re looking for the perfect backpack, you could take the top-down approach that desire paths so often protest: You could plan out everything you want your backpack to hold and do, then design a custom backpack. Or, you could start with a prototype: Buy any cheap backpack at a thrift store, and try it out. 2. Collect data Desire paths collect data based upon use of a prototype. Once you have a good-enough solution, you’re collecting data as you use it. With your cheap backpack, maybe you notice the straps gets loose, or dig into your shoulder. Maybe a pen falls out of it, or you find yourself rummaging through a big compartment full of small items. 3. Look for patterns Desire paths collect data, but that data is only useful once a pattern emerges. When a desire path forms, you can see it, but when an invisible desire path forms, you can’t. After enough time using your prototype, individual bits of data turn into patterns. Maybe a pen fell out of your cheap backpack only once and you fixed the straps so they didn’t loosen anymore, but the strap kept digging into your shoulder and you got sick of rummaging through a compartment full of small items. You’ve found your invisible desire path: You want a backpack with comfortable straps, and lots of small compartments for small items. 4. Find a solution When desire paths are used as a design feature, the visible path becomes the backbone of the solution. The designers simply pave a path over the desire path. Once you’ve found an invisible desire path, that becomes the backbone of your solution. Now that you’ve used a prototype enough times for patterns to emerge, you can find a solution that fits those patterns. Desire paths in creative projects Now how can invisible desire paths help you gain clarity on creative projects? Creative projects are a lot like choosing a backpack: You have a variety of requirements and preferences, not all of them are clear, and many contradict one another. There’s no one perfect solution, but there’s some ideal solution that balances everything. Too often, we approach creative projects thinking top-down: We don’t want to act until we have the perfect plan. But the perfect plan doesn’t exist. The best way to find an ideal plan is create an invisible desire path: Find a good-enough solution, collect data, and see what patterns emerge. Only then can you quickly and efficiently get where you’re going. Thank you for having me on your show! Thank you for having me on your show. Thank you to Ajay Mathur at the Be Yourself show. As always, you can find interviews of me on my interviews page. About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »       Show notes: https://kadavy.net/blog/posts/desire-paths/

The term, “vulnerability” has spread into realms where it’s not an accurate description of what’s going on. The case for being vulnerable often doesn’t make sense. In the creative realm – and possibly in others – we should pursue something beyond vulnerability. When I wrote about vulnerability to my Love Mondays newsletter, saying some of what I’m about to say, I got a lot of pushback. In the current – and what I believe to be incorrect – parlance, some might say I had made myself vulnerable. I don’t agree. I’ll build up to why in the course of examining the vulnerability movement. I’ll try to keep this organized, so that if you disagree with my line of thinking, it’s easier to identify where. It’s hard to talk about vulnerability in an organized way, because the more the term is abused, the more vague its definition gets. Vulnerability means “open to harm” Let’s start by defining vulnerability. In the most basic terms, vulnerability means, “open to harm.” If you want to be more technical and specific, “open” in this case doesn’t mean “inviting” harm, but rather “susceptible” to harm. Now I’ll paraphrase some examples of how vulnerability is espoused in the current movement: “Be vulnerable at work. If you need help, don’t be afraid to ask.” “Be vulnerable in relationships. Share your feelings, even if it means you might be rejected.” “Be vulnerable in your writing. Share your struggles.” (Anyone familiar with my work might be surprised to hear me tee up this last one.) I don’t deny that a person might feel vulnerable in these situations. I’m not convinced they are vulnerable. I’m definitely skeptical that striving to be or even feel vulnerable is helpful. Emotional harm is the most-subjective harm If being vulnerable is being open to harm, to understand vulnerability we have to define what harm is. There are many types of harm, but I think most are covered in three categories: physical, economic, and emotional harm. Physical harm is the least-subjective realm of harm. Yes, people might perceive their physical wounds differently, and someone can have physical pains with an emotional cause, but for the most part, you can measure physical injury. Economic harm is slightly more-subjective. If you lose your job in a flourishing modern economy, you won’t necessarily have scars, such as if you experienced physical harm. You may ultimately be better off. Emotional harm is almost entirely subjective. What seems like emotional harm to one person may not to another. Some can’t stand to be looked at by a stranger. Others don’t care if someone criticizes them. Importantly, what causes emotional harm to a person when they’re inexperienced in a realm may not – later, to that same person – cause emotional harm after they become experienced in that same realm. More on that later. The vulnerability movement: “Be vulnerable, and benefit” Now that we’ve defined vulnerability as “open to harm,” and identified most harms as physical, economic, or emotional, let’s try to identify the case being made for vulnerability by the vulnerability movement. When I say vulnerability movement, I’m not talking about any one person, but rather my perception as a very-confused outsider, trying to make sense of the conversations being had about vulnerability in TED talks, on social media, on podcasts, and at cocktail parties. As far as I can understand, the pitch of the vulnerability movement is, “be vulnerable and benefit.” To paraphrase, using the prior examples from work, love, and art: “If you need help at work, ask for it. You risk looking like you don’t know what you’re doing, but you and your team will perform better.” “Be the first in a relationship to say, ‘I love you.’ You risk rejection, but otherwise you’ll have a deeper relationship.” “Share your struggles in your writing. People may laugh at you, but your words will help others.” To be clear, I think these actions can be wise. But I don’t believe they’re objectively vulnerable, and you don’t have to make vulnerability a goal – and maybe you shouldn’t make vulnerability a goal – to catalyze these actions. These are all cases to “be vulnerable and benefit.” To be vulnerable is to be open to harm. If you ultimately benefit from an action, were you vulnerable – were you open to harm – in the first place? Is it vulnerability if it needs boundaries? Some might say, Well, you don’t know the outcome of these actions in advance, so you’re risking harm by taking them. Yet anyone who speaks intelligently about vulnerability rightly says it should come with boundaries. A CEO shouldn’t freak out about the potential fate of the company, in front of employees and shareholders. You shouldn’t spend your first date complaining about your ex. You shouldn’t share your struggles with depression in writing a user manual for a Bluetooth speaker. Too much vulnerability is oversharing. So, according to the movement, vulnerability should be a calculated risk, one you’re likely to benefit from, and one that isn’t likely to ruin you. Don’t seek vulnerability, seek ideals It seems to me the case being made for vulnerability is in pursuit of important ideals, including but not limited to truth, security, and alignment. The more we’re honest at work, the more effective we can be in an efficient marketplace. The more we share our feelings in our relationships, the more secure we feel. The more of our true selves we put into our art, the more it resonates with others. “Fear” is the word you’re looking for I think a better term for what we experience in pursuit of these ideals is “fear.” Fear is a feeling of discomfort in the face of perceived danger. Fear can be irrational. The perceived danger can be entirely in your head. Some people experience fear just looking at a spider that has no chance of physically harming them. Some people experience fear looking at birds. Valid vulnerability isn’t the type being promoted I’ve ventured into unfamiliar territory thinking about vulnerability and putting together this critique. I found many areas where truly being vulnerable resulted in benefits, such as in combat, activism, and workplace inclusion. True vulnerability, it seems, is the product of power, and people sometimes have to be vulnerable to dissolve that power. These areas are outside the scope of this short critique. Besides, I haven’t come across much chatter in the vulnerability movement that makes cases for vulnerability in these valid areas. But aren’t I a “vulnerable” writer? One area I am very familiar with is creative work. Some readers have described some of my work as “vulnerable.” I’ve written about the death of my mother, the death of a lover, and published a conversation about grief. I’ve listed my failures and published my private doubts in my pursuit of a career as a writer. I’ve written about my health struggles in graphic detail, and shared my struggles with moving to another country. I’ve been publicly reporting my income for years, starting when it was even less-impressive than it is now. I’m further critiquing vulnerability in this article, even though I got angry emails in response to my short newsletter on the topic. Was I, am I, vulnerable in creating these things? I don’t think so. Am I risking physical harm? Not likely. Economic harm? I don’t think so. Emotional harm? That’s not up to someone else to decide. What looks like “vulnerability” is “antifragility” Have I ever felt vulnerable writing these things? In retrospect, I guess I did. More accurately, I felt fear. Because I was not vulnerable. I benefitted greatly writing these things. I grew, and got to know myself. I found my voice and got closer to doing work that comes from my core. It was all real and came from an authentic place, but I grew my business in the process. I took calculated risks, and I got better at calculating along the way. I thought that by writing public income reports, I would improve my thought processes and grow my business – I did. I thought that having a public conversation about grief would help me live with it – it has. I thought that by writing about my mysterious health issues, readers would send me ideas that would help me get better – they did. I’m not claiming to be Galileo or Harvey Milk, which is kind of the point – their work made them objectively vulnerable. But I know I’ve never set out to deliberately be vulnerable. I’ve set out to face fears, because I believed they were irrational. Somewhere along the way, I stopped being scared. What once felt like fear morphed into excitement to see what would happen – to see if this action would take me closer to truth, security, and alignment. Vulnerability as a boundary, not a beacon Now that I’ve been at it a long time, if I were to feel vulnerable, I would see that as a boundary, not a beacon. That would be a warning sign that I’m oversharing, and needlessly putting myself in danger. That’s one problem with espousing the pursuit of a subjective feeling: Being afraid is not the same as being vulnerable. The more experienced you get – in work, love, or art – the more adeptly you can recognize when you really are vulnerable, and decide it’s a good idea to stop. Performative vulnerability is a slippery slope When I wrote about this in my newsletter, some readers said they had been in communities where appearing vulnerable became a sort of contest. People seemed to be oversharing just to outdo one another. That’s another problem with espousing the pursuit of a subjective feeling: If vulnerability is the goal – whether that’s being, feeling, or appearing vulnerable – you incentivize vulnerability. The definitions and the actions fitting those definitions tumble over one another down a very slippery slope. Vulnerability can be a productive lie Sometimes we tell ourselves productive lies. You can commit to working for ten minutes, knowing you’ll keep going once you’ve reached that goal. You can give yourself permission to suck – notice that’s “permission,” not “directive” – knowing you’ll improve or do better than you had expected. Maybe the pursuit to feel vulnerable is a productive lie. It teaches you to face your irrational fears. B

The Prince is a political treatise, written by Niccolò Machiavelli, first distributed in 1513. It’s infamous for its apparent advice to political leaders to lie, murder, and manipulate. It’s still a fascinating read today, and is thought-provoking when considering any context where the true motives of actions may not be what they seem. Here, in my own words, is a summary of Niccoló Machiavelli’s, The Prince. Is The Prince advice, satire, or sabotage? Machiavelli wrote The Prince while in exile from Florence. Since he opens it with a letter to Lorenzo d’Medici it seems like Machiavelli was trying to get a political position with the Medici, by demonstrating his political knowledge. (The Medici had recently returned to power in Florence, after themselves being exiled fifteen years.) But, some scholars think The Prince is satire. Others think the advice within was a ploy, in that if it were followed, the actions would weaken the power of the Medici. “The ends [justified] the means,” in Renaissance Italy Though the phrase isn’t in the book, The Prince is the origin of the saying, “the ends justify the means.” In other words, if you have an important goal, morality doesn’t matter. It’s also the inspiration for the name of the personality trait of “Machiavellianism”, which is characterized by manipulativeness, insensitivity, and an indifference to morality. Psychologists include Machiavellianism in the “dark triad” personality traits, along with narcissism and psychopathy. Sixteenth century Italy was the perfect environment for advice like that in The Prince to flourish. There was constant conflict amongst small governing bodies, including the most-notable city-states of Florence, Milan, Rome, Naples, and Venice. Additionally, there were frequent invasions by Spain, France, or the Holy Roman Empire. If the numerous examples Machiavelli cites in The Prince are any indication, if you didn’t lie, murder, and manipulate, you wouldn’t stay in power, and probably would be murdered yourself. You don’t have to be Machiavellian to learn from The Prince As you listen to this advice, it’s not hard to think of similar, less-violent situations in our everyday lives, as we build relationships and careers, or watch others vie for power. So what is some of this juicy advice that has made The Prince and Niccolò Machiavelli so infamous? I’ll break down this summary into two sections, followed by some historical examples Machiavelli cites, peppered with some quotes. Those two sections are: Gaining power Retaining power (Note this isn’t how Machiavelli organizes The Prince.) 1. Gaining power First how to gain power. Machiavelli points out that the people within a state are eager to change rulers. People naturally expect change to improve their lives, so, they’re willing to join in armed resistance against the ruling power. This attitude extends from the people, to other states. If a powerful foreigner invades a country, the states within want to help overturn the rule of the most-powerful state. But you have to be careful. It’s normal to want to acquire more land, but when you try to do it by any means possible, you end up making dumb mistakes. How this applies to other domains As you hear this, you may already have some parallels to other domains bouncing around in your head. How many times have you bought a product just slightly different from one you already had, because you believed the change would make your life better? Marketers take advantage of this. I’ve read one marketing book that advised to think of the product you’re marketing as a “new opportunity.” Changing leadership is a “new opportunity,” that temporarily makes you optimistic, like how we feel when a New Year comes around. But often, the new product, the new ruler, or the New Year doesn’t make your life better. We get stuck in a cycle of wanting change and striving for it, only to find we aren’t better off than before, which drives our desire to change once again. This is why, to quote Machiavelli: There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. —Niccolò Machiavelli The Prince In other words, you might get short-term support in the change you’re trying to introduce, but the support you once had will soon wane, and those who were doing well before will try to overthrow you. 2. Retaining power This brings us to the second section, about retaining power. Being able to retain power starts with choosing carefully where and how you gain power. This is why Machiavelli warns: He who has not first laid his foundations may be able with great ability to lay them afterwards, but they will be laid with trouble to the architect and danger to the building. —Niccolò Machiavelli The Prince Any new state is extremely fragile, unless the person who unexpectedly gained power over that state is highly-skilled. You can gain power by getting the help of the people, or other states, but whoever helped you will probably be disappointed in what they get from it, and will no longer want to help you. Be especially careful not to make your allies much more powerful, because then they’ll become threats. Additionally, they’ll distrust you, because in the process of helping them, they saw how cunning you are. So, if you’re invading a place, you want to be on the good side of the natives. However, if they’re used to being free, you’ll have to destroy them, or they’ll destroy you. As Machiavelli said: Men ought to either be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot. —Niccolò Machiavelli The Prince In other words, if they’re dead, they can’t get revenge. And: He who becomes master of a city accustomed to freedom and does not destroy it, may expect to be destroyed by it. —Niccolò Machiavelli The Prince If you want to retain power in a new state, you need to start a colony there. You don’t have to spend a lot on the colony, because after you take the land and houses of people, they will be, “poor and scattered,” and can’t hurt you. It’s important to be in the place you’re ruling, because otherwise you don’t find out about things that go wrong until it’s too late to fix them. Statecraft is a lot of work, because, as Machiavelli says: He who has relied least on fortune is established the strongest. —Niccolò Machiavelli The Prince How this applies to other domains Some of this advice may resonate with situations you’ve experienced. Some of it may be horrifying to you. Here’s how it can apply to other domains. Imagine you’re a CEO, and you’ve just acquired a new company. It’s best to get it right the first time. If you make mistakes, you’ll have a hard time leading the company. When a company acquires another, or a new leader comes into a company, you often see layoffs right away. This mirrors Machiavelli’s related advice, which is: Injuries ought to be done all at one time, so that, being tasted less, they offend less; benefits ought to be given little by little, so that the flavor of them may last longer. —Niccolò Machiavelli The Prince If done according to Machiavelli’s advice, after the brutal layoffs, there will be ice-cream socials, team-building exercises, and bonuses scattered over the coming months and years, hopefully without more massive layoffs. Whoever is in charge had better have close oversight to an office that’s far away from headquarters, otherwise by the time you find out about problems, it’s too late to fix them. How not to rule: King Louis XII A leader who Machiavelli uses as a warning for not ruling well is King Louis the XII, of France. The Venetians brought in King Louis, because they wanted to seize half the state of Lombardy. But they later realized, they had helped make Louis king of two-thirds of Italy. Louis was now well-positioned, but then his mistakes began. He helped Pope Alexander occupy the Romagna, divided the kingdom of Naples with the king of Spain, and turned around and tried to conquer Venice’s territories. So, he weakened the minor power of Venice, losing their alliance, made a great power – the pope – even more powerful, and brought in a foreign power – Spain. He didn’t settle in the land he had conquered, and didn’t set up colonies. How to rule: Cesare Borgia Like Louis XII when the Venetians enlisted his help, Cesare Borgia came into power through fortune. Unlike Louis, he made what Machiavelli felt were wise decisions. Cesare was the son of Pope Alexander VI, who himself was cunning. He wanted to give Cesare a state to rule, but there weren’t good options. For example, the Milanese or the Venetians would stop him, and anyone in Italy who might have helped knew better than to make the pope even more powerful. When the Venetians brought the French into Italy, Alexander didn’t make a fuss, and even helped Louis out by dissolving his marriage. He provided some soldiers to help out in a military campaign in Romagna, and now his son, Cesare was the duke of Romagna. But Cesare wasn’t thrilled with his military. The Orsini soldiers didn’t seem psyched to take Bologna, and when he attacked Tuscany after taking over Urbino, Louis made him stop. So Cesare decided to figure out how to do things on his own. Cesare Borgia followed Machiavelli’s advice (somewhat literally) Anywhere Cesare took power, he was sure to kill the nobles and their families. He weakened the Orsini and Colonna parties in Rome, by making them nobles and giving them a good salary. Then he brought in a Spaniard named Ramiro d’Orco (also known as Ramiro de Lorca) to govern the Romagna. The Romagna had been in disorder when Cesare took over, and d’Orco restored order, but through nasty means, using lots of torture, public executions, and fines. Once d’Orco had cleaned things up, Cesare – according to Machiavelli – didn’t want to be associated with d’Orco’s reign of terror. So, he had him publicly executed, and put his

Which would you rather have? Mild success, or wild success? Most of us would prefer wild success. But we pursue mild success. And you can’t have one when you’re going for the other. The struggle of an aspiring novelist A more specific version of the scenario I mentioned in episode 253: Imagine you’re working at Starbucks during the day, and at night you’re writing novels – not just any novels, but your favorite kind. You call it Care Bear Fanfic Urban Fantasy. As far as you know, you’re the only person who writes Care Bear Fanfic Urban Fantasy. Judging by your sales, you’re also the only person who reads it. You’ve written three novels in this genre you’ve created, and there have been hardly any sales, aside from the handful of copies you’ve sold to your mom and close friends. After a couple years writing and promoting your Care-Bear novels, you decide it’s time for a change. You told yourself when you started writing that as soon as you made as much as your Starbucks job, you’d quit and write full-time. You’re not even close. Your hourly Starbucks wage isn’t great, but you’ve actually lost money writing your three novels, after investing in cover designs and some ads. A new opportunity Fortunately, one of your friends is a pretty successful author. She makes a middle-class living writing in a genre called Sweet Romance – mostly read by retired women, some of whom read a new Sweet Romance novel every day. You buy your friend a coffee – or rather steal it from work – sit her down, and drill her to tell you all about writing and selling Sweet Romance novels. She’s super helpful, and tells you everything you need to know about the story structure readers expect, what tropes each novel has to hit, and even what keywords to advertise under. Armed with your knowledge of the Sweet Romance genre, you get to work. It’s not your favorite, but it would beat serving coffee, you figure. The first couple novels are a challenge, but once you get it down, you’re cranking out a new one every several weeks. You’ve got it down to a whole system: You change the character names, the locations, and a few scenarios from your last novel, and they practically write themselves. Making it, as a middle-class novelist Three years later, you, like your friend, are a middle-class Sweet Romance novelist. You’ve written eighteen novels, in three series, and in the past year have profited $70k. You quit your job at Starbucks a couple years ago, and you were right: Writing Sweet Romance is way more fun than serving coffee. Still, something is missing. You’re getting tired of writing the same stories over and over. New ideas for Care Bear Fanfic Urban Fantasy stories keep coming to you. But you keep pushing them down. Why would you bother writing another Care Bear novel, when you’re sure you’ll sell none? Why would you not write another Sweet Romance novel, when you’re sure you’ll sell some. Besides, you’ve upgraded your life: You now have a mortgage and a car payment, and your dog eats Purina instead of the off-brand stuff from Aldi. These novels don’t sell forever. If you don’t keep the Sweet Romance machine going, you’ll make less and less money. A missed opportunity But, one day, you discover something that changes everything you thought you knew about the business of being an author. As you’re tallying up your earnings at the end of the month, you realize that your Care Bear Fanfic Urban Fantasy series has started selling. In fact, you’ve sold a hundred copies in the past month! That’s more copies than you’ve sold in all the previous years. You dig a little deeper, and discover another author, writing under the name Brave Heart Brian, has written seven Care Bear Fanfic Urban Fantasy novels. You’re filled with excitement, confusion, and envy. You’re excited to have some Care Bear novels to read, confused as to how Brave Heart Brian seems to have popped up out of nowhere, and envious that – judging from the Amazon ranks of his books – he’s making more money than you are! You take a deep breath and wash away the envy – it is fanfic after all, it’s not like you invented Care Bears. You email Brian to congratulate him on his success, and ask him how it all happened. It turns out Brian stumbled upon your Care Bear series last year. He loved it, and wanted to read more Care Bear Fanfic Urban Fantasy, but since you clearly weren’t active anymore, he decided if he wanted to read more, he’d have to write the novels himself. Not only has he built up a nice following of readers, he just sold film rights for his series, for millions of dollars! The good news is, Care Bear Fanfic Urban Fantasy is quickly becoming a popular genre. The bad new is, you’re not the author who will reap most of the benefits. Where did you go wrong? You wonder, Where did I go wrong? You tried writing Care Bear Fanfic Urban Fantasy for years, and the writing was on the wall: Nobody cared. The problem was, Sweet Romance was a sure bet – or at least one of the surer bets writing novels could be. You expected writing in Care Bear Fanfic Urban Fantasy to behave like a sure bet, but it was not a sure bet. The Care Bear novels were a wildcard. You didn’t distinguish your sure bets from your wildcards, so you gave up on your wildcards too soon. Sure bets for mild success, wildcards for wild success We’re used to playing sure bets. You didn’t show up to your job at Starbucks for the small chance of making a lot of money. You instead had a high chance – a guarantee, in fact – to make a little money. You knew how much you’d get paid every hour you worked. Sure bets have a good chance of mild success. Even when you fail at a sure bet, you succeed somewhat – if you slack off at Starbucks, you still get paid, so long as you don’t get fired. If your next Sweet Romance novel isn’t your best, you still make some sales. Sure bets have a good chance of mild success, but wildcards have a small chance of wild success. When a wildcard fails, all your effort goes to waste. You get nothing. But when a wildcard succeeds, the sky is the limit. In my second interview with Seth Godin, on episode 177, he told me this: Your last book was really juicy. Your last book did not sell a million copies. Those things aren’t completely related. But it’s very important that your next book not be something that you think fits into a juicy slot – not be something that is searched for from an SEO point of view…. That’s how you become a second-rate romance novelist. It’s not how you write The Martian. What Seth was telling me, essentially, was to not play sure bets – don’t write something just because you know some people are searching for it. Instead, play wildcards, to write what was interesting to me, and take the risk that it might not work. Don’t rate your wildcards as if they were sure bets Essentially, when you’ve played a wildcard, don’t evaluate its performance as if it were a sure bet. The number of sales you get on one book is not a direct reflection of the quality of that book. As Seth had told me in my first interview with him on episode 77, and as I explored on episode 286, nobody knows anything. As I talked about on episode 251, if you keep playing wildcards forever, eventually ergodicity will take effect, and one of them will hit. But you can’t play wildcards forever. Your life is only so long, and there’s only so much time in the day to generate wildcards. If you had kept writing Care Bear novels, there’s no telling how long it would have taken to quit your job at Starbucks – or if you would have ever succeeded at all. The security of sure bets + the success of wildcards You don’t have to choose between playing sure bets and wildcards. As I talked about on episode 256, you can play the barbell strategy. Have the security of mediocristan, with the excitement of extremistan. If, instead of going all in on Sweet Romance novels, you had written, say, one Care Bear novel for every three Romance novels, you’d’ve greatly increased your chances of being the breakout Care Bear Fanfic Urban Fantasy writer, at the expense of a small pay-cut in the short-term. You can play all sure bets, you can play all wildcards, or you can do a mix of both. But be clear with yourself when you’re playing one or the other. The quality of the decisions you make with your creative career depends on it. Image: Mountain Village (Autumnal), Paul Klee Thank you for having me on your podcasts! Thank you for having me on your podcasts. Thank you J Thorn at Writers, Ink. As always, you can find interviews of me on my interviews page. About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »       Show notes: https://kadavy.net/blog/posts/sure-bets-wildcards/

You can’t get through a project on momentum alone. But there are mechanisms you can use to tweak your motivation and make better use of what momentum you have. These motivation mechanisms aren’t one-size-fits-all – you have to choose which ones work for you. Motivation requires self-mastery As I talked about on episode 291, getting through a creative project is like skateboarding through a halfpipe. You have a lot of motivation going into a project, due to your high expectations. Even if your expectations were to be met, it would still be impossible to coast through to the end of a project. There’s too much friction along the way. Experienced skateboarders know how to soar out of halfpipes, because they know how to tweak their momentum. Experienced creators know how to follow through on creative projects, because they know how to tweak their motivation. But gaining this experience is a catch-22: You can’t finish projects if you don’t know how to tweak your motivation, and you don’t know how to tweak your motivation if you haven’t finished projects. You have to learn, through trial-and-error, what keeps you motivated. Finish smaller projects and build your shipping skills along the way. But it doesn’t have to be guesswork. If you know what motivation mechanisms are at your disposal – and the strengths and pitfalls of those mechanisms, you can more quickly gain an understanding of your motivation. Three motivation mechanisms There are three main motivation mechanisms: carrots, sticks, and blinders. The carrot and the stick are classic motivation mechanisms that have been in the scientific literature on motivation for a long time. If you’re riding a horse, there are two ways to motivate him: dangle a carrot in front of his face, or strike him in the flank with a stick. The carrot represents the promise of potential reward, the stick represents the threat of potential punishment, and what I call blinders block out distractions and keep the horse focused on the road ahead. We’re attracted to rewards, and we avoid punishments. If we set up our projects so action leads to carrots and inaction leads to sticks, we’ll get motivated and maintain the momentum to finish – in theory. Carrots: internal and external One way to work carrots into your projects is to have promising data. If you have market research that suggest you’ll earn a lot of money if you finish the project, you might have an easier time getting motivated. Or, you might merely be so curious about the outcome of the project, that motivates you to follow through. You can also use external rewards as carrots. For example, you might promise yourself a vacation if you finish a project. On a more granular level, you might promise yourself a piece of chocolate for every 100 words you write. Sticks: internal and external One way to work sticks into your projects is to do part of a project that will result in a punishment if you don’t finish the rest of the project. I called this “The Whip,” in my book, The Heart to Start. When I create a new email course, for example, I use the whip. I set up a landing page promising emails on a schedule, then send traffic to the landing page. Once I have sign-ups, I’m highly motivated to finish writing all the emails in the course, as the promised dates approach. This same tactic has worked for other people who have tried my “Explosive Email Course” formula. You can also use external punishments as sticks. You can promise to pay your friend $100 if you don’t finish your project by a certain date. On a more granular level, you can punish yourself for behavior that doesn’t drive your project forward. Maneesh Sethi, who I interviewed on episodes 13 and 117, created Pavlok, a wristband you can program to shock you when you do things you’d rather quit. I once used it to quit Facebook, and it was shockingly effective. Blinders: physical and mental Carrots can reward you for the behavior you want to be motivated to do, and sticks can punish you for what you don’t want to be motivated to do. Blinders can keep you more focused on what you want to be motivated to do, while blocking out what you don’t want to be motivated to do. Blinders can be physical, or mental. If you have a dedicated office, or space you do your work, that’s a form of physical blinder. By working in that space many times, your mind has been trained to focus on work when in that space. As I talked about in Mind Management, Not Time Management, even if you don’t have much space, you can set up certain cues in your environment to serve as blinders. When I was first starting on my own, in a tiny bedroom in San Francisco, I transformed that space from bedroom to office through strategic use of a room divider, aromatherapy, and lighting. Physically separating yourself from a potential source of distraction is another type of physical blinder. If you put your phone in another room, or in a lockbox with a timer, that’s a blinder. By using a “grippy” instead of “slippy” tool, you’re also using a blinder. There are many options of distraction-free writing devices, but I write my first drafts on an antique typewriter. Rules and schedules as mental blinders Rules and schedules can serve as mental blinders. Simply by deciding that you will or won’t do something within some period of time, you focus your mind on the target behavior, while blocking out distractions. The first-hour rule is an effective blinder: Spend the first hour of your day working on your most important task. You can get a lot done in an hour, and can usually hold off any other activity for that short period of time. Mental blinders with secondary benefits You can also use mental blinders not only for the benefits of the behaviors they promote, but also for the secondary effects of those behaviors. The ten-minute hack – or setting a timer for ten minutes to focus on one task – isn’t powerful so much for the work you do in those ten minutes, but for the momentum it creates. Ten minutes is an easy decoy goal that short-circuits your ego’s excuse engine, but once those ten minutes are up, you usually have the momentum to keep going. On the contrary, “cheat days,” whether when dieting or reducing, say, social media intake, can let the superego take a rest, and let the id blow of steam. It can be hard or even detrimental to quit things cold-turkey, but if there’s one day a week you cheat, it can make the rest of the week tolerable. Pitfalls of motivation mechanisms As you can see, there is a huge variety of motivation mechanisms you can use to keep yourself going when projects get tough. But the motivation mechanism that works for one person won’t necessarily work for another. And some mechanisms are prone to particular pitfalls that others aren’t. Rewards lose effectiveness First, some of the pitfalls of these mechanisms. The biggest problem with carrots is eventually you get your fill of carrots. This tends to be more of a problem when the rewards you’re using are external, and not an integral part of the project. If you’re, say, giving yourself a piece of chocolate for every 100 words you write, there’s a good chance you won’t be as motivated by the tenth piece of chocolate as you were by the first. But even when the rewards are integral to the project, you can tire of those rewards, and need to search for another source – as I talked about in my reflections on fifteen years as a creator on episode 283. Rewards can backfire Also, external carrots especially can make doing the work more about the destination – the carrot dangled in front of you – than about the journey. External rewards can actually reduce your motivation. Behavioral scientist Dan Ariely described on episode 51 that Intel lost productivity when an experimental monetary bonus was removed – relative to more integral rewards, such as verbal praise. Rewards require discipline When self-administering external carrots, you also need to be disciplined enough to dole out the reward to yourself properly. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how giving yourself chocolate for every 100 words could backfire. Punishments can lose effectiveness, backfire, and require discipline Sticks can be prone to many of the same problems as carrots: The punishment may lose its effectiveness, doing the activity while motivated to avoid punishment may cause you enjoy it less, and you have to be disciplined enough to administer the punishment for it to matter. Blinders entrain behavior Blinders tend to have fewer problems than carrots or sticks. They don’t use external stimuli, so there’s less chance of your motivation getting misdirected. Instead, the more you use blinders, the easier the target activity tends to get. As the neuroscience saying goes, “Neurons that fire together wire together,” so each time you do the target activity, it’s easier to do it again. Each time you work in your home office, you train yourself to work when in your office. When you spend the first hour of your day working on your most important project, you make it easier to do it again tomorrow. Blinders are nearly foolproof Blinders are nearly foolproof because the source of your motivation stays within the project or the activity itself – and that’s the best source of motivation. So if you must use external carrots and sticks, do so sparingly. If you’re relying on external rewards and punishments to motivate yourself, or if you can’t find the self-discipline to administer your own blinders, that’s a bad sign. You clearly don’t enjoy the activities involved in completing the project, and/or completing the project isn’t meaningful enough to you to be a source of motivation. Be an expert on your personal motivation mechanisms There’s of course a lot of research on motivation – how effective carrots, sticks, or even blinders are – but none of that matters as much as how each of these motivation mechanisms work for you, personally. A motivation mechanism, such as external rewards, may backfire in the confines of a scientific study, in a context different than your project, and averaged out amongst the study subjects, rather than on an individual basis. If you want to finish lots of creative projects, you need t

The Network, by Scott Woolley, tells the history of wireless communications, and the stories of the characters that were a part of it. It’s the first book strictly about media history that I’m summarizing and adding to my best media books list. Wireless communications start with wired communications Wireless communications today of course include cell phones, but The Network takes us from the wireless telegraph, to radio, to television, and finally to satellites. First, it gives a little background on the history of the electric telegraph, the invention which suddenly made it possible to move, in minutes, messages that used to take weeks to reach their destinations. The electric telegraph was able to change the world thanks to one simple action: The ability to move a piece of metal at the end of a wire. That was enough to develop codes that could transmit messages, based upon the simple movement of that piece of metal. This process started in 1822, when Christian Órsted attached a copper wire to a battery and saw a nearby compass needle move. There was a several-decade-long race to develop an electric telegraph. The first transatlantic cable was opened for business by 1866. A big customer of these telegraph services were stock traders, who could buy shares in London, sell them a few seconds later in New York, and always profit if their trades were executed in time. Morse code was the winning format for turning the movement of a piece of metal into messages that could travel around the world. A claim in The Network I couldn’t find a source for, but that sounds pretty cool: The clouds in New York City at night used to have projected on them news, election results, and sports scores – in Morse code. From a worthless accidental discovery to worthwhile wireless The history of wireless communication started with a discovery as accidental as Christian Órsted’s: Heinrich Hertz noticed that metal objects moved slightly when lightning struck nearby. He later conducted experiments where he successfully generated sparks through the air. It was pretty cool, but he concluded that the invisible waves he had discovered were “of no use whatsoever.” Electrical signals that traveled through the air were made very useful, indeed, by Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi. For much of its early years, most people thought his Marconi Company was a scam. Like the dot-com and crypto booms, many companies at the dawn of wireless technology made off with investors’ money. One article, with the headline, “Wireless and Worthless,” pointed out that more criminals were being prosecuted from wireless companies than from any other industry. Besides, what did we need wireless technology for, when there were companies such as The Commercial, which was probably the hottest tech company in New York in the early 1900s? It owned five of the sixteen cables crossing the Atlantic Ocean, and one of the two that crossed the Pacific – which was 10,000 miles long. 10,000 miles was pretty impressive, especially when you consider that in 1896, Guglielmo Marconi could only send a wireless message one mile. What was the point? The pseudo-events of Guglielmo Marconi Marconi was good at building buzz for his wireless technology through public demonstrations – you could call them pseudo-events, a la Daniel J. Boorstin’s The Image, which I talked about on episode 257. In front of an audience, he’d ask a volunteer to carry around a “magic box.” He’d build tension from the stage, then push a lever, which would make the magic box buzz from afar. In 1898, when his wireless range was somewhere around ten miles, Marconi set up a telegraph receiver on the yacht of the prince of Wales. Queen Victoria sent the first mundane wireless text message, asking, “Can you come to tea?” The prince replied, “Very sorry, cannot come to tea.” After all, he was on the ocean. By 1899, Marconi could send a message over the English channel, and by 1901, he could send a message 225 miles. Marconi had competition in trying to send a wireless message across the Atlantic, which was 3,000 miles. Nikola Tesla, with the money of J.P. Morgan, was working on a fifty-five ton, 187-foot-tall steel super-antenna. And Marconi didn’t have the funding to build something like that. Marconi won that race across the Atlantic. In one of his publicity stunts, he was able to relay “Marconigrams,” as he called them, from celebrities in London to celebrities at a dinner party in New York. But, that wasn’t enough to impress stock traders who relied on wired telegrams – the messages took ten minutes to arrive, with pre-arranged help in expediting them as they traveled to and from coastal locations on wired connections. And radio waves are easier to transmit at night than during business hours, when radiation from the sun interferes with wireless signals. As the Titanic sank, Marconi rose But in 1912, the day before Marconi Company investors were to vote on whether to further fund the company, the Titanic sank. Using Marconi’s wireless technology, an ocean liner, the Olympic, fielded a message from the Titanic, over 500 miles away, which included coordinates, and said, “We have struck an iceberg.” Another ocean liner, the Carpathia, came to the rescue. Thanks to Marconi’s wireless technology, of the Titanic’s 2,223 passengers, 706 survived. What followed sounds like the third act of a great movie: When Marconi arrived at a lecture that had already been scheduled, there was a crowd overflowing out the building. He received a standing ovation, including from the once-skeptical Thomas Edison. And the vote of Marconi shareholders, on whether to issue another $7 million in stock to build stations for intercontinental telegraphs, was a no-brainer. David Sarnoff: The early days of an innovator Working at Marconi at that time was the young David Sarnoff, who had started at Marconi after being fired for taking the day of Rosh Hashanah off work at Marconi’s rival company, the Commercial. A Russian immigrant, Sarnoff’s father had recently become unable to work, so he had set off to support the family as an office messenger boy, at only fifteen. Being a telegraph operator was a hot tech job at the time. David Sarnoff bought a used telegraph key, so he could spend his evenings practicing his coding skills – his Morse-coding skills. He worked his way up until he was managing Marconi’s New York office, but then transferred to what seemed like a step down – as an inspector in the engineering department. Edwin Armstrong’s signal amplifier It was as chief inspector David Sarnoff met Edwin Armstrong, who demonstrated to him an amazing signal amplifier. From a Marconi station in New Jersey, Armstrong’s amplifier turned signals from an Ireland station from barely audible, to loud and crisp. They were then able to listen in on signals from competitor Poulsen Wireless, as their San Francisco station communicated with their Portland station. They were even able to listen to Poulsen’s Hawaii station, despite the fact Poulsen’s own San Francisco station – the breadth of a continent closer – could barely pick up the signal, amidst a Hawaiian thunderstorm. Sarnoff thought he had found the key technology that would help Marconi dominate wireless telegraphy, and free it from having to share its revenue with rival cabled networks. Instead, Guglielmo Marconi himself refused to believe the results of the story, and another executive publicly chided Sarnoff within the company for conducting the unauthorized experiments, which he believed merely drove up the prices of inventors’ patents. Edwin Armstrong becomes Major Armstrong Armstrong ended up selling the patent for his amplifier to AT&T. Through the use of that amplifier and other wireless-technology inventions, Edwin Armstrong achieved the rank of Major Armstrong in WWI. During WWI, Britain and Germany cut one another’s cables, making wireless communication even more important. The British military took over Marconi’s wireless stations within their empire. Armstrong helped intercept Germany’s wireless communications. RCA, born from a patent pool But during the war, the way wireless technology patents were split up amongst companies became a problem. It was impossible to build useful devices without using a variety of innovations, and thus infringing on other companies’ patents. The Navy used its wartime powers to allow American manufacturers to use any wireless patents they wanted, without consequence. Once the war was over, the military sought to maintain this freedom of innovation, and – as a matter of national security – keep the American radio industry out of foreign hands. They struck a deal to cut off the American portion of the British Marconi company, and pool together patents from AT&T, Westinghouse, G.E., and – interestingly – United Fruit Company, who had patents for communications systems on their Central American banana plantations. The name of this new company: RCA. Its general manager: David Sarnoff. Sarnoff’s radio Sarnoff had pitched to his bosses at Marconi, in 1915, a “Radio Music Box.” Far more complex than moving a piece of metal, voice had first been transmitted over radio waves in 1906, and The Navy had done “radio telephone” calls, but nobody had thought of using radio to transmit to a wide audience. His pitch described a box with amplifier tubes, and what he called a “speaking telephone.” He wrote, “There should be no difficulty in receiving music perfectly when transmitted within a radius of 25 to 50 miles. Within such a radius there reside hundreds of thousands of families.” Sarnoff had already experimented with the concept by transmitting music, to a boat cruising around Manhattan, from a phonograph in Marconi’s New York office. Sarnoff’s bosses at Marconi had ignored his radio music box pitch, but once he was in charge at RCA, he was free to pursue the idea. Sarnoff hadn’t gotten much support for his ideas at Marconi, but he had learned the value of a well-crafted pseudo-event. The upcoming boxing match between the American, Jack Dempsey, and the Frenchman, Georges Carpentier was the perfect opportunity to show the value of using radio waves to broadcast sound to a larg

A creative project is like a halfpipe. The depth of the halfpipe from which you must ascend to finish a project is equal to the height of the optimism that prompted you to begin. But there’s a way to build your project halfpipe so the project itself keeps you moving forward. The gravity of optimism pulls you into a project When you begin a project, you are optimistic. Why else would you start? You’re interested in the subject matter, and you expect to succeed. This optimism serves as the gravity that pulls you into the project halfpipe. Without experience, you can’t maintain the momentum to finish The momentum you build from this drop into the halfpipe may get you through much of the project, but will eventually run out. By the time you get to the other side of the halfpipe – the end of the project – you’ve forgotten the optimism you once had, and the friction of reality has sapped your energy. The project isn’t as fun as it once was, and it hasn’t been as easy as you had expected. You face a steep incline, and don’t have the momentum to ascend. Experienced skateboarders know how to tweak their momentum, so they have enough energy to ascend the other side of a halfpipe. Like kicking their legs while riding a swing, they’re able to climb higher and higher, as they go back and forth. Experienced creators know how to tweak their motivation, too, to ascend the other side of the halfpipe. They’ve finished enough projects, they know how to harness their momentum to make the most of their efforts, and coast through the tough parts. But the need for this experience is a catch-22: You don’t know how to tweak your motivation to follow through if you haven’t finished projects, and if you haven’t finished projects you don’t know how to tweak your motivation. A halfpipe is a closed system A halfpipe, with nothing but a skateboard rolling back and forth, is a closed system. The first law of thermodynamics states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. The energy from the descent into the halfpipe is not enough to get to the other side of the halfpipe, because much of it is wasted on friction. When you put a person on the skateboard, that adds a new energy source to the system. The skateboarder can move their body in ways that overcome the loss of energy from friction, thus maintaining enough momentum to get out of the halfpipe. But the skateboarder is a closed system, too. They require energy to move. Shiny object syndrome sets in when projects get tough Shiny object syndrome often sets in toward the end of a project. There are other halfpipes all around. The excitement of dropping into one and once again experiencing effortless momentum is a lot more fun than putting forth effort to get out of the current halfpipe. So, you switch projects – you switch halfpipes. Some creators, after dropping into enough halfpipes, figure out how to tweak their motivation to get through one – whether due to luck or experimentation. More often, they get frustrated with the endless cycle of shiny object syndrome, and burn out. They stop “skating” altogether. You learn to maintain momentum by finishing projects But, you can turn the closed system of a halfpipe into an open system that maintains your momentum, propelling you to the finish. If you use this method to finish more projects, you’ll gain experience tweaking your motivation. Maybe you need an accountability partner – or maybe you hate obligation. Maybe you gain momentum by building prototypes – or maybe you prefer to develop a detailed plan. Maybe you like to talk about ideas with friends – or maybe you discover it causes you to lose your momentum. Do smaller projects, finish more projects If you aren’t finishing projects, you can’t learn what works for you. A great way to finish more projects is simply do smaller projects. When you do smaller projects, two things happen: One, you make the halfpipe shorter, and less shallow, so you don’t run out of momentum so fast, and you can more easily find the internal motivation to get out of the halfpipe. Two, you can more easily get momentum from the project itself, in the form of feedback loops. For example, when I’m working on a new book, I don’t just sit down and write a book. That’s too long and deep a halfpipe. I might be excited going in, but I’ll soon lose momentum, and I’ll forget why I began in the first place. Instead, I break the process of writing into tiny projects, which feed into progressively larger projects. I write and share an idea on Twitter. If it does well on Twitter, I expand it into a newsletter. If it does well as a newsletter, I expand it into an article and podcast episode. After I complete this process enough times, I have a large collection of ideas I can share in my book. There’s still a lot of work to be done: I need to weave the ideas together into a cohesive whole, not to mention edit the book, lay it out, design the cover, and market it. But that bigger halfpipe of writing the book is much easier to get through when fueled by the momentum of the smaller halfpipes of tweets, newsletters, and articles. In fact, through these smaller projects with feedback loops, my halfpipe is no longer a closed system. The projects themselves are providing the momentum. Big projects are like halfpipes: You lose momentum and get stuck. Small projects are like waves: Feedback loops keep you moving forward. Turn halfpipes into waves When you surf a wave, gravity is still pulling you down the face of the wave, but the wave itself is moving, too. This is why you sometimes hear the expression of “riding a wave,” in business. The success of an industry or trend becomes an outside force that keeps you moving, multiplying your efforts. The success of a project itself can become a wave, too. As blogger Tynan has pointed out, one reason it’s hard to finish projects is that in the middle of the project, you’ve experienced all the downsides of working on the project, but none of the upsides of succeeding. You’re stuck in the halfpipe. But if you design the project so you get some of that feedback throughout the process, you get to experience some upsides that keep you moving. This works for a lot of creative projects. You can’t count the number of stand-up comedians who go to one open mic after another, testing out jokes, then take those jokes on the road to polish them, then weave it all together into a one-hour special, then repeat the process over again. Even War and Peace, written when publishing wasn’t so rapid and didn’t have such immediate feedback, was published serially, with a different name, and wasn’t even intended to be a novel. It wasn’t until later that Tolstoy wove it together, and re-wrote it. The next time you find yourself stuck in a project halfpipe, or switching to new projects each time a previous project gets tough, see if you can turn that halfpipe into a wave. Complete smaller projects that give you immediate feedback. You’ll finish more projects, and learn to tweak your motivation well enough to soar out of larger and larger halfpipes. Thank you for having me on your podcasts! Thank you for having me on your podcasts. Thank you to Ivan Farber at the Conversations About Conversations podcast. As always, you can find interviews of me on my interviews page. About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »       Show notes: https://kadavy.net/blog/posts/project-halfpipe/

The world expects us to be Raphaels, but some of us are Leonardos. Don’t hold your Leonardo mind to Raphael standards, because this Raphael world would be nothing without Leonardo minds. There’s an inscription in the Pantheon in Rome that says, “Here lies that famous Raphael by whom Nature feared to be conquered while he lived.” In other words, Raphael was such an amazing painter, Nature was supposedly shaking in her boots, afraid he would learn all her tricks. (Ironically, Raphael’s remains are sealed away in a sarcophagus, where Nature can’t get to them. Who’s afraid of who?) But Nature had nothing to fear. Raphael could not outdo her. As Raphael was being buried, the painter Nature should have feared lay hundreds of miles to the north, in a little church on the grounds of the King of France’s chateau. Raphael the young phenom, Leonardo, the old has-been Several years before Raphael’s early death, he was getting paid thousands of ducats to paint one fresco after another in the Vatican. Meanwhile, the aging Leonardo da Vinci was nearby, living off a meager 33 ducat-a-month stipend, not doing much of importance. The pope had tried hiring him to paint something, but ended up frustrated, saying, “This man will never get anything done!” When the prolific art patron, Elizabeth d’Este, who had hounded Leonardo for a portrait for decades, came to visit Rome, she didn’t bother getting in touch with Leonardo. He was a has-been, who couldn’t be counted on to follow through. Who was she there to see? The young phenom, Raphael. Raphael was very similar to Leonardo, but also very different. His most important difference was that he was a master executor. If you hired Raphael, he got the job done. He also had been raised in the workshop of his father, a court painter for a Duke, so Raphael was refined and well-mannered. He knew how to schmooze with nobility. He had the connections that came along with that background, and could get a letter of recommendation from one powerful person to another with ease. Leonardo, on the other hand, was born out of wedlock – which made him “illegitimate” at the time – and didn’t get much education. While he had gained a reputation as a brilliant engineer and architect, he had also gained a reputation as an unreliable painter. Raphael: A reliable Leonardo As Raphael continued his career as the pope’s wunderkind, Leonardo worked his way north. He left yet another project unfinished in Milan, then impressed King Francis I enough to be invited to join him at the Chateau d’Amboise, as the official painter, architect, and court pageantry designer. While a gig with the King of France wasn’t the worst thing in the world, it was a step down from what Leonardo could have been doing if he hadn’t been reputed as someone who couldn’t get things done. The pope and all the nobles in all the principalities of Italy just watched him go. He’d never return again. While Raphael had some clear advantages that helped his career advance, he couldn’t have done it without the ways he and Leonardo were similar. The frescoes being painted by the young Raphael – such as his most-famous School of Athens – were exactly the kinds of projects Leonardo would have been great for, if only he could have been counted on to finish them. In fact, there was no person in the world to whom Raphael owed his own painting style more than Leonardo. When it came to painting, Raphael was mostly a reliable Leonardo. Raphael’s “Leonardo period” Art historians call the years during which Raphael spent a lot of time in Florence his “Florence period.” But they might as well call them his “Leonardo period.” That’s the four years during which Raphael’s work started looking less like that of his mentor, Perugino, and more like that of his idol, Leonardo. During Raphael’s Florence period, Leonardo was in a public face-off with another young phenom, Michelangelo. Leonardo had been commissioned to paint a battle scene in the Florence Council Hall. As usual, the first deadline came and went. Meanwhile, Michelangelo had done such a great job with his David statue, the council decided it would be a great idea to have him paint a battle scene, too. It was a pretty awkward situation for Leonardo. He was already struggling to finish, and a committee of which he had been a part had gone against his recommendation for a less-conspicuous location and put the David right outside the entrance of the council hall. Michelangelo was an arrogant prick who openly taunted Leonardo for his past failures, and now Leonardo had to walk through the shadow of Michelangelo’s latest triumph to get to his mural. Oh, and Michelangelo’s battle scene mural was directly across the room from his. By all accounts at the time, this was a painting competition – a battle of battle scenes. Leonardo wasn’t competitive by nature, but this was supposedly going to motivate him to finish his mural. Today, we might say putting Leonardo in this position was pretty machiavellian. Which is ironic, because it was arranged with the help of none other than the inventor of machiavellianism, the council’s secretary, Niccolò Machiavelli. Once word of this painting battle traveled outside Florence, young artists traveled to Florence to witness it. One of those artists: Raphael – armed with a letter of recommendation from the mother of the future Duke of Urbino to the leader of the Florentine Republic, stating that the twenty-one year-old was “greatly gifted…sensible and well-mannered.” It’s during this “Florence period” that Raphael’s work changed dramatically. It started to look as if he might know a thing or two about anatomy, he started aping Leonardo’s smokey sfumato technique, and drawing contorted, muscular men in the heat of battle. He learned a bit watching Michelangelo, but he learned a lot watching Leonardo. As it turned out, neither Leonardo nor Michelangelo finished his mural. For Michelangelo, it wasn’t a big deal. He got summoned to Rome, where he eventually painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Leonardo, however, had more of his career behind him than ahead of him. Yet another public failure meant he never got another public commission. So while Leonardo, in his sixties, was wandering around Europe, chasing what work he could, Raphael, in his early thirties, was getting showered with high-paying papal commissions, as a more-reliable Leonardo. The rise and fall of Raphael These days, we admire Leonardo more than we do Raphael, but that wasn’t always the case. That Raphael is one of the few people entombed in the palace of the gods, alongside kings, is testament to his popularity when he died. Heck, at his funeral, the pope kissed his hand. Around 1800, the church in which Leonardo was buried was destroyed in the French Revolution. Nobody bothered to try to recover Leonardo’s remains. They were mixed in with everyone else’s and forgotten. Meanwhile, Raphael was as popular as ever. If you take a peek at Google Ngram, you see a sharp increase in mentions of Raphael around that time. For hundreds of years after Raphael’s death, he was considered the quintessential painter of the High Renaissance. The art academies around Europe, who controlled the opinion of what was or wasn’t good art, built their curricula around studying the work of Raphael. But as the influence of art academies crumbled in the late 1800s with the rise of Impressionism, so too did crumble the reverence for Raphael. Meanwhile, Leonardo has risen in popularity over the centuries. Today, if you want to find a good book on Leonardo, you have lots of choices. Raphael, not so much. The probable cause of this rise in popularity and the probable cause of Leonardo’s struggles with follow-through are one in the same: Nature had more reason to fear Leonardo than Raphael. Leonardo’s massive iceberg Through the centuries after Leonardo’s death, his notes began to resurface. They had been inherited by someone who was supposed to compile and publish them, but were so numerous and disorganized, that was a nearly impossible task. His notes ended up collated and bound into individual notebooks, scattered amongst collectors around Europe. One notebook was found as recently as the 1960s, hiding in plain sight in Madrid, in the collection of the library. These notebooks have revealed that for Leonardo, painting a picture was about much more than painting a picture. When Raphael did an anatomy study, it was all about knowing how the skin on the surface of the body was shaped by the muscles underneath. The only purpose was to mimic Nature, on a superficial level. For Leonardo, an anatomy study was about much more. He didn’t just want to know what muscles were under the skin. He wanted to also know which muscles were engaged by which movements, or which nerves activated by which emotions. As a painter, there was no reason for Leonardo to know what the human heart looked like, or how it worked. Yet Leonardo made observations about the heart that would have advanced science by centuries, had they been published. Leonardo searched, Raphael found As I talked about on episodes 105 and 288, economist David Galenson would say Raphael was a conceptual innovator, while Leonardo was an experimental one. To Leonardo, there was no such thing as irrelevant information. In the course of researching how to paint something, he might make a new discovery about anatomy, metallurgy, geology, or some other field, that would set him down a different path. The art historian Eugene Garin thought, based upon Leonardo’s many thousands of pages of notes, that he was trying to compile a treatise of all human knowledge. Leonardo wasn’t studying Nature just so he could paint it convincingly – he was trying to understand all of Nature. Raphael didn’t have to explore all aspects of the world. He merely had to copy the result of Leonardo’s thinking. Galenson told me, “It’s what conceptual innovators do, it turns out.” Conceptual innovators take an idea, and make it their own. It’s what Picasso did with the work of Cézanne, what Warhol did with the work of Pollack, what Hemingway did with the work of Stein and Twain. The projects Leonardo pursued were impossible to finish Leonard

Today I have a special episode for you. If you missed last month’s AMA/Livestream, I’m delivering it right to your ears. In this AMA, I answered questions about: How should I start marketing my books? How can you cope with burnout that gets in the way of creative work? How can you market your books when it doesn’t come naturally? How did you build your audience and how long did it take? (How can you build an audience without “niching down”?) What’s the difference between an accountability partner and a creativity partner? How did you get your first book deal? How can you stay motivated and get help from others when you work in isolation? How can you create luck in creative work? Which is better: Medium, or Substack? Do you use editing software, such as Grammarly? How did you come up with the Seven Mental States of Creativity? Have you made soap lately? How are you improving your fiction and storytelling skills? How do you hack learning a new language? Why are you using a pen name to write fiction? What are good writing goals for a beginner? Why do you prefer self-publishing over traditional? How can you pick a creative project when you have too many ideas? How do you make foreign-rights deals for your books? What should do with lots of different content on different topics? I also mention in this my new giveaway, and I’ll tell you briefly about it now. I’m giving away 20 of my favorite creativity books. As you know from this show, I’m a creativity enthusiast. I love to think about how to tap into your creativity and motivate action, and I love stories about how all creators do that, whether they’re writers, painters, musicians, scientists – or do any kind of creative work. I’ve compiled a list of my favorite creativity books, spanning mindset, creativity science, biographies, and more. I’m reaching into my own pocket and buying all twenty book for one lucky winner. Find out which books are on the list and sign up at kdv.co/giveaway. About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/ama-september-2022/

The book, Old Masters and Young Geniuses shows there are two types of creators: experimental, and conceptual. Experimental and conceptual creators differ in their approaches to their work, and follow two distinct career paths. Experimental creators grow to become old masters. Conceptual creators shine as young geniuses. University of Chicago economist, and author of Old Masters and Young Geniuses, David Galenson – who I interviewed on episode 105 – wanted to know how the ages of artists affected the prices of their paintings. He isolated the ages of artists from other factors that affect price, such as canvas size, sale date, and support type (whether it’s on canvas, paper, or other). He expected to find a neat effect, such as “paintings from younger/older artists sell for more.” But instead, he found two distinct patterns: Some artists’ paintings from their younger years sold for more. Other artists’ paintings from their older years sold for more. He then found this same pattern in the historical significance of artists’ work: The rate at which paintings were included in art history books or retrospective exhibitions – both indicators of significance – peaked at the same ages as the values of paintings. When he looked closely at how painters who followed these two trajectories differed, he found that the ones who peaked early took a conceptual approach, while those who peaked late took an experimental approach. Cézanne vs. Picasso The perfect examples of contrasting experimental and conceptual painters are Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso. Paintings from Cézanne’s final year of life, when he was sixty-seven, are his most valuable. Paintings from early in Picasso’s career, when he was twenty-six, are his most valuable. A painting done when Picasso was twenty-six is worth four times as much as one done when he was sixty-seven (he lived to be ninety-one, and his biographer and friend called the dearth of his influential work later in life “a sad end”). A painting done when Cézanne was sixty-seven – the year he died – is worth fifteen times as much as one done when he was twenty-six. Cézanne, the experimenter Cézanne took an experimental approach to painting, which explains why it took so long for his career to peak. Picasso took a conceptual approach, which explains why he peaked early. Cézanne left the conceptual debates of Paris cafés to live in the south of France, in his thirties. He spent the next three decades struggling to paint what he truly saw in landscapes. He felt limited by the fact that, as he was looking at a canvas, he could only paint the memory of what he had just seen. He did few preparatory sketches early in his career, but grew to paint straight from nature. He treated his paintings as process work, and seemed to have no use for them when he was finished: He only signed about ten percent of his paintings, and sometimes threw them into bushes or left them in fields. Picasso, the conceptual genius Picasso, instead, executed one concept after another. He had early success with his Blue period and Rose period, then dove into Cubism. He often planned paintings carefully, in advance: He did more than four-hundred studies for his most valuable and influential painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. One model described how he simply stared at her for an hour, apparently planning a series of paintings in his head, which he began painting the next day, without her assistance. Cézanne said, “I seek in painting.” Picasso said, “I don’t seek; I find.” Cézanne struggled to paint what he saw, and Picasso said, “I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.” Experimental vs. conceptual artists Here are some qualities that differ between experimental and conceptual artists: Experimental artists work inductively. Through the process of creation, they arrive at their solution. Conceptual artists work deductively. They begin with a solution in mind, then work towards it. Experimental artists have vague goals. They’re not quite sure what they’re seeking. Conceptual artists have specific goals. They already have an idea in their head they’re trying to execute. Experimental artists are full of doubt. Since they don’t already have the solution, and aren’t sure what they’re looking for, they rarely feel they’ve succeeded. Conceptual artists are confident. They know what they’re after, so once they’ve achieved it, they’re done, and can move on to the next thing. Experimental artists repeat themselves. They might paint the same subject over and over, tweaking their approach. Conceptual artists change quickly. They’ll move from subject to subject, style to style, concept to concept. Experimental artists do it themselves. They’re discovering throughout the process, so they rarely use assistants. Conceptual artists delegate. They just need their concept executed, so someone else can often do the work. Experimental artists discover. Over the years, they build up knowledge in a field, to invent new approaches. Conceptual artists steal. To a greater degree than experimental artists, they take what others have developed and make it their own. Other experimental & conceptual artists Some other experimental artists: Georgia O’Keeffe: She painted pictures of a door of her house in New Mexico more than twenty times. She liked to start off painting a subject realistically, then, through repetition, make it more abstract. Jackson Pollock: He said he needed to drip paint on a canvas from all four sides, what he called a “‘get acquainted’ period,” before he knew what he was painting. Leonardo da Vinci: He was constantly jumping from project to project, rarely finishing. He incorporated his slowly-accrued knowledge of anatomy, optics, and geology into his paintings. Some conceptual artists: Georges Seurat: He had his pointillism method down to a science. He planned out his most-famous painting, Sunday Afternoon, through more than fifty studies, and could paint tiny dots on the giant canvas without stepping back to see how it looked. Andy Warhol: Used assistants heavily, saying, “I think somebody should be able to do all my paintings for me,” and “Why do people think artists are special? It’s just another job.” Raphael: Who had a huge workshop of as many as fifty assistants, innovated by allowing a printmaker to make and sell copies of his work, and synthesized the hard-won methods of Leonardo and Michelangelo into his well-planned designs. Experimental & conceptual creators in other fields Galenson has found these two distinct experimental and conceptual trajectories in a variety of fields. This runs counter to the findings of Dean Simonton, who believes the complexity of a given field determines when a creator peaks. Galenson argues that the complexity of having an impact in a field changes, as innovations are made or integrated into the state of the art. Sculpture In sculpture, Méret Oppenheim had a conversation in a café with Picasso, and got the idea to line a teacup with fur. It became the quintessential surrealist sculpture, Luncheon in Fur, but it was totally conceptual. She continued to make art into her seventies, and never did another significant work. Constantin Brancusi spent a lifetime as an experimental sculptor. He said, “I don’t work from sketches, I take the chisel and hammer and go right ahead.” He did his most famous work, Bird in Space, when he was fifty-two. Novels In novels, Mark Twain wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn experimentally, in at least three separate phases, over the course of nine years. He finally published it when he was fifty. Hemingway’s novels were conceptually driven, using his trademark dialog as one of his major devices. He picked up this technique and synthesized it from studying the work of Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, and Twain himself. When I talked to Galenson on episode 105, he explained the way to spot the difference between an experimental and a conceptual novel is to ask, “are the characters believable?” Conceptual novelists focus on plot, while experimental novelists focus on character. Poetry In poetry, Robert Frost, who spent his career trying to perfect how rhythms and stress patterns affected the meanings of words – so-called “sentence sounds” – wrote “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” when he was forty-eight. Ezra Pound developed his technique of “imagism” when he was twenty-eight, and had thought it through so well he published a set of formal rules. With this conceptual approach, he created the bulk of his influential poems before he was forty, despite living well into his eighties. Movies In film, Orson Welles created Citizen Kane when he was only twenty-six. The carefully-planned conceptual innovations in cinematography and musical score make it widely-regarded as the most influential film ever. Alfred Hitchcock didn’t make his most-influential films until the final years of his life, as he was about sixty. He said, “style in directing develops slowly and naturally.” Are you an old master, or young genius? I really enjoyed Old Masters and Young Geniuses. I find this dichotomy of experimental versus conceptual approaches really helpful in understanding why, in general, some creative solutions come quickly, while others take months or years of searching. Do you have a choice in the matter? Galenson is careful to stress that you aren’t either an experimental or conceptual creator – it’s a spectrum, not a binary designation. But in case you’re wondering if you can make yourself a conceptual creator, to become successful more quickly, Galenson says you can’t. You might switch from a conceptual to an experimental approach, and find it works better for you, as did Cézanne, or you might try to go from experimental to conceptual and find it doesn’t, as did Pissarro. But you can’t change the way you think. He told me, “It’s like trying to change your brain, and we don’t know how to do that.” About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David

Do you want to build an audience online, but have such a wide variety of interests, you don’t know what to focus on? I think you’ll like this interview with David Perell. David Perell (@david_perell) calls himself “The Writing Guy.” He runs the cohort-based online writing school, Write of Passage (I love that name). His marketing is very specific, but he has incredibly diverse interests, and enthusiastically shares content related to those interests online. I went through his links on his website (no longer posted) to prepare for this conversation, and just my highlights of his links were over 6,000 words long! The topics included economics, art, urban planning, golf, music, and much more. I’ve been really impressed watching David’s online presence, so I brought him on the podcast for my first interview episode in more than two years! We’ll talk about: The four grants David has gotten from Tyler Cowen’s Emergent Ventures. How did he get those grants, and for what projects? Have all the opportunities to grow your audience online passed? David will share what he thinks is the biggest growth opportunity right now. We’ll talk about how to please the Twitter algorithm. What about it is “so brutal,” as David says? Topics mentioned Write of Passage David Perell Twitter David Perell's podcast “The Hedgehog and the Fox” by Isaiah Berlin David’s viral logo thread Tyler Cowen Tim Ferriss Joe Rogan David Galenson Old Masters and Young Geniuses Pablo Picasso Paul Cézanne Andy Warhol Leonardo da Vinci Raphael Michelangelo Cézanne’s studio Claude Monet Impressionism Cubism Space X Mark Manson Tim Urban on Tim Ferriss Hacker News Patrick Mackenzie Quantitative Easing Dodgeball Foursquare Mark Manson Twitter James Clear Twitter "Fake Take" Don't hate the player, hate the game Emergent Ventures Renee Girard lectures Naval Ravikant on leverage The Age of Leverage Nat Eliason on speed versus mass Warren Buffett spends one year deciding The Barbell Strategy for content marketing – Alex Birkett Matthew Fitzpatrick Mark Broadie Strokes Gained Trackman Titlelist Performance Institute About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »       Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/david-perell-podcast

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